Loading Dock Canopy

The green steel canopy extends over a concrete loading dock on the southern face of the former Davies Coop / Bradmill factory on Francis Street, Yarraville. A corrugated roller door sits closed behind it, and a rusted metal bin rests at the base of the dock. Across a cracked yard, a brick warehouse wall carries a broken window and a closed metal door. The paint on the canopy steelwork has worn back to bare metal in patches. Nothing has moved in some time. The Francis Street site was developed by Davies Coop & Co. Ltd from 1952. That year, the company entered an agreement with the Bradford Dyers' Association Ltd of England, securing the exclusive Australian rights to the "Rigmel" shrink-control process and establishing a wholly owned subsidiary, Davies Coop (B.D.A.) Pty. Ltd., to run dyeing and finishing on property already acquired at West Footscray. The dye house, begun that year, was expected to be completed by November 1954, the same year Davies Coop reported a record net profit of 338,026 pounds. The company had purchased 40 acres at West Footscray and was running a vertically integrated operation: spinning in Adelaide, weaving in Sydney, and dyeing and finishing in Victoria. The site later operated under the Bradmill name and became a major Australian denim and workwear fabric manufacturer. Operations ceased around 2001 as tariff protection wound back and cheaper imports undercut domestic production. The site was vacated around 2007. By 2011, when this photograph was made, the factory had been standing empty for several years, its roller doors shut and its yards going to weed and crack. The loading dock in this frame is one of the quieter corners of a complex that ran to manufacturing sheds, a boiler house, a proofing building and a Modernist canteen. It records what a working dock looks like when the work has stopped: the canopy still in place, the bin still in position, the door still closed as if a truck might still arrive.