Marrickville in the 1930s

Seen from an aeroplane, 1930s Marrickville is a grid of terrace roofs with factories dropped into it — sawtooth sheds, brick chimneys, rail lines threading between the works and the housing. The most striking thing in those aerial views is a cluster of squat conical brick towers. They are bottle kilns, and they belong to Fowler's.

The pottery had been going for a century by then. Enoch Fowler started it at Parramatta in 1837 with a small up-draught kiln and clay from the site, making salt-glazed jars and ginger beer bottles; the works moved to Glebe, then to the corner of Parramatta Road and Australia Street at Camperdown, adding drainpipes and bricks. His son Robert ran it from 1873, inherited it in 1879 and was Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1880. After Robert's death the firm moved out to Marrickville, where it made pipes, chimney pots, edging tiles and laundry tubs — the unglamorous ceramics a growing city eats by the tonne.

There is a religious Marrickville underneath the industrial one. The first Carmelite nuns in Australia sailed from the Carmel of Angoulême in France and reached Sydney Harbour on 30 July 1885, and within six months had bought a mansion called The Warren on the banks of the Cooks River here. That venture went badly and they gave it up in June 1900, the order settling in the end at Dulwich Hill on Marrickville's edge. By the 1930s they were long established, and the chapel photographed here — rose window, gabled brick front, a crowned statue of the Virgin on a pedestal, and inside, walls hung with garlands and greenery for a jubilee — belongs to that later, settled life.

On a corner elsewhere in the suburb, a two-storey wine saloon carries Penfolds advertising across its facade and window awnings — Sparkling Minchinbury, and the slogan *Be never without Penfolds within*. And on a gravel road under an elevated water tower, a woman in a dark patterned dress is walking a tabby-and-white cat on a leash.