Pigeon on Beam

A pigeon on a timber beam. Corrugated iron sheeting buckled away from the wall on either side of it, rusted fixings dotting the panels, dark interior below. The bird has found a gap in the skin of a building that once housed one of the largest textile operations in Victoria. The Francis Street factory in Yarraville was developed by Davies Coop & Co. Ltd from 1952, when the company formed a wholly owned subsidiary, Davies Coop (B.D.A.) Pty. Ltd., to run dyeing and finishing operations at the West Footscray site under an agreement with the Bradford Dyers' Association Ltd of England. The arrangement gave Davies Coop exclusive Australian rights to the Bradford Dyers' "Rigmel" shrink-control process. By 1954 the dye house, begun two years earlier, was nearing completion. Davies Coop had purchased 40 acres at West Footscray and described the venture as the basis for large-scale development of the textile industry in Australia. The manufacturing buildings date from the early 1950s. Their sawtooth roofs, south-facing to flood the weaving floors with even daylight, represent a transitional phase in factory design: the large sawtooth form carried on trussed roofs rather than the close column spacing of earlier industrial buildings or the clear-span structures that came later. The site later operated under the Bradmill name, becoming a significant denim and workwear fabric manufacturer. Textile operations ceased around 2001, the factory a casualty of the post-tariff collapse of Australian manufacturing. By 2011, when Brett Patman made this photograph, the building had been sitting empty for years. The corrugated iron was tearing loose from its fixings. The sawtooth sheds that Davies Coop built to let light in were letting everything else in too. Locally listed under Maribyrnong Heritage Overlay HO125, the site has since been redeveloped as a mixed-use residential precinct by Frasers Property Australia and Irongate, retaining the boiler house and proofing building. The sheds are gone. The pigeon has somewhere else to be.