Attic Space

Sunlight enters through a grimy window into the attic of Box Hill Brickworks, catching the dust that still hangs in the air above decaying timber and forgotten objects. It is a still, silent space, the kind that accumulates years of grime and silence in equal measure. The site at 14 Federation Street, Box Hill, began as the Haughton Park Brick Company Ltd in 1884, proposed on 30 acres at the corner of Elgar and Canterbury Roads. The company renamed itself Box Hill Brick Co Ltd in 1886, rode the peak of Melbourne's brickmaking trade in 1889, declared its first dividend in 1890, and suspended production entirely by 1892 as the colonial economy collapsed. The clay pit left behind was sold to council for £1,000 in 1905 and became Surrey Dive, a public swimming hole. Brick production resumed on the adjacent site around 1911. By 1913 the works had been formally reconstituted as Standard Brick and Tile Co. Ltd, with an 18-chamber Hoffman patent kiln constructed to allow continuous firing. The plant converted from steam to electricity in 1952. Ownership passed to the Co-operative Brick Company in 1938, and then to Brick and Pipe Industries in 1966. The works closed permanently in August 1988. The Victorian Heritage Register listed the site as VHR H0720 on 20 September 1989. Its significance was assessed at state level: a rare and unusually intact brickmaking plant of the early twentieth century, and the last historic remnant of the belt of brickworks that spread east from Hawthorn to Mitcham during the 1880s land boom. Every other works from that era has been demolished or redeveloped. This photograph was made in 2011. The attic holds its silence. Below it, the full sequence of brick production, from clay extraction to dispatch, remains legible in the structures that still stand.