I share your love of old industrial sites. I’ve worked in stacks as a trades assistant and have found them to be extraordinarily rich and resonant places. I did a stint at the Fishermans Bend munitions factory and that was the most deliriously surreal site I have ever seen. It was a RDO so no one was about, but all the small forges were still burning bright as the morning sunlight streamed in. Stunningly beautiful place.

I Grew up near the Pascoe Vale gasometer in Melbourne and the memories of that vast, groaning, rusty crown by a small creek with the Pascoe Vale Hunt Club nearby are probably responsible for this passion. They were demolished forty years ago.

The National Trust has applied for heritage listing of the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, over five hectares of factories now partly deserted and crying out for adaptive reuse. Its owner Australian Defence Industries has leased out some buildings but has been frustrated by Council in its attempts to lease out others. They are now applying to demolish structures as a cheaper option than maintaining them empty and so we moved for an interim heritage order to block demolitions.
It has turned into an unpleasant brawl with certain Lithgow Councillors publicly accusing us of destroying jobs etc and passing resolutions attacking us. It’s all a black comedy when you consider that the buildings are empty already and Council itself has failed to attract new industry for decades now, but the few new projects in town have mostly been heritage based tourism of one sort or another.
In the past, our suggestion that an imaginative approach to reuse of the Small Arms Factories would attract exactly the creative industries that grow new jobs has been greeted with horror and mutterings about hippies and crystal shops – you’re in a real time warp here. Try and talk to the Councillors about information technology and you very quickly realise that you are talking to “the internet is a series of tubes” sort of people. It is difficult and depressing to try to deal with people whose understanding of the world is about thirty years out of date. A meeting with them quickly sends most proposed new businesses scuttling a further 50 kilometres up the road to Bathurst, where there is much more understanding of what contemporary business is about.
The whole story will be on http:/www.nationaltrustlithgow.com within a day or so.