Max Dupain began his career in 1930 at Cecil Bostock’s commercial photography studio in Sydney. By 1934, Dupain had established his own premises and embarked on a highly successful career, moving away from the pictorialist style in which he had been trained to pioneer modernist photography in Australia.

That year, Dupain launched his first commercial partnership and began what would become a 40-year engagement with CSR Limited (Colonial Sugar Refining Company) to document its mills and the activities of its cane growers and their families. Dupain’s initial commission saw him travel to the cane fields of Ingham, Innisfail and the Burdekin, and he would return north over subsequent decades.

Taken in the 1950s, this photograph conveys something of the heat and humidity of North Queensland through the strong shadows cast by the buildings’ awnings and the plumes of steam rising from the mill’s chimneys. Dupain considered industrial subjects to be ‘giant still lifes’; an approach evident in this image, in which the curve of the repository in the foreground is contrasted against the geometric jumble of buildings on the left.