Alexandria in the 1930s
Michael O'Riordan, five times mayor of Alexandria, called it the Birmingham of Australia, and he was not being modest for the sake of it. By 1943 the municipality held something like 550 factories and employed more than twenty-two thousand people, and half the suburb was under large industrial concerns. It was the largest industrial municipality in the country.
The 1930s is when that becomes visible from the air, and from the air is how it should be looked at. A ground-level photograph of a factory is a wall. An oblique aerial shows the actual organism: parallel sawtooth sheds pulling north light down onto the machines, warehouses, a tall chimney, open yards stacked with rows of concrete pipes, railway sidings running in between, a straight concrete-lined canal along one edge — and dense terraced housing pressed up against all of it, works and street sharing a fence line.
One name keeps appearing on the roofs. The Century Storage Battery Co. opened its works here in 1928, the first Australian factory building batteries designed for Australian conditions, and its signage is legible across several of these views alongside neighbours like the Crown works. Century stayed in Alexandria until the plants were rationalised in the mid-1980s.
The most telling detail is at the edges of the frame, though. Look past the works and the sidings and there are still weatherboard cottages on unmade roads, open paddocks and market gardens. Alexandria was not built industrial; it was being converted, fast, while somebody was up there with a camera.
