Brick Press

The brick press in the main hall of Box Hill Brickworks is a cast iron machine of considerable mass. Its upright frame and heavy working mechanisms remain in place, covered in the accumulated dust of decades, exactly where they sat when the works closed permanently in August 1988. The Victorian Heritage Register records that the grinding pans and press machinery retained on site exhibit the same fundamental technology introduced with the industrialisation of brickmaking in the latter nineteenth century. That is not a small claim. It means what stands in this hall is a direct physical continuation of how machine-made bricks were pressed in Melbourne during the 1880s land boom. The site's history reaches back to 1884, when the Haughton Park Brick Company Ltd issued a prospectus for a works on 30 acres at the corner of Elgar and Canterbury Roads, Box Hill, proposing to produce machine and hand-made bricks, tiles, earthenware and porcelain. Production suspended in 1892 amid the broader colonial depression and did not resume until around 1911. By 1913, the company had been formally reconstituted as Standard Brick and Tile Co. Ltd, an 18-chamber Hoffman patent kiln had been constructed, and four brick presses were planned. It is machinery from this phase of the works that remains in the hall today. The works changed hands several more times. The Co-operative Brick Company took over in 1938; the plant closed during the war in 1942 and reopened in 1946; electricity replaced steam in 1952; Brick and Pipe Industries acquired the operation in 1966. The works closed for the last time in August 1988. The Victorian Heritage Register lists Box Hill Brickworks as a rare and unusually intact brickmaking plant of the early twentieth century and the last historic remnant of the brick-producing belt that once ran between Hawthorn and Mitcham. The press photographed here in 2011 is part of what makes that assessment defensible.