Footscray Cotton Mills

This artwork by Kerrie Gottliebsen celebrates the wonderful Cotton Mills buildings and arts community located on the corner of Parker St and Maribyrnong St, Footscray. I was fortunate enough to visit a few studios many years ago as part of the City of Maribyrnong ‘Open Studios’. The weekend invited the public into the studios of working artists, many of whom were located in the Mills.

The buildings date back to 1926 when the site was built as an expansion of the Barnet Glass Rubber Company, designed by the same architect as the former Footscray Town Hall.

Barnett started at this site in 1906 by purchasing a building closer to the river that was initially a jute factory built in 1875 by Thomas McPherson. The building now occupying that site was once the world headquarters of Lonely Planet guidebooks. The Barnet company claimed to have made the colony’s first rubberised clothing and in the 1920s, also manufactured garden hoses, among other rubber products. In 1939 the factory was purchased by Bradford Cotton Mills from NSW to be used for spinning, weaving, dying and waterproofing and by 1959, it was considered one of Australia’s largest companies.

With its dramatic brick chimney and densely-built red brick processing buildings, the buildings are architecturally notable for their unified design on a massive scale representing the heights of early 20th-century industrial developments. As such, the factory is possibly the best example of the multi-story mill design perfected in Britain in the late 19th century to make the best use of congested urban sites, but only rarely transferred to Australia. The site, therefore, demonstrates the diversity of industrial forms which make up the history of manufacturing in Australia.

The Footscray Cotton Mills artwork can be purchased in A4, A3, A2, A1 and the super enormous A0.

To discover the artists currently working in the Mills visit https://www.thecottonmills.com.au/home