Caged Area

A wire mesh cage occupies a section of the factory floor at the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works site in Spotswood. Machinery rests inside the enclosure, untouched, dust settling across every surface. By the time this photograph was made in 2011, the building had been silent long enough for that dust to accumulate in layers. Nothing had been cleared. Nothing had been moved. The Spotswood site dates to 1890, when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works purchased 12 acres on the Yarra and constructed a new manufacturing plant, complete with a branch railway siding to Spotswood station and a jetty for river shipping. By 1891 the works employed more than 220 men and ran continuously day and night. By 1908 the factory was producing 27 million bottles annually and supplying practically all the beer bottles in Australia. The operation passed through successive corporate identities across the following century. Australian Glass Manufacturers took over in 1915, renaming again as Australian Consolidated Industries in 1939 before BTR plc acquired the business in the late 1980s. Owens-Illinois completed its acquisition of BTR Packaging on 30 April 1998, folding the Spotswood site into the world's largest glass container manufacturer. A 19-week lockout of maintenance workers in 1996 and 1997 had preceded that handover, with 59 workers stood down while the future of the site was contested. The factory closed in January 2012. All buildings were demolished shortly after, the site paved with asphalt. Only the basalt wall on Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, known to workers as the Great Wall of Spotswood, was preserved. This photograph records the caged machinery as it stood in the final year before everything came down.