Loading Area

The loading area of the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood is a wide, low space, its concrete floor blanketed in dust, the faded yellow lines of empty loading bays still holding their geometry against the grime. Grimy windows run along the wall, casting diffused light across a floor that has not moved freight in years. Nothing remains in the bays. The space reads as a room designed entirely around throughput, now at a complete stop. Glass was produced on this Spotswood site from 1890 until January 2012, over 100 years under four corporate identities: Melbourne Glass Bottle Works, Australian Glass Manufacturers, Australian Consolidated Industries, and finally O-I Glass following Owens-Illinois Inc.'s acquisition of BTR Packaging in April 1998. The factory began as the manufacturing arm of Felton Grimwade and Co., two wholesale druggists who in 1872 decided to make their own bottles rather than import them. By 1908 the Spotswood plant was producing 27 million bottles annually and supplying practically all the beer bottles in Australia. The loading area photographed here was the exit point for that volume. The factory at its peak consumed 20 tons of sand and 4 to 6 tons of lime and soda every day. The products that moved through these bays included beer and soft drink bottles, jam and pickle jars, medicine vials, and containers for industrial use across the country. By 1996 the site employed 139 maintenance workers and was under threat of closure. A 19-week lockout followed as BTR-Nylex restructured under an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. Operations wound down through the late 1990s, with full closure recorded as January 2012. All buildings were subsequently demolished. The photograph was made in 2011, in the last period before the structures came down. The basalt wall on Douglas Parade, known to workers as The Great Wall of Spotswood, is the only above-ground element that survives.