Change Room

The change room of the former Peters Creameries Pty Ltd factory at Chatham is one of the quieter spaces left inside a building that once ran around the clock. Metal lockers line the walls, their doors open or gone. A solitary bench sits on the floor in front of them. Nothing else remains. The room has been stripped of every fitting, every personal trace. The factory itself was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing plant in Chatham, a suburb of Taree on the Manning River. The building contract was let to D. Gallagher in 1938, and the factory was officially opened on 4 November 1939 before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people. The operating entity was Peters Creameries Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, the company founded by Frederick Augustus Bolles Peters in Sydney in 1907. At opening, the plant was estimated to have capacity for 70 to 80 workers across three shifts. The factory processed condensed milk as its primary product, along with butter for local trade, and expanded its product range over subsequent decades. A major expansion in the 1940s and 1950s added amenity buildings to the site, including a canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool. The change room in this photograph is part of that human side of the factory: the infrastructure built for the workers who ran the machinery, cleaned the processing lines, and kept the plant moving. By the time Brett Patman photographed the interior in 2016, the building had been abandoned for the better part of two decades. The lockers stand as they were left. The bench remains. The plant closed in the late 1990s following corporate rationalisation under successive owners, with production shifted to more modern facilities elsewhere.