Ordnance Factory Maribyrnong

The Ordnance Factory was set up on Wests Road at Maribyrnong, beside the older Royal Australian Field Artillery barracks and stables, in two converted buildings in 1923, and was formally established as a Commonwealth agency on 1 January 1924 as a military engineering works. It was one of only four government munitions factories in existence at the outbreak of the Second World War, and made heavy guns, armoured vehicles and a range of larger equipment for warfare; wartime photographs show 3.7-inch anti-aircraft guns nearing completion, gun barrels being bored and rows of depth-charge throwers, and by 1941 the Maribyrnong munitions complex as a whole employed more than 16,000 people. The No. 1 Forge and the gun and carriage section of the No. 1 machine shop, both vast classically treated brick buildings, were the heart of the works.

After the war came steady decline: despite the Korean and Vietnam wars the government factories were denied federal capital to upgrade. It was in this period that the Australian Army's Land Rover trailer, the Trailer, Cargo, ½-ton, No.5, was built, from 1963, based on the British Sankey of the early 1960s: a tub-type trailer without a tailgate, with a lunette-ring hitch and 5-stud Land Rover wheels, so that the towing vehicle's spare fitted. It served behind the Army's Series Land Rovers and remained in use for some fifty years, later towed behind the Land Rover 110 Perentie, with in-service modifications recorded on a plate on the tub. Enthusiast registers attribute the first batch to the Government Ordnance Factory, Maribyrnong, with later batches by contract builders and the type listed under Australian Defence Industries in state registration records; the REMLR and AULRO pages carrying that maker-plate evidence sit behind bot checks and could not be fetched for this entry, which is why it is left in draft.

On 4 May 1989 the Ordnance Factory ceased to exist as a Commonwealth agency, replaced along with the other government establishments by the government-owned company Australian Defence Industries Pty Ltd, and the Maribyrnong factories had closed by 1994. Transfield sold its half of ADI to Thales in October 2006, and the business is now Thales Australia. All but the head-office building of the Ordnance Factory period has been demolished for the Waterford Green housing estate; the surviving RAFA barracks, administration office, gatehouse and stables on Wests Road are on the Victorian Heritage Register.