Brown Mountain Backdrop

On a green ridge near Brown Mountain in the Bega Valley, a single timber and corrugated iron dairy building sits against the mountain's eucalypt wall. The roof has rusted to a patchy red-brown, with paint lifting where decades of coastal weather have worked at the iron. The weatherboard walls lean slightly as the frame settles unevenly on its stumps. Brown Mountain rises behind as a solid mass of forest, blue-grey in the atmospheric haze, with the white trunks of dead gums visible among the canopy. The paddock around the building remains cleared and grazed; the land is still in agricultural use, but the dairy building is not. Buildings like this were the working infrastructure of one of NSW's most significant dairy districts. The Bega Valley supplied almost half of the state's total cheese production by 1900, and that output depended on hundreds of small farm-scale structures where individual farmers separated cream before sending it to the cooperative factories. The centrifugal cream separator, first used at nearby Kameruka Estate in 1886, made on-farm processing practical. Every dairy farm in the district needed a building to house the separator and store cream cans before collection. The cooperative factory at South Wolumla, one of the first cooperative dairy factories in the state, was erected in 1887. By around 1920, 49 cheese factories and 8 butter factories were operating in the corridor between Tilba and Wolumla. Farm dairy buildings like this one sat at the start of that supply chain. The transition to bulk milk collection with refrigerated farm vats in 1966 made the cream room obsolete. There was no longer any need to separate cream on-site, and no further use for the building that had housed the separator. Brown Mountain Backdrop was photographed in 2018.