After Thirty-Seven Winters Camping the Same Coast With Her Husband, a Port Lincoln Glass Artist Has Finished 124 Complete Sets of Eight Ocean Glasses — and She Will Not Sell Them Apart After forty-eight years at the torch, Glenys Trezona’s right hand no longer opens flat. A surgeon in Adelaide has told her that is permanent. We drove down to the Eyre Peninsula to see the last of what she made.

The shed stands at the back of a block on the hill above Proper Bay. For thirty years before Glenys Trezona put a glass torch in it, it held cray pots and coils of rope. Along the back wall this month are one hundred and twenty-four cartons, stacked four high. Each carton holds eight navy boxes, and each box holds one hand-worked ocean glass. When the last carton goes out the door, the gas bottles go back to the supplier in Port Lincoln and the shed gets emptied.

Glenys is seventy-two. She has worked at that torch since 1978.

Her husband Des fished rock lobster out of this coast for forty-four seasons. He died in June of last year, at home, a hundred metres from the shed door. Glenys did not open that door again for three months.

What she made when she went back in is why we drove down the peninsula. Across forty-eight years together, she and Des kept a running list of the sea animals they had seen. The list had one strict rule, and after thirty-seven winters it had exactly eight things on it. Between September of last year and this winter, Glenys made every one of those eight in glass, over and over, until she had one hundred and twenty-four complete sets.

A hand surgeon at the Royal Adelaide has since told her there will not be a second batch. Not a smaller one, not a slower one. There is what is on the shelf, and then the torch goes cold for good.

And she will not break a set up. Not for the gallery that asked, and not for the buyers who have asked since.

Forty-Four Seasons on the Water and Forty-Eight Years at the Torch: How Two Pairs of Hands Built One List

They met at Tunarama in January 1977. Glenys was twenty-two and had a trestle table at the festival selling little glass animals she had made in Adelaide. Des came past off the boats, picked up a glass seahorse the size of a thumbnail, and paid her forty cents for it.

She still has it. One fin is chipped.

Glass was already in the family. Her father, Cliff Rowe, bent neon tube for shopfronts in Adelaide from 1948 — Rundle Street, Hindley Street, the picture theatres. She sat on a crate in his workshop as a girl and watched him turn hot tube over a ribbon burner for hours at a time. The torch itself she learned properly at the JamFactory in Adelaide, two years from 1976, at the point when Australian studio glass was barely a few years old.

In 1978 Des cleared the cray pots out of the shed behind the house so she would have somewhere to put a bench. He built the bench himself and ran the line for the second gas bottle. She lit the torch that spring and, apart from three months last year, has not been away from it since.

For the next thirty-six years their days ran alongside each other. Des out on the Glenys R before light — he named the boat after her in 1981 and never once made a joke about it — and Glenys at the bench with the torch hissing, the two of them working with their hands about a hundred metres apart.

Then every winter, the week after the season closed, he hitched the tinny to the ute and they drove somewhere down this coast and camped for a fortnight. Baird Bay. Fowlers Bay. Coffin Bay. Greenly. Thirty-seven winters of it, 1978 through to 2014.

That is where the list came from, and the list had a rule. An animal only counted if both of them saw it, and only if they saw it at the same time. Des was strict about it to the point of being difficult. One winter he refused to count a whale because Glenys was asleep in the tent when it went past.

People who bought her glass came back. Not often, and never through a shop. The work went out the shed door a few pieces at a time, to whoever was in town. But families in Cummins and Tumby Bay and Whyalla have been buying a glass off Glenys every couple of years since the early nineteen-nineties. A number of them wrote to her after Des died.

Des Is Gone: The Three Months She Could Not Walk Into the Shed

Des was ill through the autumn. He died at home in June of last year. Glenys went into the shed once that week, to shut the gas off properly, and then did not go back in.

She is plain about why. People down here usually are.

“There was nothing in that shed that was not his as well,” she told us. “He built the bench. He ran the line for the second bottle. It was his pot shed before it was my workshop. I could not go and stand in it.”

What eventually got her back through the door was a piece of paper. In the week after the funeral she wrote the eight animals out in biro on the back of a fuel docket from the co-op and stuck it to the fridge under a tuna-shaped magnet from Tunarama, with no plan for it at all. She looked at it every morning for three months.

In September she walked down to the shed, turned the gas back on, and lit the torch.

The first thing she made was the octopus. She made it nine times before she was willing to keep one.

After that she worked six days a week, most weeks ten hours a day, taking the animals in the order they had happened. Not fast — glass does not let anybody rush it. But without stopping. She finished the last of them this winter.

Eight Ocean Memories in Molten Glass, and Why All Eight Go in One Carton

Each glass is a memory with a date on it. That is not a sales line, it is how the collection was built. Glenys can name the year and the place for every one without stopping to think about it.

That is the whole list, and it is the reason the eight are sold together and not separately. Buyers have asked Glenys for the octopus on its own. Galleries have asked. She will not do it.

Every glass is made the same way, and none of it is quick. Glenys heats clear borosilicate on a rod and works it into a tumbler at the torch. She turns it the entire time. The moment she stops turning, gravity pulls the shape out of it. The animal is built separately and then laid onto the outside wall of the tumbler while both pieces are still soft enough to move. The two melt into one instead of being stuck together.

