Loading Dock

The loading dock at the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood holds what the rest of the factory left behind: rusting machinery pushed against walls, paint stripped back to bare surface in long curling sheets, light arriving through windows so thickly coated it arrives in the room diminished. The photograph was made in 2011, months before demolition removed every building on the site. Glass had been produced on this Spotswood site since 1890, when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company purchased 12 acres on the Yarra and built its first plant. A branch railway siding connected the works to Spotswood station; a jetty served river shipping. By 1891 the factory employed approximately 120 workers and ran continuously day and night. By 1908 it was producing 27 million bottles a year, handling 20 tons of sand daily alongside lime and soda, and had expanded to include a Port Melbourne branch for beer bottles and imperial pints. The company amalgamated with the Waterloo Glass Bottle Manufacturing Company in 1915 to form Australian Glass Manufacturers. In 1939 that entity became Australian Consolidated Industries, which diversified over the following decades into plastics, packaging, and building products. BTR plc acquired the business around 1987; Owens-Illinois completed its acquisition of BTR Packaging in April 1998, folding the Spotswood site into the world's largest glass container manufacturer. A 19-week lockout of maintenance workers in 1996 and 1997 was the final industrial rupture before manufacturing wound down. The factory closed in January 2012. Buildings that heritage assessors had described as the oldest continuously operating industrial complex in the city were demolished, the site paved over. Only the basalt wall on Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, was preserved. The loading dock, the machinery, the peeling paint: gone. The photograph is what remains.