What You Got Is This Whole Miserable Subculture

A wall inside the Bradmill Denim factory at Yarraville carries a section of graffiti reading WHAT YOU GOT IS THIS WHOLE MISERABLE SUBCULTURE, the lettering applied in white spray paint across a stretch of plastered brick. The wall is otherwise unpainted in this section, with the brick showing through where the plaster has lost its top coat. The lettering is rough but legible, the kind of line a writer leaves when working fast on an interior wall in a derelict building. The surrounding industrial space carries the standard fit-out of the abandoned factory: exposed pipework on the ceiling, fluorescent fittings long dead, a concrete floor scuffed and stained from the years of denim production.

Bradmill Industries operated at the Yarraville site from 1940 onwards, with the denim mill becoming Australia's only manufacturer of indigo-dyed denim from 1945. At peak in the 1970s the company was the country's largest textile manufacturer; the Yarraville factory was using 40,000 bales of cotton a year and was the third-largest water user in Victoria. Cheap imports pushed Bradmill into receivership in the early 2000s and the site shuttered around 2002. Through the dormant years the buildings became one of the most photographed urban-exploration sites in Melbourne, with the interior walls accumulating layered tags and pieces. Brett photographed this wall in March 2012. Bradmill was the first abandoned building he photographed.