Welding Bay

The welding bay inside the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood holds the particular stillness of a workshop that was not emptied so much as abandoned. Tools lie where they were set down. Rust has taken the metal surfaces. Dust has settled evenly over everything, the kind of accumulation that takes years rather than months. The factory that surrounded this bay had been manufacturing glass on the Spotswood site since 1890, when the Melbourne Glass Bottle Works Company purchased 12 acres on the Yarra and built its first plant there. By 1908 the works was producing 27 million bottles a year. The company became Australian Glass Manufacturers in 1915, Australian Consolidated Industries in 1939, and passed through BTR plc to Owens-Illinois, known as O-I, when that company completed its acquisition of BTR Packaging in April 1998. The maintenance workforce that would have used a bay like this one numbered 139 by the mid-1990s. In November 1996, BTR-Nylex threatened to close the Spotswood site entirely, demanding new work practices as a condition of a planned A$43 million upgrade. Fifty-nine maintenance workers were locked out. The dispute ran for 19 weeks. Managing Director Philip Aiken described it publicly as being about the long-term survival of the site. Glass manufacturing wound down through the late 1990s, and the factory closed in January 2012. The buildings were demolished shortly after. Only the basalt wall along Douglas Parade, 115 metres long and 6 metres high, survived. Workers called it "The Great Wall of Spotswood." The welding bay and everything inside it is gone. The 2011 photograph is what remains of it.