Plate Room

The plate room at the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood holds shelves of discarded glass plates, each one coated in dust that has settled undisturbed. Paint peels from the walls in broad sections. Light filters through broken windows and falls across the plates and the debris on the floor, the only movement in a room that has been still for some time. The Spotswood site sat on 12 acres of land purchased in 1890 on the Yarra River, with a branch railway siding connecting the works to Spotswood station and a jetty erected on the river for shipping. The factory complex grew through the interwar years, accumulating buildings from the 1880s through to the 1940s, many of them in the Moderne industrial style typical of that period: curved walls, steel-framed windows, decorative string courses, and glass bricks. The Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company was amalgamated into Australian Glass Manufacturers in 1915, which became Australian Consolidated Industries in 1939, which was acquired by BTR plc around 1987, and then by Owens-Illinois on 30 April 1998. Four names, one site, more than a century of continuous glass production. The Victorian Heritage Database recognised it as the oldest continuously operating industrial complex in the city, and possibly the metropolitan area. A 19-week lockout of maintenance workers in 1996 and 1997 preceded the wind-down of operations. The plant's closure date is recorded as January 2012. By 13 March 2012, a local newspaper reported all the buildings gone, the site paved with asphalt. Only the basalt wall on Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, was preserved. The workers called it the Great Wall of Spotswood. This photograph was made in 2011, inside a building that no longer exists.