Welding Bay

Soot coats the brickwork above a grimy counter at the former Melbourne Glass Bottle Works at Spotswood, with a large metal ventilation hood directly overhead, suggesting this corner of the works once saw sustained heat or fumes. Papers and framed items are still pinned to the wall above the counter. Two boarded-up windows flank the space, and an open timber door at right shows a further room beyond. The photograph was made in 2011. 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." This corner of the works and everything in it is gone. The photograph is what remains of it.