Rootes Ltd Factory [Former] 19-25 Salmon Street, Port Melbourne

Rootes Ltd Factory [former] 19-25 Salmon Street, Port Melbourne HERITAGE ASSESSMENT Prepared jointly for Art Deco & Modernism Society, Inc National Trust of Australia (Victoria) Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society 23 July 2015 P O B o x 2 2 2 E m e r a l d 3 7 8 2 w w w . b u i l t h e r i t a g e . c o m . a u p h o n e 9 0 1 8 9 3 1 1 A: INTRODUCTION BACKGROUND & BRIEF In the Fishermans Bend Heritage Study , commissioned by Places Victoria and completed by Biosis Pty Ltd in June 2013, the subject site (referred to as the Rootes/Chrysler factory, 11-19 [ sic ] Salmon and Plummer Streets) was identified as one of seven places “recommended for further investigation with a view to inclusion on the Heritage Overlay”. The present report was jointly commissioned by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), the Art Deco & Modernism Society, Inc (ADMS) and the Port Melbourne Historical & Preservation Society. The brief was as follows: With respect to the work undertaken in 2013 by Biosis for 19-25 Salmon Street, and with regard for the finding by Biosis that the place has local heritage significance and that further investigation should be undertaken, please prepare a detailed site history, contextual analysis, brief comparative analysis, and heritage significance assessment of the site. Depending on your findings, the National Trust and other stakeholders may wish to advocate for an interim heritage control under the local heritage overlay or other appropriate heritage control. SITE DETAILS Names/s 1941-43 Department of Munitions: experimental tank depot 1943-46 Department of Aircraft Production (Maintenance Division): factory/store 1946-66 Rootes Ltd factory [company known as Rootes (Australia) Pty Ltd after 1954] 1966-72 Chrysler (Australia) Ltd factory Address 19-25 Salmon Street, Port Melbourne Note that two rear tenancies are separately addressed as 20 and 30 Smith Street, and another one along the north frontage is separately addressed as 380 Plummer Street. In this report, the Salmon Street address is deemed to refer to the entire complex bounded by Salmon, Plummer and Smith Streets Local Government Area City of Port Phillip F O R M E R R O O T E S L T D F A C T O R Y P O R T M E L B O U R N E 3 EXISTING HERITAGE LISTINGS City of Port Phillip The subject site is not currently included in the Heritage Overlay Schedule to the City of Port Phillip Planning Scheme, either as an individual heritage place or as part of a broader heritage precinct. National Trust of Australia (Victoria) The subject site is not classified by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria). Register of the National Estate (former) Not recorded. AUTHORSHIP This report was prepared by Simon Reeves, director and principal of Built Heritage Pty Ltd. LIMITATIONS Due to the limited amount of time available to prepare this report, it was not possible for the consultant to undertake his own inspection of the subject site. For this report, reliance was made on recent photographs that were taken by representatives of the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), during a site visit on 9 July 2015. Similarly, historical research was limited to published secondary sources and select primary sources that are readily available online, such as digitized newspapers, historical maps, aerial photographs and other illustrative material. It is expected that further information on the building, particularly relating to its governmental, occupation, would exist in the National Archives of Australia. While examination of these archival records would certainly add to the body of knowledge on the building, the limited research undertaken to date is deemed to have been sufficient to establish a case for local significance. CONCLUSION & RECOMMENDATIONS For associations with its respective occupation by the Department of Munitions, the Department of Aircraft Productions and car manufacturers Rootes Ltd, the complex is deemed to be of historic and aesthetic significance at the local level. As such, an individual heritage overlay is deemed appropriate. For its specific associations with the Commonwealth government’s top secret tank manufacture programme, which prompted the construction of the building in 1941, the earliest part of the building is considered to be potentially of significance at the state level. 