Dispatch rural This is the basic oxygen

This is the basic oxygen and continuous casting era of Port Kembla Steelworks

fabric scraps and tools left where production stopped

The timber wharf at Balls Head Bay

hinting at the rooms beyond

photographed in 2011

Dispatch rural This is the basic oxygenA single work boot sits on a dusty timber floor, left behind when the Northcote Shoe Factory closed sometime in the 1980s or 1990s. The factory, purpose built on Arthurton Road in 1926, produced footwear under the Purnell Shoe Company name by the 1970s, one of a wave of inner Melbourne manufacturers that didn't survive tariff reductions and cheap imports. Part of the Northcote Shoe Factory series.