Bagging Room

The bagging room of the Mungo Scott Flour Mill at Summer Hill is where the mill's gravity-fed process ended. Grain entered the site by rail siding, was lifted to the top floor of the five-storey load-bearing brick building, and moved downward through rollers and sifters, floor by floor, until it arrived here as flour, ready to be bagged. The machinery visible in this 2014 photograph has not moved since milling operations ceased in 2009. Dust covers the equipment and the floor evenly, the way it does in a room that has been sealed rather than stripped. Construction of the mill began in 1921. It opened in June 1922, when Mungo Scott Ltd vacated their previous premises on Sussex Street, Sydney. The firm had been established in 1895 and chose the Summer Hill site specifically because of its access to the Rozelle-Darling Harbour Goods Line, the World War I-era freight railway that ran along the site's eastern boundary. The rail connection was not incidental; it was the reason the mill existed where it did. The building that houses this room is five storeys of load-bearing brick with a timber post-and-beam internal structure, a form dictated entirely by function. The tall, narrow profile was the machine. Gravity did the work of moving grain through each stage of milling, from the top floor down. Workers in the bagging room received the finished product at the bottom of that process. A fire in January 1927 destroyed part of the mill and approximately 10,000 bags of flour, believed to have been started by sparks from passing trains igniting stored flour. The mill was rebuilt and continued operating. By the 2000s it was the sole remaining user of the Rozelle Goods Line. The last goods train delivered to the mill on 1 December 2008. Milling operations ceased the following year. This photograph records the bagging room in 2014, five years after the last shift. The mill was heritage-listed under the Ashfield Local Environmental Plan in 1985, a recognition that arrived well before its closure. What the listing could not hold was the silence.