The Goldsbrough Mort Wool Store, West Footscray
The imposing Goldsbrough Mort & Co building on the corner of McArthur Street and Sunshine Road in West Footscray.
In early 2026 I spent a morning documenting, photographically, the Goldsbrough Mort Wool Store on the corner of McArthur Street and Sunshine Road, West Footscray – or Tottenham, as I always think of it.
Goldsbrough Mort was one of the great names of Australian wool – a pastoral business whose stores once anchored ports and rail yards across Australia. Its West Footscray (or Tottenham, as it used to be known) store at 63 Sunshine Road is a monumental four-storey brick warehouse built around 1940. It’s located right beside the Watswool Wool Brokers building (which in its heyday was called the Australian Estates wool stores). In architectural terms the Goldsbrough Mort building is the quieter building of the two, courtesy of the fact that the Watswool building next door has some flamboyant flourishes.
The Goldsbrough Mort building was though, in its wool-storing prime, an advanced wool facility. It had purpose-built rail and truck loading, automated bale elevators and conveyors, concrete and steel framing to carry heavy floor loads, and – as you can see in the side-view picture below – a sawtooth roof, its south-facing rooflights designed to throw even, shadowless light across the top-floor wool sale floor. It was on this top floor that buyers judged the quality of the fleece.
A railway siding from the building once ran straight to Tottenham station.
Like the Watswool building next door, Goldsbrough Mort was hollowed out by the consolidation of the wool trade in the 1990s. This building remains listed though as being of regional historical and architectural significance (Heritage Overlay HO161, City of Maribyrnong).
Fences guard the Goldsbrough Mort & Co Wool Store on Sunshine Road, West Footscray, in 2026. PHOTO: Campbell Mattinson.
The building today
A lot of money has gone into this building in recent years, and a lot more money could be about to go into the site itself.
The heritage Goldsbrough Mort warehouse itself had (or is in the process of having) AU$29.1 million spent on repurposing works. These works were approved by the Maribyrnong council in 2023, and were/are designed to convert the building into warehouses, offices and hospitality space. The building trades as the WEFO Wool Store. The original Goldsbrough & Mort signage and Victorian Ash floorboards have been restored; solar and rainwater systems have been added; and the building leased.
There’s vacant land at the back of the Goldsbrough Mort warehouse though (not pictured), and it’s on this land that things get interesting, because there’s a data centre proposed to be built on it.
Indeed developer Perri Projects has plans for a new four-storey data centre on the broader 2.72-hectare site – to be built behind the heritage warehouse. If it goes ahead, it will feature a facade of brick bands and glazed panels designed by Greenbox Architects; they are meant to complement the architectural style of the Goldsbrough Mort building. This development is estimated to cost AU$800 million and to achieve an expected end value of AU$1 billion. A ministerial planning permit (PA2403320) has been issued through the state's fast-track Development Facilitation Program.
Data is the new wool.
All images on this page were taken on a Fujifilm GFX 50R medium-format camera, as part of my Real Estate Novelist series; it wasn’t a commission, and I have no association with any of the buildings or businesses mentioned.
