Grease Pump

On the floor of the former O-I Glass factory at Spotswood, a grease pump sits as it was left, its metal housing consumed by rust. The surface corrosion is deep and even, the kind that builds across years of complete disuse rather than simple neglect. Whatever fittings or lines were once attached to it are long gone. What remains is the pump itself, planted on the factory floor as though waiting for a maintenance shift that never came. The Spotswood site had been in continuous operation since 1890, when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company purchased 12 acres on the Yarra and built its first plant. A branch railway siding ran from Spotswood station to the works; a jetty on the river handled shipping. By 1908 the factory was producing 27 million bottles a year and supplying, by its own account, practically all the beer bottles in Australia. The operation ran through amalgamation into the Australian Glass Manufacturers Company in 1915, through renaming as Australian Consolidated Industries in 1939, through acquisition by BTR plc in around 1987, and finally through Owens-Illinois completing its purchase of BTR Packaging in April 1998. The maintenance workforce was at the centre of the factory's final chapter. In November 1996, BTR-Nylex threatened closure unless new work practices were accepted, and 59 of 139 maintenance workers faced forced redundancy. A 19-week lockout followed. The A$43 million upgrade that had been dangled as the alternative never materialised in full. Operations wound down across the late 1990s, and the factory formally closed in January 2012. All buildings were demolished shortly before March 2012. The grease pump photographed here in 2011 did not survive. The basalt wall along Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high and known to the workers as the Great Wall of Spotswood, is the only above-ground remnant of more than a century of glass manufacturing on the site.