Meal Room

The meal room inside the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood holds its furniture still: tables and chairs arranged as they were, settled under a uniform coat of dust. Light comes in through windows that have not been cleaned in years, diffuse and flat, picking out the texture of neglect across every flat surface. Nothing has been disturbed. The room reads like a place that was simply walked out of. The factory behind this room operated for over 100 years on the one Spotswood site. It was founded in 1872 by Alfred Felton and Frederick Grimwade at Graham Street, Emerald Hill, as a way to supply bottles for their wholesale pharmaceutical business. By 1890 the company had purchased 12 acres on the Yarra at Spotswood and built a new plant, connecting it to Spotswood station by branch railway and to the river by a jetty. The 1891 works ran continuously day and night with approximately 120 workers producing 700 gross bottles per week, lit throughout by electric light. By 1908 the Spotswood plant was producing 27 million bottles a year and employing 500 people across two sites. In 1915 the company amalgamated with the Waterloo Glass Bottle Manufacturing Company in New South Wales to form Australian Glass Manufacturers. In 1939 the business became Australian Consolidated Industries, and in 1998 the site passed to Owens-Illinois, the world's largest glass container manufacturer, completing the acquisition of BTR Packaging worldwide. Glass manufacturing wound down through the late 1990s. A 19-week lockout of maintenance workers in 1996 and 1997, while BTR-Nylex restructured operations under an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement, was the last significant chapter before operations substantially ceased. The buildings were demolished in early 2012. Only the basalt wall along Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, known to workers as The Great Wall of Spotswood, was preserved. This photograph records the meal room as it stood in 2011, the year before everything behind that wall came down.