Bendigo factory

[jack neville]

Fantastic photos Mike. A sad reminder that this country is rapidly increasing our capacity to make ....nothing.

[Mike Cecil]

Yes, 1950s.

The 120mm RCL L2A1 BAT gun was not made in the thousands, of course, and was only ever a training weapon in Australia (ie not the listed weapon for deployment).

Nice collection. The factory is now a Thales manufacturing plant, and is where Bushmasters are assembled.

Mike

[Mrs Vampire]

amazing photos...glad to hear its still being used ...but I'll bet we don't make stuff like that anymore.

[Lang]

Great photos Mike.

I think they got carried away when they said the overhead crane was 110ft high If you imagine the 44gallon drums stacked on top of each other - more like 40ft.

Lang

[Tony Mathers]

My son did work experience at Thales Bendigo a couple of weeks ago and one of his jobs was loading the magazine of a naval gun that was under test... it apparently was very hard work keeping up with the rapid fire gun.... it fired in 5 round bursts. The older workers let him do the actual loading as he was a bit more nimble than they were.
He also help build some Bushmasters and went for a drive in another Bushmaster.