Burnt Out Interior

The brick walls are still standing. Everything else is not. Twisted corrugated sheeting lies across the floor alongside scattered metal and a deep layer of charred debris, the remnants of a fire that moved through one of the manufacturing buildings at the former Davies Coop / Bradmill factory on Francis Street, Yarraville. Concrete columns hold their line along the right side of the frame. The upper floors have given way, leaving exposed steel framing in their place. Soot has worked its way into the brickwork on both sides. The factory's origins trace to 1952, when Davies Coop & Co. Ltd formed a wholly owned subsidiary, Davies Coop (B.D.A.) Pty. Ltd., to run dyeing and finishing at the West Footscray site under licence from the Bradford Dyers' Association of England, using the Bradford Dyers' patented "Rigmel" shrink-control process. A 1954 report in The Herald noted the company had purchased 40 acres at West Footscray, with the new dye house started in 1952 and expected to be completed by November 1954. The manufacturing buildings on the site date from the early 1950s and reflect a transitional phase in factory design: south-lit sawtooth roofs carried on trussed frames. The site later operated under the Bradmill name as a major denim and workwear fabric manufacturer, producing through to the early 2000s when operations ceased following the wind-back of tariff protection. By the time Brett Patman photographed the site in 2011, most of the complex had been cleared or left to deteriorate. The heritage listing under Maribyrnong Heritage Overlay HO125 identified the boiler house, proofing building and canteen as the significant fabric to be carried through into any redevelopment. The fire-damaged manufacturing building in this frame was not among them. The photograph records what the dormant years did to the parts of the factory that nobody kept.