Showers

Speckled grey partitions run the full length of the amenities block at the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood, Victoria, drawing the eye toward a dark timber door at the far end. Opposite, a tiled wall carries abstract black markings across its surface, the paint applied in broad, loose strokes. Natural light from a high row of windows falls across the debris-covered floor, picking out the pale dust between fallen material. The factory on this site had its origins in 1890, when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company purchased 12 acres of land on the Yarra at Spotswood and built a new manufacturing plant. A branch railway siding connected the works to Spotswood station; a jetty on the river served shipping. By 1891, the plant employed approximately 120 workers and ran continuously, day and night. By 1908, the Spotswood site employed hundreds of workers and produced 27 million bottles annually. Sand arrived by rail; crude oil was stored in a riverside reservoir; open furnaces on the first floor burned at white heat. Workers gathered molten glass on 5-foot iron tubes and shaped it in hinged moulds. Shift after shift, the same routines. The company changed hands and changed names across the following decades. The Melbourne Glass Bottle Works became Australian Glass Manufacturers in 1915, then Australian Consolidated Industries in 1939, then passed to BTR plc in the late 1980s, and finally to Owens-Illinois, trading as O-I, when that company completed its acquisition of BTR Packaging on 30 April 1998. A 19-week lockout of maintenance workers in 1996-1997 preceded the wind-down of operations. The factory closed in January 2012. The buildings were demolished shortly afterwards. The basalt wall on Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, is the only above-ground structure that survived. These photographs, made in 2011, record what stood behind it.