Mill Window

A single window in the brick wall of the Mungo Scott Flour Mill, Summer Hill. The glass has clouded with grime and the sill is streaked with rust, the paint beneath it lifting in layers that built up over decades of operation and then years of quiet. Light still pushes through the pane, but the view beyond is blurred beyond reading. The mill building is five storeys of load-bearing brick with a timber post-and-beam interior structure, a hipped roof clad in metal sheeting, and a form dictated entirely by function. Mungo Scott Ltd began construction in 1921 on land purchased for £3,000 from a railway authority that had resumed it and then found it surplus to requirements. The mill opened in June 1922. Grain arrived by rail along a dedicated siding connected to the Rozelle-Darling Harbour Goods Line, was raised to the top floor, and worked downward through rollers and sifters, floor by floor, until it left the building as flour. On 13 January 1927 a fire, believed to have been caused by sparks from passing trains igniting stored flour, destroyed a flour store and part of the mill. The mill was rebuilt and continued operating. Capacity was expanded in the 1950s when concrete grain silo towers were added to the site. By the 2000s the Mungo Scott mill was the sole remaining customer on the Rozelle Goods Line. The final goods train delivered to the site ran on 1 December 2008. Milling operations ceased in 2009, ending an unbroken run from June 1922. The building was heritage-listed under the Ashfield Local Environmental Plan in 1985. This photograph was made in 2014, five years after the mill closed and before construction began on the mixed-use redevelopment that would follow. The window records that interval: the rust, the peeling paint, the smeared glass.