Blower Room

The blower room of the Mungo Scott Flour Mill sits inside the original five-storey mill building at 2-32 Smith Street, Summer Hill. Heavy machinery fills the space, dust accumulated across every surface in the years after operations wound down. Light filters through windows coated in grime, casting flat planes of illumination across the equipment and the brick walls around it. Nothing has been moved. What was here when the mill closed is what the photograph records. Mungo Scott Ltd began construction on the Summer Hill site in 1921, after purchasing land that had originally been resumed for a freight railway line and then sold off when the railway authority no longer required it. The mill began operating in June 1922, and Mungo Scott Ltd vacated their previous mill on Sussex Street, Sydney. The building was constructed with load-bearing brick walls and a timber post-and-beam internal structure, its form determined by function: grain arrived by rail to the mill's own siding, was raised to the top floor, and then fed by gravity down through the milling machinery floor by floor. A fire on 13 January 1927 destroyed a flour store and part of the mill. The operation was rebuilt and continued. Through the following decades the site expanded, with concrete grain silo towers added in the 1950s and further steel storage infrastructure added in 1963. Ownership passed from Mungo Scott Ltd through Goodman Fielder to Allied Mills. By the 2000s the mill was the sole remaining user of the Rozelle-Darling Harbour Goods Line. The final goods train delivered to the site on 1 December 2008. Milling operations ceased in 2009, ending nearly ninety years of continuous flour production at Summer Hill. This photograph was made in 2014, five years after the machinery last ran. The site was listed as a heritage item of local significance under the Ashfield Local Environmental Plan from 1985. Redevelopment of the broader site was already underway by the time of this capture; the Mungo Scott building and six silos were retained under heritage conditions attached to the concept plan approved in July 2013.