Rear Tool Room

The rear toolroom of the ATL Building at Nancarrow Avenue, Meadowbank, was part of a factory purpose-built in 1947 for Automatic Totalisators Limited. By 2015, the room had been cleared and partial demolition was underway. The suspended ceiling grid hung open above a concrete floor stripped of all equipment. Partition walls were part-way down, their framing exposed. A green-trimmed doorframe and an exit sign remained standing in the middle of the space. Daylight came through a bank of windows at the far end, falling across surfaces that no longer held any trace of what had once been made there. The building was designed by Julius, Poole and Gibson, the consulting engineering firm founded by Sir George Alfred Julius, who invented the automatic totalisator and incorporated Automatic Totalisators Limited on 21 April 1917. Julius died on 28 June 1946 at Killara, months before the Meadowbank factory was completed. He did not live to see the purpose-built premises his firm had designed for his company. From 1947, the factory at Nancarrow Avenue manufactured precision-engineered totalisator systems, turnstiles, hospital communication equipment, vehicle registration plates, and commercial signs. Between 1948 and 1955, equipment from the factory was installed at 99 racetracks worldwide. By 1970, ATL totalisators were in use at nearly every major racing centre across 29 countries. The toolroom was central to that output, producing the precision components the mechanical and electromechanical systems required. ATL operations were acquired by the Smorgan group in 1980, and by AWA (Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Ltd) around 1988. The factory was repurposed through the 1990s and 2000s as a multi-tenant facility. The building was listed as a local heritage item under Ryde Local Environmental Plan No 105 in 2003, but was approved in principle for demolition under the Shepherds Bay Urban Renewal Concept Plan, approved by the Planning Assessment Commission on 6 March 2013. Demolition followed around 2016. The site was redeveloped as residential apartments fronting Shepherds Bay.