Back Dock

The back dock at Peters Creameries Pty Ltd Factory in Chatham is a loading bay that has been returning to the earth by degrees. Weeds have split the concrete floor along its joints, pushing upward through cracks that widen each season. The walls carry the ghost of painted signage, faded to the point where the words are more suggested than legible. Sunlight reaches in from outside, the only thing still arriving at a dock that once had a purpose. The factory was built in 1938 on land purchased from Christen Christensen on Railway Parade, Chatham, a suburb of Taree on the Manning River. The building contractor was D. Gallagher, who had extensive dairy factory construction experience but died before the work was complete. His estate finished the contract. The building opened on 4 November 1939 before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, with the Minister for Works and Local Government officiating. A temporary stage with broadcasting and amplification equipment was erected for the occasion. The public was invited to tour the premises. The operating entity was Peters Creameries Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, the company founded in Sydney in 1907 by Frederick Augustus Bolles Peters. The Chatham plant was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing facility, with four Babcock and Wilcox boilers in the boiler house and machinery supplied by Richard Wildridge and Co. of Sydney. Initial production focused on condensed milk and butter. Milk and cream arrived from farms within a 20- and 50-mile radius respectively, carried in part by two river steamers, "Yankee Jack" and "Viola", which collected from farm wharves along the Manning River. The factory expanded significantly through the 1940s and 1950s under contractor A. J. Hayter, adding a canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool for workers. A NIRO milk powder spray-drying plant, commissioned in 1953, added a capacity of 1 tonne per hour to the site's output. The river cream boat deliveries ceased in the 1970s after approximately four decades. The factory itself closed in the late 1990s following corporate rationalisation under successive owners. This photograph, made in 2016, records what remained at the back dock.