Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Corporate changes at North Fremantle

At North Fremantle there's a stretch of beach known as Leighton. It used to be a beautiful beach when I was a kid in the 1950s. A wide expanse of pure white sand like the best of Australian beaches. Now its spoiled and polluted.

North Fremantle was once the habitat of many light industries. Immediately coming to mind were the tank farms and various facilities of oil companies like Shell and Caltex; Lever and Kitchen's soap factory; Pearse Brothers boot and shoe factory and the Dingo Flour Mill. There were plenty of others too, but most have long gone.

The flour mill still operates. It's conspicuous by a huge logo of a dingo on the front of the building. Many people associate the design with the corporate criminal Alan Bond who repainted it when he was a signwriter. But it was around well before him. My mother worked for a Fremantle architect by the name of Mr Nicholas prior to WW2 and told me that her boss it's designer. It had originally been painted up by others, not Mr Bond.

Today it can be seen that the logo is red and white. In the 1950s the dingo was black on a mustard yellow background.

There was no road close to the ocean like there is today. The nearest road was Stirling Highway which runs past the flour mill. It's about 800 metres from the water. Leighton beach is opposite the mill. In the 1950s beachgoers were obliged to park their Hilman Minxes and Ford Prefects on the eastern side of the Highway, virtually in the shadow of the mill.

Between the mill and the water were numerous very large storage sheds. Black in colour. I think these might have been left over from the American occupation in WW2. There was also a lot of railway lines, including the main one running between Perth and Fremantle. The public were allowed to access the beach by negotiating their way past all these elements.

It soon became very different. By the sixties the sheds were removed and the entire area reformed into a significant goods-railway junction - the area became barren and boring. Public access was stopped, but this was compensated by the construction of a bypass road closer to the coast.

Now in 2007 the railway junction has mostly gone, there is only the Perth-Fremantle line remaining. The coastal bypass road is currently being rerouted to facilitate a major luxury housing project.

A little further northwards from the Dingo Flour mill is another conspicuous factory building. The architecture might be described as industrial art deco. It was originally a Ford assembly plant - small by Ford's standards I suppose, because there was no base-manufacturing done there. Vehicles were manufactured in the Eastern States and overseas and assembled at Leighton for the Western Australian domestic market.

Ford eventually pulled out - a corporate decision. I think it may have been related to the completion of the rail line connecting to the eastern states. Fully assembled cars of the major brands were then brought from the east and unloaded at the North Fremantle junction. The rows of hundreds of Australian made cars, Fords and general Motor's Holdens became a familiar sight in the railway precinct for passers by.

Now they too have gone. Instead it is the Fremantle wharf areas to the south which are are packed with thousands of new cars every week, brought in from China, Korea and Japan by ship.

This week the old Ford factory is again in the news. For about the past fifteen or so years it has been a brewery, originally operated by a company called the Matilda Bay Brewing Company. Matilda Bay is further upstream on the Swan River, which is behind the building.

When you drive past on the Stirling Highway you can often smell the hops brewing. There are very large windows on the front and through these can be seen the inner workings of the facility, including the domed copper kettles.

In the world of corporate brewing nothing lasts forever. There have been many twists and turns in this state with them in my lifetime. Too many to keep up with. The eastern states (Victorian) company Fosters eventually took over the Matilda Bay setup and employed about sixty people - until this week. It has just announced that it will closing brewing operations in late September. The employees facing redundancy can transfer to the company's operations in the eastern states if they wish.

I recall last week reading another announcement from Fosters. They were going to start producing the Fosters brand in a deal with the Miller Brewing company in Georgia and Texas. A few years ago they had also gone into brewing in a big way in China, but I have an idea there have been some revaluation problems there.

Beer drinkers in this state won't panic with the closure. There is still the huge Swan Brewery operation and plenty of so called boutique breweries. One of the most popular is a place called "Little Creatures" adjacent to the fishing boat harbour in Fremantle.

Fosters reckon they are going to maintain building and its equipment for several years. However it is on a really prime piece of real estate, and there is a lot of agitation by developers along the coast for multi story apartments etc. It's going to be a case of watch that space.

© MMVII Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.

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