PE Department

The room photographed here was the production engineering department of the ATL Building at 37 Nancarrow Avenue, Meadowbank. By 2015, when this photograph was made, faded court lines crossed the dusty floor and rusted equipment sat where no game had been played for years. Broken windows let sunlight in across the surfaces. The building was quiet. The ATL Building was constructed in 1947 as a purpose-built factory for Automatic Totalisators Limited, the company founded by Sir George Alfred Julius on 21 April 1917. Julius, a mechanical engineer who graduated from Canterbury College alongside Ernest Rutherford, had conceived the automatic totalisator as a vote-counting machine before pivoting to racecourse betting after governments showed no interest. The Meadowbank factory was the company's third and final manufacturing site, following premises at Alice Street, Newtown and 182 Chalmers Street, Sydney. The building was designed by Julius's own engineering firm, Julius, Poole & Gibson. Julius himself died on 28 June 1946, months before the factory was completed. From Meadowbank, Automatic Totalisators Limited produced precision mechanical and electromechanical totalisator systems for racecourses across 29 countries. The company also manufactured automatic turnstiles, hospital communication systems, motor vehicle registration plates, and commercial signs. As electromechanical systems gave way to electronic and computer systems through the 1970s and 1980s, manufacturing at the site declined. Smorgan acquired ATL's operations in 1980, and AWA (Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd) purchased them from Smorgan around 1988. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the building was repurposed as a multi-tenant facility: a gym, a church, office space, and a dance school moved through its rooms. The court lines and rusted equipment in this photograph are the physical residue of that gym tenancy. The factory was listed as a local heritage item under Ryde Local Environmental Plan No 105 in 2003. The Planning Assessment Commission approved the Shepherds Bay Urban Renewal Concept Plan on 6 March 2013, which included in-principle approval for demolition of the heritage-listed building. The ATL Building was demolished circa 2016. Residential apartments now occupy the Shepherds Bay foreshore.