Screw Feeder

Inside the Mungo Scott Flour Mill, a screw feeder sits where it stopped. Rust has worked its way into every fold of the casing. Flour dust, pale and dense, has caked to the metal in the way that only decades of accumulation produces. The timber floor beneath it belongs to the mill's original post-and-beam interior structure, the same load-bearing framework that carried the weight of the operation from the building's first year. The mill at 2-32 Smith Street, Summer Hill opened in June 1922. Mungo Scott Ltd had established themselves decades earlier, operating out of Sussex Street in the city before the Summer Hill site was ready. The new location was chosen for one reason: the Rozelle-Darling Harbour Goods Line ran alongside the site's eastern boundary, and a private siding could connect directly to it. Grain arrived by rail, was lifted to the top floor, and then moved downward through the building by gravity, passing through progressively finer rollers and sifters on each level, eventually becoming flour, bagged and ready for distribution. A fire on 13 January 1927 destroyed a flour store and part of the mill. Sparks from passing trains on the goods line were believed to have ignited the stored flour. The mill was rebuilt and continued operating. Concrete grain silos were added in the 1950s. By the time operations finally ceased in 2009, the Mungo Scott mill was the sole remaining customer on the Rozelle Goods Line. The last goods train had delivered to the site on 1 December 2008. This photograph was made in 2014, five years after the mill went quiet, as the site was moving through planning approvals for its redevelopment. The screw feeder in the frame was part of the infrastructure that kept grain moving through the building across 87 years of operation. By 2014 it had not moved in five years. The rust and the flour dust record that interval exactly.