Living Quarters

Inside the living quarters at the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood, a moulded plastic chair sits on a debris-covered floor. Overhead cupboards hang open above it, their doors at odd angles. Through the doorway, yellow tiles line an ensuite bathroom wall. The room is ordinary in its proportions and fittings, the kind of space that attracted no attention when it was in use and draws attention now only because everything in it has been abandoned. The factory that surrounded it was anything but ordinary. The Melbourne Glass Bottle Works began manufacturing glass on this Yarra riverfront site in 1890, after the company outgrew its original premises at Graham Street, Emerald Hill. The Spotswood plant covered 12 acres, ran day and night, and by 1908 was producing 27 million bottles a year, supplying practically all the beer bottles in Australia from a single site. It was, as the Victorian Heritage Database records, the oldest continuously operating industrial complex in the city and possibly the metropolitan area. The site passed through four corporate identities over more than a century. The Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company became Australian Glass Manufacturers in 1915, which became Australian Consolidated Industries in 1939, which became part of BTR plc's packaging division in the late 1980s, which was acquired by Owens-Illinois in April 1998. A 19-week lockout of maintenance workers in 1996 and 1997 preceded the winding down of glass manufacturing operations. The plant formally closed in January 2012. All factory buildings were demolished shortly after. Only the basalt wall on Douglas Parade survives above ground, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, which workers called the Great Wall of Spotswood. This photograph was made in 2011, in the months before the site came down. The chair, the open cupboards, and the yellow tiles in the next room are what remained of the people who worked and lived here.