Vacuum Sealer Hoses

The vacuum sealer hoses lie coiled on the production floor of the Northcote Shoe Factory, filmed with dust, the fittings and plastic tubing undisturbed. Around them, the floor holds the other equipment of a working factory: press levers, sewing machinery, storage. None of it was cleared out. It was simply left. The factory at 13-15 Arthurton Road, on the corner of Arthurton Road and Helen Street in Northcote, was purpose-built in 1926. Before that, the operation ran out of two smaller buildings on nearby Eastment Street. The move to Arthurton Road was an expansion into purpose-built premises, a factory designed for shoe production from the ground up. By the 1970s it was operating under the name Purnell Shoe Company. The State Library of Victoria holds a pair of brown lace-up shoes in their original Purnell-branded cardboard box, acquired between 1970 and 1979, a physical record of what came off this floor. Northcote had been a manufacturing suburb since the 1870s. Boot and shoe production was concentrated across Melbourne's inner northern suburbs through that period and into the twentieth century, with employment in Melbourne's footwear industry peaking in the 1960s at nearly 12,000 workers. From the 1980s, tariff reductions exposed Australian manufacturers to low-cost imported footwear, and factories across the inner north closed in a wave that was suburb-wide and industry-wide. The Northcote Shoe Factory closed somewhere in that window. The exact date has not been confirmed. This photograph was made in 2012, when the production floor was still fully equipped. The vacuum sealer, used in sole-attachment processes, was one station in a chain that also included the clicker press for cutting leather components, the sewing desk for upper-stitching, and the dispatch area where finished product left the building. The hoses record that chain as clearly as any written account. The factory was demolished in 2016 and the site redeveloped as a residential complex.