The start of the 20th century was marked in Victoria by the multiplying of factories and smokestacks. The end of the century was marked by their decline. While Victoria still produced half of the nation's output of textiles, clothing and footwear, the foreign imports were soaring. Maybe 100 000 jobs in factories were transferred indirectly from Victoria to China and Malaysia and other Asian countries. Even more jobs in factories were obliterated by new labour-saving machines.

A taxi-driver who knew his Melbourne could point, in the year 2000, to dozens of empty workshops and empty warehouses: the acres of factories at Montague where Dunlop had manufactured tyres and other rubber goods for nearly all of the century; the idle boot and shoe factories of Collingwood, past which walked people now wearing their cheap foreign shoes; Ruwolt's big engineering works pulled down to make way for a shopping and entertainment centre on the riverbank at North Richmond; the idle rope works at Footscray; the malthouse in South Melbourne which was turned into a theatre; the jam factory in Chapel Street which became a place of cinemas and other entertainments; and the old Carlton and United brewery that resembled a bombed-out site after the wreckers completed their task. While many old factories of the inner suburbs were squeezed out by foreign competition, others were enticed away to outer Melbourne suburbs where land for spacious factories was easily found.