Abandoned Factory Floor

The frame shows one of the manufacturing halls at the former Davies Coop / Bradmill textile complex on Francis Street, Yarraville. Steel columns run at regular intervals across the floor. A section of sheet-metal roofing has given way, pulling loose from the rear wall and hanging at an angle above the concrete below. A large cylindrical pipe, surface eaten through with rust, lies where it fell among scattered debris. To the right, a row of round-ducted units sits intact against the wall, the last evidence of the ventilation infrastructure that once served an active production floor. The Francis Street site was developed by Davies Coop & Co. Ltd from 1952, when the company entered an agreement with the Bradford Dyers' Association Ltd of England. That agreement gave Davies Coop exclusive Australian rights to the Bradford Dyers' Association's "Rigmel" shrink-control process, and the company formed a wholly owned subsidiary, Davies Coop (B.D.A.) Pty. Ltd., to run the new dyeing and finishing operation at West Footscray. A 1954 shareholders' report recorded the dye house as begun in 1952 and expected to be finished by late that year, with 40 acres purchased at West Footscray for the development. The manufacturing buildings on the site reflect a particular moment in industrial design: large south-lit sawtooth roofs carried on trussed structures, a form sitting between the close column spacing of earlier factories and the clear-span roofs that came later. The complex later operated under the Bradmill name and became a significant Australian denim and workwear fabric manufacturer, before textile operations ceased around 2001 following the wind-back of tariff protection. The site was finally vacated around 2007. This photograph was made in 2011, during the years the buildings stood empty before redevelopment. The Bradmill Denim series documents that interval, recording the fabric of a factory whose manufacturing history stretched back to the early post-war decades and whose closure marked the end of a particular kind of Australian textile production.