4 F O R M E R R O O T E S L T D F A C T O R Y P O R T M E L B O U R N E B: HISTORICAL OVERVIEW PREAMBLE Erected during 1941, the former factory complex at 19-25 Salmon Street, Port Melbourne, had no fewer than three different occupants during the first six years of its existence. These consisted of divisions of two separate government departments, each engaged in different types of war-related manufacture, followed in 1946 by a private enterprise that would remain headquartered in the building for two decades. Each of these three key phases of the building’s occupation and use are imbued with their own associations of cultural significance and will be discussed separately. • Department of Munitions [experimental tank depot, 1941-43] • Department of Aircraft Production (Maintenance Division) [factory/store, 1943-46] • Rootes Ltd/Chrysler Australia Ltd [vehicle factory, 1946-72] DEPARTMENT OF MUNITIONS (TANK DEPOT) Background to tank manufacture The Australian government’s ambitious but ultimately short-lived attempt to manufacture tanks locally during the Second World War is documented in Peter Beale’s definitive study, Fallen Sentinels: Australian Tanks in World War II (2011). Ultimately, the programme traced its origins back to December 1940, when Percy Spender, then Minister for the Army, presented the Military Board’s proposal for the establishment of an armoured division. Early the following year, approval was given for the creation of an Australian Armoured Corps, as well as the raising of the required personnel (across the engineering, signal and ordnance corps) and the establishment of two training regiments and an AFV (Armoured Fighting Vehicle) training school. By that time, plans were already underway for the design and manufacture of the tanks themselves. A British artillery officer, Colonel W D Watson, arrived in Australia in December 1940 to consult on the project, and technical officers of the newly-created Design & Development Section obtained “a great deal of technical data and assistance form the US authorities”. By February 1941, a tank design (designated as the Australian Cruiser, Mark 1, or AC1) had already reached mock-up stage, with detailed design progressing swiftly thereafter. At that time, it was optimistically estimated that the first Australian-made tank would be completed by November. However, this timeline proved to be too optimistic; much more research needed to be done, and many complex technical issues (for example, the preferred methods of armour-plating and riveting) needed to be ironed out. These matters were subject to countless meetings and discussions during 1941. F O R M E R R O O T E S L T D F A C T O R Y P O R T M E L B O U R N E 5 Experimental Tank Depot, Port Melbourne During this prolonged period of design development, it was proposed to establish an experimental tank depot in Melbourne. On 23 July 1941, a report of the Director-General of Munitions stated that this depot, occupying a 9½ acre site at Fishermen’s Bend, was almost half completed (Figure 1). Although the presence of the new building was recorded in the street-by-street section of the Sands & McDougall Directory in 1942-43, it was identified only as the Department of Munitions “experimental works”, in what was clearly an attempt to keep the nature of its operation under wraps. Given the top secret status of the tank programme, it is not surprising that little seems to be recorded of the experimental depot, even in Beale’s book. Major-General Ronald Hopkins, who was involved in the tank project from the beginning, recalled many years later that “Colonel Watson established a workshop in South Melbourne where he installed a team of carpenters and commenced building wooden mock-ups of his designs. As the General Staff representative, I spent many hours there discussing and testing various alternatives for the arrangement of crew and armaments”. 1 Aftermath of tank programme In any case, development of the tank programme came to a fore towards the end of 1941, when it was resolved to proceed with the manufacture of the AC1 while abandoning any further development of a variant design, the AC2. Construction of the tanks did not take place in Melbourne but rather in Sydney, where the state government railway workshops at Chullora had been taken over as a top secret manufacturing facility for munitions, aircraft components and other requirements. A dedicated tank assembly annexe, in the form of a simple shed-like building measuring 500 feet by 140 feet, was duly constructed. 2 Tank production commenced in February 1942 and the first examples of the AC1 (by then, informally referred to as the Sentinel ) emerged in August. Ultimately, the Australian government’s wartime tank building programme was not a success. One senior member of military staff later recalled that, by mid-1942, “only a few tanks had been built, the timetable was in arrears and even the design had become out of date”. 3 Ultimately, only 65 examples of the AC1 were manufactured (rather than the hundreds originally envisaged), and, although they were tested and used for training, none of them ever saw active service. The tank programme was terminated in July 1943, when the government resolved that its resources would be better expended in supporting the arrival of tanks from the USA.

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