Concentrate Room

The concentrate room at Peters Creameries Pty Ltd's Chatham factory holds what the late 1990s left behind: machinery gone cold, pipework running nowhere, every surface filmed with the dust of decades of disuse. The pipework branches in multiple directions, connecting casings and valves now seized with corrosion. Paint has lifted from metal surfaces. The room is quiet in a way that machinery rooms are not supposed to be. The factory that contains this room was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing plant. Construction began in 1938 on land purchased from Christen Christensen on Railway Parade, Chatham, a suburb of Taree on the Manning River. The building contractor, D. Gallagher, died before the work was finished; his estate completed the contract. The factory opened on 4 November 1939 before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, at a cost of approximately £60,000, with capacity to process 1,000 gallons of milk per hour. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd was a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, the company Frederick Augustus Bolles Peters had founded in two rented rooms at Paddington in 1907. By the time Chatham opened, Peters operated facilities across New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. The Chatham plant was one node in that network, connected to local dairy farms by river. Two steamers, "Yankee Jack" and "Viola", collected cream and milk from individual farm wharves along the Manning River and its tributaries, a system that continued for approximately four decades. The factory expanded significantly through the 1940s and 1950s under contractor A. J. Hayter, adding amenity buildings, a canteen, a recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool. Production at the site spanned condensed milk, butter, milk powder, ice cream, oil, and yoghurt. A NIRO milk powder spray-drying plant, commissioned in 1953, added a capacity of 1 tonne per hour. Corporate ownership changed more than once in the factory's final decades. Pacific Dunlop sold the Peters ice cream division to Nestle in the mid-1990s, and rationalisation followed. The Chatham factory closed in the late 1990s as production moved to more modern facilities elsewhere. What this photograph records in 2016 is what that decision left standing: the pipework, the machinery casings, the dust, and the silence.