The clock on the silo says eleven degrees.

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I’m high on the hill, looking over the bridge, to the MCG.
And way up on high, the clock on the silo says eleven degrees.
Paul Kelly, Leaps and Bounds (1987)

Well, the clock on the silo used to say eleven degrees. It used to say everything from zero to 45 degrees too.  And it told the time.  For more than forty years, the Nylex Plastics sign above the barley storage silos in Richmond told the passing people of Melbourne the current time and temperature alternately in an illuminated light display.

The sign and clock were designed and built in 1961 by a Melbourne company, Neon Electric Signs on behalf of Nylex, an Australian manufacturer of plastic products. At the time of its construction, it was the highest neon sky-sign in Australia.  Even in the built-up Melbourne of today, it can still be seen from a wide surrounding area.

The sign was placed on the Victorian Heritage Register in 2003 due to its social and historical significance. Its listing in the Heritage Database mentions the increasing rarity of neon sky-signs, which were once a prominent feature of the Melbourne skyline. It also highlights the wider recognition the sign has as a result of its inclusion in the Paul Kelly song Leaps and Bounds. A recognition that extends far beyond the immediate Melbourne surrounds.

In the early 2000s, the clock started to have some technical issues. Around the same time, Barrett Burston Malting Company (who had owned and operated the barley silos since the 1870s) sold the silo precinct. Nylex bought the sign itself from Australian Neon Signs, who had owned the leased Nylex sign. A major restoration was undertaken by Nylex, however there still were a number of glitches.

But then in December 2007, the Nylex company went into receivership and the lights were permanently switched off on the Nylex clock.

It makes me sad every time I pass the Nylex sign that it no longer works.  To me, that sign IS Melbourne. It’s the Melbourne I moved to back in the early 1990s. It’s the Melbourne of Paul Kelly’s Leaps and Bounds. It’s the Melbourne where we shared a vocabulary of: “Geez, it’s hot…the Nylex sign said 41 degrees when I passed it.”

In  the winter of 1993, I  worked briefly in an office in the Como Centre in South Yarra. That job was sooooo excrutiatingly boring, that the highlight of each day was watching the temperature on the Nylex sign flip over to double digits. Thankfully, that job didn’t last long and I moved on to bigger and better things. But my enduring memory of that time will always be wrapped up in images of the Nylex sign.

Sure, many of us now have thermometers in our cars, or can check the time and weather on our phones…but that is exactly what makes the Nylex sign so very special. It is a collective point of reference for Melbournians. It is something we all look outward and up to, rather than inward and down to, like our phones. There is something very heartening to the human spirit about the act of looking up. (Why else would centuries of religious buildings have been built so high? Gothic spires, Cham towers,  Renaissance belltowers…)

(And isn’t it deliciously ironic, that the current billboard on the silos in front of the Nylex sign is for the downward-focused iPhones?)

IMG_1577There was a brief glimmer of hope that the clock on the silo will return. An October 2012 article in The Age reported the Victorian Planning Minister, Matthew Guy’s announcement that a developer had been granted a permit to redevelop the whole maltings site. The plans drawn up by Hede Architects included offices, shops, studio apartments (in the silos) and a public plaza. As part of the redevelopment, the developer was, “likely to pay for the clock to be repaired and then to keep it running. He [Mr Guy] said the government had already spoken with the developer about fixing the clock, which was likely to be a one-off cost of “tens of thousands” of dollars. Keeping the clock running would cost up to $40,000 a year, he said.”

But an April 2013 item in The Sydney Morning Herald says that those plans have stalled.

A  Facebook page, “Return the Power to the Nylex Clock” which started in 2009 doesn’t seem to have any action since December last year….and the same for a Twitter account @Nylexclock…but it’s good to know that other like-minded Nylex Clock lovers are onto it.

I’d really like to see my favourite Melbourne icon back saying eleven degrees. But for now, it’s a forlorn blank display.

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Would you like to see the Nylex clock return?

(updated 29 Jan 2015…media reports this morning that the Nylex sign was back on a couple of times this morning! No explanation as yet…)

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