Elegy for the former Tontine factory
Nicholson Street, East Brunswick
Author: Krysia Birman
I yearn for an age when documentation was important. It seems the more accessible photography becomes, the less we strive to preserve the attestation of our lives. And it is the same with the places that surround us.
Just now, I have completed a Google search and I cannot find the name of the founder of the Tontine factory. The official Tontine story tells me it was founded in 1958, which gives me the idea that perhaps the founder was a World War Two refugee. Or perhaps the Tontine founder arrived earlier, developing smaller industrial factories, over many years, building up to Tontine. After all, it is broadly known that many of the founders of the industrial age in Australia, mostly Melbourne, were Russians fleeing the Soviets. Maybe the Tontine founder fled the Soviets too.
The lens tilts upwards revealing lingering shots of billowing cathedral-dust as the famous onion-domed cupolas yield at the insistence of the dynamite sticks installed in the under-croft. Aged babushkas stand in lines of silenced terror as they observe the gold dust falling to the black loam earth. The Orthodox cross of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral topples to their feet. It is Moscow 1931. I saw it on YouTube. You can too. The music providing the sound reminds me of Shostakovich’s Symphony Number 7 with its rich violin tones and adventurous opus which is somehow underpinned by a declamatory theme of times to come.
I want to know more about how we take external loss of architectural structures into our bosom. The religion that was removed from the streets by the Soviets permeated into the crevices of the scarves of these babushkas, who would whisper incantations into the ears of their children so their prayers would not become unknown.
Again, my thoughts are interrupted by the invasive drilling.
A metal-bearer is forming a hole where foundations will be poured across the road from where I live.
An enormous apartment complex with a small shopping centre called the East Brunswick Village (how sweet) will be erected, but there are no lingering shots of the destruction of the former Tontine factory.
There will be no plaques marking Melbourne’s industrial age when factories brought opportunity and wealth to this new country. There will be no YouTube clips to document the people who worked at these factories for decades, possibly generations. Women, seated at long benches with sweating cotton dresses clinging to their pudgy bodies with strong, solid arms moving rapidly across the sewing machines, providing Australia with its first ‘Aussie doona’, under which the nation slept.
Their stories will not be recollected, whispered into the ears of the children to be remembered.
This singular familiarity of Brunswick’s industrial age is slipping away and soon these workplaces will become apartments: life-factories where people eat and sleep in pre-fabricated condominiums. They will be inhabited by professionals — either single people or couples — who are elevated in the air high above the lead-filled earth, save their souls. Detached and isolated from the dirt that supports them.
There will be no boastful documentation to mark the lives of the buildings that were.
Instead, the nostalgia will sit with me in these fleeting moments when the noise of the drill is so loud, I can barely think — and it presses on me to flee my home.
And the history of the production of these buildings.
And the camaraderie of the men and women within.
Will be once more forgotten.
KRYSIA BIRMAN is a strategic thinker and writer for various not-for-profit and social justice services. She is interested in using her writing as a sword that pierces through complex challenges and enables users and readers to access the limitless possibilities that emerge.