Then come the details. The rings on the octopus go on one at a time with a fine rod, each one smaller than a grain of rice, fifty to seventy of them per glass. The clear beads down the underside of every arm are set individually. The eye is a bead of dark glass sunk below the surface, so that it catches the light and appears to move when the glass is turned in the hand.

After that it goes into the kiln to cool down slowly overnight. Glass that cools quickly will crack sooner or later. In the morning she looks at it in daylight and decides whether it goes into a box or back into the scrap bin.

There is no mould at any stage. That is why no two arm curls sit the same way, and it is also why nine hundred and ninety-two glasses took a year.

“Your Right Hand Is Not Going to Open Again”

The first thing to go was not strength. Glenys can still gather glass and she can still turn a rod. What she cannot do is hold a tool steady long enough to set a ring the size of a grain of rice onto a turning glass at a thousand degrees.

She noticed it in the autumn, on an octopus glass, when a ring she had set ten thousand times came out crooked. She put the piece in the scrap bin and started another. It happened again a week later.

A hand surgeon at the Royal Adelaide gave it a name: Dupuytren’s contracture, both hands, the right one much further along. The cords in the palm thicken and shorten and slowly draw the fingers in. The ring and little finger of her right hand no longer lie flat on a table. He was kind about it and he was clear: the hand does not come back on its own, and the fine work is the first thing it takes.

She kept going long enough to finish the count. Then she stopped, cleaned the bench, and went through the shelves with a pencil.

One hundred and twenty-four complete sets. Nine hundred and ninety-two glasses. The number is not set by the octopus or the crab — there are spares of both of those in the boxes. It is set by the seahorse, which is the smallest of the eight, the slowest to make, and the one she could not bring herself to hurry. There are one hundred and twenty-four seahorses. That is the ceiling, and that is where it stops.

When those are gone there is no apprentice, no second run, and no arrangement with anybody to make more. Glenys does not make a fuss about it. Forty-eight years, she says, is a long time to get to do exactly what you wanted to do. She is not about to complain about the way it ends.

124 Complete Sets, Sold Direct: Why She Turned Down the Gallery in North Adelaide

In July a homewares gallery on Melbourne Street in North Adelaide made her a straightforward offer. They would take every remaining set and put them on the shelf at seven hundred and ninety-nine dollars each. Hand-worked South Australian art glass, final edition, closing artist. It would have worked. One payment, all of it at once, and she would never have had to think about it again.

She said no.

“At eight hundred dollars it ends up in a cabinet,” she said. “Somebody buys it, puts it behind a pane of glass, and looks at it. I did not spend a year on these so that somebody could look at them.”

She is selling them herself instead, at two hundred and seventy-nine dollars for the complete set of eight. About a third of the gallery price, and a long way under what the work is worth. That is a choice, not a discount. What she wants is eight glasses on a table with something in them on an ordinary Tuesday, and the same eight back on the table on Wednesday.

Des never charged a neighbour for a cray in his life, she points out. In that house it settles the argument.

Buyers From Three Decades Speak Out

What Makes These Glasses Different From Anything You Have Had on the Table

Most ocean glassware sold in this country is a printed sticker glued to the outside of a cheap tumbler. It has no thickness, so it casts no shadow and bends no light. After a season in the dishwasher it starts peeling at the edge. What Glenys makes is a different thing, and it comes down to five points.

• Hand-worked lead-free borosilicate glass. The same glass laboratories use. It handles heat about three times better than cheap souvenir glass. Ice water into a warm glass, hot tea into a cold one, and nothing happens.
• A hand-sculpted ocean creature fused into the glass itself. Not printed, not glued, not pressed into a mould. The animal is a second piece of hot glass laid onto the wall of the tumbler while both are still soft. The two melt into one. There is no seam, so there is nothing that can come apart later.
• Balanced for daily use, not for a display shelf. Three hundred and fifty millilitres, ten centimetres tall, no stem, and heavy in the base on purpose. The creature sits low, so the hand lands there on its own, and the raised glass gives the fingers something to hold. It was made for a bloke coming in off a boat with cold hands.
• Eight lined navy boxes in one carton, with a numbered card. The set ships whole, every box separately lined, with the set number written on the card in Glenys’s hand. Nothing is shipped loose.
• Numbered 1 through 124, with no second run. Eight animals, one hundred and twenty-four complete sets, one maker, and a torch that is going cold. Nobody is going to make more of these, including Glenys.

How to Claim One of the Final 124 Sets Before They Are Gone

The sets are sold only here, direct from the shed. They are not in stores, not on Amazon and not on any marketplace — the North Adelaide gallery was the one wholesale offer and Glenys turned it down. If anybody finds these somewhere else at eight hundred dollars, that is not her.

There is no choosing an animal, because there is no splitting the list. One hundred and twenty-four complete sets were made, capped by the one hundred and twenty-four seahorses, and every carton contains all eight. When the last set goes, the page comes down, because there is no way to make another one.

Every set is covered for thirty days from delivery. If it is not right, send an email and it goes back. No restocking fee and no explanation needed. Glenys would rather have a set back on the shelf for somebody who wants it than sitting in a cupboard because somebody felt awkward about asking.