Administration Office

The administration office of Peters Creameries Pty Ltd's Chatham factory is a small room that has not been cleared since the plant stopped operating in the late 1990s. Desks sit where they were last pushed back. Chairs remain at angles suggesting someone simply walked away. Papers and files cover the floor, and dust has settled over every surface in a fine, even layer. Sunlight enters the room and picks out the detail of what has been left behind. The factory was built in Chatham on land purchased from Christen Christensen in 1938. The building contract was let to D. Gallagher, an experienced dairy factory contractor who died before the building was finished; his estate completed the work. The plant opened officially on 4 November 1939, before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, and was launched by the Minister for Works and Local Government. Initial staff capacity was estimated at 70 to 80 workers across three shifts, with primary production of condensed milk and butter from milk collected within a 20-mile radius and cream sourced within a 50-mile radius. The factory was one node in a national network established by Frederick Augustus Bolles Peters, who had founded Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd in two rented rooms of a Paddington ice factory on 27 August 1907. By the time the Chatham plant opened, the company had spread across NSW, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. The £60,000 steam-driven plant on the Manning River was the company's reach into the mid-North Coast dairy belt. Through the 1940s and 1950s the site expanded under contractor A. J. Hayter, adding a canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool for workers. The boiler house ran four Babcock and Wilcox boilers. A NIRO milk powder spray-drying plant, commissioned in 1953, processed 1 tonne per hour. Corporate rationalisation under successive owners consolidated production elsewhere. The plant closed in the late 1990s. The building remains at Chatham, largely empty. The administration office, recorded here in 2016, holds the last paperwork of a factory that once employed most of the Manning Valley.