That (Monsanto) building on Somerville Road, Brooklyn
My dad was a chemistry teacher. He taught at the same school for many decades and then went on teaching chemistry for more than a decade after that; he was still teaching chemistry to high school kids until he was just about 80.
But before that, from 1957 to 1966, he was an industrial chemist at Monsanto (454-460 Somerville Road) in Brooklyn in Melbourne. I've heard the word Monsanto all my life. For my first 25 or so years it was always in affectionate terms; it was only later that I became aware of any wider Monsanto conversations.
But I've never, until I finally found it yesterday, seen the building it operated out of in Melbourne. Here it is, now abandoned. It’s such a striking building; I stood in front of it for more than an hour on a Sunday arvo, and as I did two other cars stopped to gaze and wonder too. Everyone wants to know what this magnificent old building is, or was. Everyone wants to know what “that Somerville Road abandoned building” is.
It’s Monsanto, Melbourne. Built 1941 or so. It’s my dad's first workplace. Back then, he tells me, the suburb of Altona North was just paddocks, and so he used to ride his bike across the lands each morning, from Williamstown to Brooklyn, as a young scared wide-eyed boffin, to quality-check the incoming ingredients for the production of aspirin. This quality-checking was done, believe it or not, by actually tasting the aspirin. So my dad, as a young industrial chemist, was an aspirin-taster as his job.
And yes, you could ride your bike across open paddocks from Newport to Brooklyn back then.
(When I told him that I’d visited it recently he asked: is the canteen building still there? [Answer: yes, at the back].)
I do admittedly find it interesting that I became a wine reviewer – I taste things every day and say yay or nay as a job – and my dad used to taste aspirin every day and say yay or nay as his job. I was twenty years into my life as a wine reviewer before I knew that his job had been to actually taste aspirin. Unfortunately his job at Monsanto and my job as a wine writer did not coincide time-wise, otherwise as a family we would have made for the perfect circular economy: my job gave people headaches, his job cured them.
All photography here is copyright Campbell Mattinson and is available for sale.
Picture of Monsanto's Melbourne headquarters, in the suburb of Brooklyn. This image is copyright Campbell Mattinson and is available for sale.
