Abandoned Office Interior

The suspended ceiling is the thing that dates a room. Drop ceilings like this one arrived in Australian commercial interiors during the postwar decades, standard issue for any office fit-out from the 1960s onward: lightweight tiles in a metal grid, a service void above for cabling and ductwork, easy to install and cheaper than plaster. Here, in an office corridor at the former Davies Coop / Bradmill factory in Yarraville, the grid remains but the tiles are failing. Some are missing outright. Others have cracked and shed fragments across the grey carpet below, which is otherwise intact, still following the corridor the full length of the passage. The mauve walls are unmarked. The glazed timber-framed doorways are still in their frames, their glass unbroken. A red fire safety sign is mounted on one wall. The corridor looks like an office that was locked up and left, not stripped out or demolished, simply stopped. The factory site behind this corridor has a longer and more layered history. Davies Coop and Co. Ltd, the Australian cotton spinning, weaving, dyeing and finishing company, established its West Footscray dyeing and finishing operation in 1952, forming a wholly owned subsidiary, Davies Coop (B.D.A.) Pty. Ltd., to run the plant under licence from the Bradford Dyers' Association of England. The dye house was begun that year and completed around 1954, by which time Davies Coop had purchased 40 acres at West Footscray and committed to large-scale development of the site. Manufacturing buildings from the early 1950s reflect a transitional phase in factory design, with south-lit sawtooth roofs carried on trussed frames. The site later operated under the Bradmill name and became a major Australian denim and workwear fabric manufacturer. Textile operations ceased around 2001, and the site was vacated around 2007. By 2011, when this photograph was made, the factory had been empty for several years. The industrial sheds were largely gone. What remained was the boiler house, some masonry buildings, and spaces like this one: an office corridor with its furniture removed, its ceiling slowly returning to the floor, and a fire safety sign that no longer has anyone to instruct.