Living Quarters Corridor

Rows of gridded glass brick windows line the right-hand wall of the corridor, letting diffuse light fall across a floor thick with debris and broken plaster. Paint has lifted from the walls. Exposed brick columns punctuate the left wall, and two large boards lean against them in the foreground. A partially open door at the far end draws the eye down the length of the passage. The building that contained this corridor was part of a factory complex at 2 Booker Street, Spotswood, that had operated continuously since 1890, when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company purchased 12 acres of land on the Yarra and built its new manufacturing plant. A branch railway siding ran from Spotswood station directly into the works; a jetty on the river handled shipping. Within a year of opening, the plant was running day and night with approximately 120 workers and producing 700 gross bottles per week. The company grew substantially through the early twentieth century, amalgamating with the Waterloo Glass Bottle Manufacturing Company in 1915 to form Australian Glass Manufacturers (AGM), which made Spotswood its headquarters. AGM became Australian Consolidated Industries (ACI) in 1939, then passed to BTR plc around 1987, and finally to Owens-Illinois (O-I) when that company completed its acquisition of BTR Packaging in April 1998. Through each change of ownership, the Spotswood site kept producing. The end came after a prolonged 19-week lockout of 59 maintenance workers in 1996 and 1997, as BTR-Nylex restructured under its Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. Manufacturing wound down through the late 1990s, and the site formally closed in January 2012. All factory buildings were subsequently demolished; the heritage listing under Hobsons Bay Heritage Overlay HO46 offered only local-level protection and did not prevent demolition. The sole surviving above-ground element is the basalt wall on Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, which workers called "The Great Wall of Spotswood." This photograph, made in 2011, records the living quarters corridor as it stood in the final period before the buildings came down. What the camera found was a passage that had outlasted its purpose by years, waiting on a demolition that was already decided.