Boiler House

The boiler house at Peters Creameries Pty Ltd Factory in Chatham, Taree, is the engine room of a building that once processed 1,000 gallons of milk per hour. Four Babcock and Wilcox boilers stand inside it, enormous and corroded, their surfaces layered with rust and decades of grime. By 2016, when this photograph was made, the machinery had been silent for the better part of two decades, the steam pressure long gone, the connecting pipework and fittings intact but motionless. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, resolved to build the Chatham factory in 1938. The land was purchased from Christen Christensen, and the building contract was let to D. Gallagher, an experienced dairy factory constructor who died before the work was finished. His estate completed the job. The factory officially opened on 4 November 1939, before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, with the Minister for Works and Local Government presiding and a temporary stage erected with broadcasting and amplification equipment. The occasion drew the company's senior directors and the managing director of machinery supplier Richard Wildridge and Co. of Sydney. The plant was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy factory, sited on Railway Parade adjacent to a rail spur and with a wharf on the Manning River for waterborne milk and cream deliveries. A riverside pump house supplied 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. Expansion through the 1940s and 1950s, led by contractor A. J. Hayter, added amenity buildings including a canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool. Following the mid-1990s sale of the Peters ice cream division to Nestle, the factory closed in the late 1990s as part of a wider corporate rationalisation. The boiler house and its machinery remain in place at Chatham, rusted and vacant, as this photograph records.