A cigarette factory, with a skating rink on the roof

The building was made for 900 cigarette makers. One floor was kept as a luncheon room.

The firm’s Standard cigarettes came with collectable cards of footballers and jockeys. The back of a 1917 jockey card promised “Cork Tipped, Warranted, Hand Rolled”, and the rolling was done by women and girls. The firm’s cigarette makers had a union of their own, and when one was formed for the whole trade in 1908, most of its officers were women.

The floors were a first for Australia. There are no beams. The concrete slabs sit on columns with wide, mushroom-shaped heads. Some said a floor like that would not carry its own weight, so they piled 35 tons on one. The sign in the photograph says it sagged three-sixteenths of an inch.

The owners were so sure it would never burn that they insured only the windows.

In 1930 another tobacco company, Godfrey Phillips, bought the building for about £35,000, and two more floors went on in 1938. In December 1949 the Argus came in to photograph “the girls who make your cigarettes”. About 300 people worked there by then, and one machine made 1,000 cigarettes a minute. One of the women photographed, Mrs Halana Kulik, had come from Poland, where she had trained as a pianist at the Warsaw Conservatorium.

By 1960 the tobacco company had moved to Collingwood. A firm of typesetters called Dover’s took its place in the lane, and the building still carries their name. In the 1990s it became apartments.

Today there are 45 of them. The mushroom-headed columns still hold up the floors, and at least one apartment has a column inside it.