Factory Floor

The factory floor of the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood is a large, open industrial space running the length of a building designed around continuous production. High windows line the upper walls, and in 2011 the light they admitted fell across machinery left standing where it had last been used. Rust had taken hold across most metal surfaces. Nothing had been cleared. The floor held the evidence of a manufacturing operation that had simply stopped. Glass production at Spotswood began in 1890, when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company purchased 12 acres on the Yarra and built a new plant to replace the original Graham Street, Emerald Hill works established in 1872. A branch railway siding connected the site to Spotswood station; a jetty on the river handled shipping. By 1908 the factory was producing 27 million bottles annually, consuming 20 tons of sand and 4 to 6 tons of lime and soda every day. Workers gathered molten glass on 5-foot iron tubes, rolled it on metal marvers, and shaped it in hinged moulds. The company amalgamated with the Waterloo Glass Bottle Manufacturing Company in 1915 to form Australian Glass Manufacturers (AGM), with Spotswood as headquarters. AGM became Australian Consolidated Industries (ACI) in 1939, and the site continued producing glass containers under that name through the following decades. Owens-Illinois (O-I) completed its acquisition of the BTR Packaging group, which then held ACI Glass Packaging, in April 1998. The plant closed in January 2012. All factory buildings were demolished shortly after closure. The heritage listing the site carried, a local-level overlay under the Hobsons Bay Planning Scheme, did not prevent demolition. The basalt wall on Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high and known to workers as the Great Wall of Spotswood, is the only above-ground remnant. This photograph records the factory floor as it stood in 2011, machinery in place, the building still intact.