Painted Arch Door

The door sits inside one of the manufacturing buildings at the former Davies Coop / Bradmill factory on Francis Street, Yarraville. Someone, at some point during the building's working life, painted a tall keyhole arch on its face in red, outlined in white, set against a border of green. The brass lever handle is worn at the grip. The render around the frame has cracked and pulled away in places, and a dark painted dado runs along the wall on either side. It is the kind of detail that accumulates in a large industrial workplace over time, a practical marker that also became, without anyone planning it, a piece of folk decoration. The Francis Street site has its origins in a 1952 agreement between Davies Coop & Co. Ltd, an established Australian cotton spinning, weaving and finishing company, and the Bradford Dyers' Association Ltd of England. Davies Coop formed a wholly owned subsidiary, Davies Coop (B.D.A.) Pty. Ltd., to run dyeing and finishing operations on property already acquired at West Footscray, using the Bradford Dyers' Association's proprietary "Rigmel" shrink-control process. The dye house, begun in 1952, was expected to be complete by late 1954. The company had purchased 40 acres at West Footscray for the purpose. The earliest manufacturing buildings on the site, including the sawtooth-roofed sheds designed to flood weaving floors with even daylight from the south, date from this early period. The site later operated under the Bradmill name and became a significant Australian denim and workwear fabric manufacturer. Textile operations ceased around 2001 as tariff protection was wound back and import competition intensified, and the site was vacated around 2007. By the time Brett Patman photographed it in 2011, the factory had been empty for several years, its interiors accumulating graffiti and the slow damage of disuse. The painted door records something more ordinary than the boiler house or the sawtooth rooflines: the texture of daily life inside a large factory, where a door is also a landmark, and paint is also a signal.