Summary

Black and white silver gelatin photograph of the Kodak Australasia factory in Abbotsford, Victoria, 1912.

This photograph features the 1886 Austral Laboratory building which curves around Southhampton Crescent, Abbotsford, on the Kodak factory site. This building was originally part of the Austral Plate Company factory site which Thomas Baker, a pharmaceutical chemist, established on his residential property, Yarra Grange, in 1884. This building was used to manufacture photographic plates. In 1894, under the partnership name Baker and Rouse, this company was owned by Thomas Baker and accountant, John Rouse. In the first decade of the 20th century the company and factory site was bought and operated by Kodak, hence the site shows expansion in this photograph. In the late 1950s Kodak moved from Abbotsford to a new factory site at Coburg on the northern outskirts of Melbourne.

Kodak manufactured and distributed a wide range of photographic products to Australasia, such as film, paper, chemicals, cameras and miscellaneous equipment. Its client base included amateur and professional photographers, as well as specialist medical and graphic art professionals who used photography, x-ray and other imaging techniques.

This photograph is part of the Kodak collection of products, promotional materials, photographs and working life artefacts collected from Kodak Australasia in 2005, when the Melbourne manufacturing plant at Coburg closed down.

Description of Content

Photograph of the exterior of a factory site. The view looks across at the building from a road which is perpendicular to the building. Four of the five sections of a multi-storey brick building are visible in this photograph, as well as the side of the building at far right. A gas street lamp is on the corner of the two roads, and bluestone guttering lines the road in the foreground. A footpath is visible on the left on the edge of a vacant block opposite the factory building.

Physical Description

Black and white silver gelatin photograph, printed on light weight Kodak paper, landscape format with a white border.

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