Alexandria in the 1930s

Alexandria called itself the Birmingham of Australia, and it was not being modest for the sake of it. The flats between the city and Botany Bay were already being written up under that name in 1910, and by the 1940s the municipality was the largest industrial district 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, building batteries it sold as made 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.