Heater

The heater in this frame is cold. Its coils are thick with dust, the kind that settles over years when a space stops moving air through it. It sits on the factory floor of the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood, a site that ran glass manufacturing continuously from 1890 until January 2012. The factory began as an extension of a pharmaceutical business. Alfred Felton and Frederick Grimwade had been running a wholesale drug operation since 1872, first from a site at Graham Street, Emerald Hill, and found it more practical to manufacture their own bottles than to keep importing them. The Spotswood plant was a step up in scale: 12 acres on the Yarra, a branch railway siding running from Spotswood station to the works, a jetty for river shipping, electric lighting throughout the buildings, and water gas manufactured on site. By 1891 the workforce stood at approximately 120, running continuously day and night. By 1908 that same site was turning out 27 million bottles a year. Sand arrived daily by the tonne. The factory produced practically all the beer bottles in Australia. In 1915 the company amalgamated with the Waterloo Glass Bottle Manufacturing Company in New South Wales to form Australian Glass Manufacturers. In 1939 that became Australian Consolidated Industries. In 1998 Owens-Illinois completed its acquisition of the BTR Packaging group worldwide, and the Spotswood site became part of the world's largest glass container manufacturer. The buildings that housed all of it were demolished c.2012. The heater, the coils, the dust, the quiet: this photograph is what remained in 2011, in the last months before the site was gone. The only structure to survive demolition was the basalt wall on Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, which the workers called the Great Wall of Spotswood.