Sunshine Harvester Works

The name "Sunshine" is assumed to have been given by McKay to his harvester works after he attended a lecture by the American evangelist Reverend Thomas De Witt Talmage who visited Victoria in 1894.

[6] By the 1920s, the company was running the largest implement factory in the southern hemisphere, and had led the international agricultural industry through the development of the world's first self-propelled harvester in 1924.

McKay Massey Harris exported 20,000 Sunshine drills, disc harrows and binders to England, to facilitate an increase in food production.

However, from the 1970s, when many Australian-based manufacturing industries were experiencing financial difficulties, the business progressively contracted, and most of the factory was demolished in 1992, to make way for the development of the Sunshine Marketplace.

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography, a Garden City is "a planned settlement designed to overcome the limitations of both town and country, by combining the best of both in free-standing, self-sufficient communities with ample parkland and public space.

McKay’s development at the then town of Sunshine, 12 km from the centre of Melbourne, exemplifies this and represents an "early Australian version of the Garden City ideal".

[16] As was reported in The Burrowa News in May 1926, "Mr. McKay from the start took an active interest in Sunshine, and was lavishly spending money there to make the conditions of his employees as ideal as possible.

[18] McKay’s plan for a model industrial town involved providing key infrastructure and services, including "electric lighting, parklands, recreation areas, public buildings, land for school and library, and housing for employees.

[23] Lastly, this segment from Australian Home Builder in 1926 demonstrates the significance of Sunshine to the wider Garden City movement in Australia and the attractiveness of Garden City ideals as a means of overcoming the limitations of urban life: If a cluster of outer suburbs could be ringed around Melbourne, all planned and developed with the prescience and system that has been exercised in Sunshine, there would be no grounds for fearing the growth of new slums that now haunt many once-promising districts.

Moreover, examination of the relationship between Garden City principles and McKay’s plan, including the early increase in industrial efficiency that the development of Sunshine facilitated, points to social and cultural changes that were occurring at the time.