Dispatch Office

The dispatch office at the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood holds the ordinary debris of a working room abandoned mid-routine. Papers cover the floor. A chair lies on its side next to a desk that has been emptied of everything except the passage of time. Nothing has been staged. The room is exactly as the last person to use it left it. The Spotswood site was established in 1890 when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company purchased 12 acres on the Yarra and built a manufacturing plant connected to Spotswood station by a dedicated branch railway siding and to the river by a jetty. By 1891 the works employed approximately 120 people, operating day and night. By 1908 the factory was producing 27 million bottles a year, and, according to contemporary reporting, practically all the beer bottles used in Australia came from this single Spotswood site. The factory passed through four corporate identities over more than a century of operation. The Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company became Australian Glass Manufacturers in 1915, then Australian Consolidated Industries in 1939, then part of BTR plc in the late 1980s, and finally O-I Glass following Owens-Illinois Inc.'s acquisition of the BTR packaging division in April 1998. A 19-week lockout of maintenance workers in 1996 and 1997, as BTR-Nylex restructured the site under a new Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, preceded the wind-down of glass manufacturing at Spotswood. The site closed in January 2012. The buildings, deemed in such disrepair they could not be saved, were subsequently demolished and the site paved with asphalt. Only the basalt wall along Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, known to the workers as the Great Wall of Spotswood, survived above ground. This photograph, made in 2011, records the dispatch office in the months before the end. The papers on the floor, the overturned chair, the empty desk: what remains of a room that once kept 27 million bottles a year moving out the door.