Perth Voice Interactive

Vincent council’s valuable collection of “highly significant” historic bottles will be handed to the WA museum instead of being split up and sold off to private collectors.

Some 3337 glass, ceramic and stoneware bottles, jars and vases were recovered from the old Perth and Fremantle Bottle Exchange Company site in 2001. The company operated from 1905 to 1974 and Robertson Park now stands on the site.

Archaeologist Stuart Rapley analysed the artefacts and says some bottles are a century old and the more rare items can fetch up to $1000 each.

After being uncovered the bottles sat in the council’s Osborne Park depot for a decade.

The council’s history advisory group engaged a local bottle collector for advice. He had a few recommendations including “partially dispos[ing] of the collection, including the selling of the intact bottles”.

Mr Rapley opposed that and recommended the entire collection be offered to the WA museum, a plan the council endorsed this week.

The museum is reportedly stoked: Its heritage assessment states the bottles are “a very important reference collection, a research tool for analysts wanting to understand the nature of change and continuity in this type of manufacturing industry in WA.

“No such reference collection currently exists in the state collections.”

Leftover fragments of broken bottles will be kept to work into sculptures or other interpretation artworks for any new developments at the old bottle yard site.

The council will also be able to borrow back some of the bottles for its own historical displays.

Cr Matt Buckels says “it’s good to know [the collection] won’t disappear into a box, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

by DAVID BELL