To see another side of Melbourne I was off with the guided tour to Tottenham - a 3 minute train ride west of where I live - to see the industrial side of Melbourne. Actually most of the factories are closed now but the years between the World Wars were an economic boom for the area. This is a large flat area, filled in eons ago by lava. So the soil on this west side of Melbourne is not good for growing food, just grass for sheep. Eventually it became Australia's arsenal and other factories were built also. Then after the Japanese bombed Darwin it was realised that all the munitions shouldn't be manufactured in the same place and the area started a slow decline. We looked at a few of the Art Deco factory facades that remain and heard some stories about them from people on the tour whose fathers worked in them in the 1950s and 60s.
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