My family and I have a strange hobby. We love digging up old bottles. It’s something we stumbled upon, quite literally, on a boring weekend.
On a visit to the family farm, we were exploring a shaded gully below the house, where a small stream meandered down the hill. One of the children tripped on a ledge sticking out of the mud. After it was dug up and taken out, it turned out that the object was a round, honey-colored medicine bottle.
The rest of the afternoon had us digging out more old bottles from the shades softened by the rain. Another medicine bottle appeared, flat and wide like a hip flask, with a raised row of tablespoons on one side. Then it was a narrow-waisted soft drink bottle, completely transparent and decorative, that she told us once contained an “Orange Sip,” a “pure fruit drink box.” These glass time capsules have survived decades of mud shifting and beating. Now they were floating to the surface like so many cicadas, encouraged by the rain.
The children’s grandfather was our original bottle digger. We were directed to the valley that day. His prized bottle finds have been lining the farm’s windowsills for years, reborn as vases for another of his tender passions – local orchids. He’s been gone for four years, but like those bottles of his, he still catches the light all over the place.
We finished off day one in the bottle groove by adding a grandpa window sill arrangement; Newly discovered amber and pale glassy greens glowed in the sunset as we ate dinner.
Those bottles came loaded with questions, of course. The kids had dollar signs in their eyes and were especially eager to see what their finds might fetch on the open market. We can’t help but wonder too. We Googled and searched, but there were no shouts of “found it.” The general consensus was that there was no fortune to be made from this old glass toy of ours. But it’s been fun to discover similar ones online for sale or in museum collections. This history has been reclaimed, inscribed with stern warnings and declarations from its makers: ‘Poison: Not to be consumed’ or ‘This bottle always remains the property of Ballarat Brewing Co’.
We’ve done a lot of wet bottle digging since then. It has turned into a summer thing, when the days are long and the drizzle is welcome. The dogs are always happy to join us. Searching the gully seems to tie in well with their side hustle of rescuing long-forgotten cow bones.
Some of our excavations yield nothing, others are a broken promise, a skinny neck and nothing else. Little by little, our group is growing. The groove has miraculously yielded intact bottles of all shapes, colors and sizes.
Sure, vintage bottles may lack nuggets of gold or gemstones, but there’s character sparkling in every one of those wonky glass curves. Round-shouldered or square-shouldered, pale or dark, thin or fat, they come out with stories to tell. Once popular, they have stood the test of time. They endured. And hey, it’s not plastic.
Like many hobbyists before us, we know we’ve barely scratched the surface of this glass-half-full pastime. The art of bottle engraving goes back farther and farther back.
Historically located somewhere between a rubbish heap and a rubbish heap, Bottle Digging has a whiff of clothing about it. Also known as a private pit, it has made its way into the modern era of the outdoor or private toilet. Since the ancient pigeons were nothing more than a hole in the ground, they were also very useful for throwing away empty items. In the jungle, streams and gullies served the same purpose. Over time, these holes were covered or blessedly washed away by the passage of years and waterways.
As humble hobbyists, we realize that we are lucky to have our own little bottles. It’s more than enough. But if you wander among the fossil-digging brothers, you’ll begin to see the Australian landscape through their eyes. It is full of pits and cavities where previous generations had thrown away all sorts of potentially valuable vessels. This has led to unscrupulous bottle diggers looting sensitive cultural and archaeological sites to make a quick profit. Fortunately, the general vibe of bottle digging seems to be that whether it’s a gold rush-era rarity or an unassuming golden-brown long neck, the beauty of this glass gem lies in the eye of the bottle digger.
For us, sifting through bottles together never gets old. It’s fun to chase, wash, and then uncover. It’s a chance that something beautiful might decide to be found after being hidden for generations. It is the idea that something so fragile could have survived for so long as one piece and in one place. We catch the light, and raise the cup to Grandpa.