Dining Room

The dining room of the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood sits undisturbed. Chairs remain at a long table, each coated in the same layer of dust that covers every other surface in the frame. Nothing has been cleared, nothing rearranged. The room reads like it was simply locked and left. The factory that surrounded it had been producing glass on this site since 1890, when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company purchased 12 acres on the Yarra and built its first Spotswood plant. By 1908, the works was turning out 27 million bottles a year. It was, by that point, producing practically all the beer bottles in Australia. Through amalgamation in 1915 it became Australian Glass Manufacturers, then Australian Consolidated Industries in 1939, and finally passed to Owens-Illinois when O-I completed its acquisition of BTR Packaging in April 1998. The Spotswood site carried four corporate names across more than a century of continuous operation. The buildings themselves reflected that accumulation: earlier fabric from the 1880s and 1890s alongside substantial interwar construction in the Moderne style, with curved walls, steel-framed windows, and glass bricks on the Booker Street frontage. A 19-week lockout of maintenance workers in 1996 and 1997 was among the final episodes in the site's working life. Glass manufacturing wound down in the years that followed. The Heritage Inventory record for the site gives January 2012 as the closure date. By the time a Star Weekly journalist reported on the site in March 2012, the buildings were gone, the land paved with asphalt. Only the basalt wall along Douglas Parade remained, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, known to the workers as the Great Wall of Spotswood. This photograph was made in 2011, before the demolition. The dining room it records no longer exists.