Concentrate Room Mezzanine

The Concentrate Room Mezzanine occupies a level above what was the working floor of one of the Manning Valley's most significant industrial buildings. The structure around it is the former Peters Creameries Pty Ltd factory on Railway Parade, Chatham, a suburb of Taree on the Manning River. In 2016, when this photograph was made, sunlight entered the space to find peeling paint, rust-stained concrete, and silence. The building had been empty for years. Nothing remained on the mezzanine level to suggest the scale of what the factory once was. Construction began in 1938 after the directors of Peters Creameries Pty Ltd resolved to build at Taree and purchased land from Christen Christensen. The building contract went to D. Gallagher, an experienced dairy factory builder who died before the work was finished; his estate completed it. On 4 November 1939, the factory opened before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people. The Minister for Works and Local Government officiated. A temporary stage was erected with broadcasting and amplification equipment, and the public was given free access to tour the premises. The reported cost was approximately £60,000. The plant was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing facility. Machinery was supplied by Richard Wildridge and Co. of Sydney. A riverside pump house supplied 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. Initial capacity was 1,000 gallons of milk per hour across three shifts. Milk was collected from within a 20-mile radius; cream from within 50 miles. River steamers named "Yankee Jack" and "Viola" collected dairy products directly from farm wharves along the Manning River. The factory operated under successive corporate owners through the following decades. In the mid-1990s, Pacific Dunlop sold the Peters ice cream division to Nestle. Rationalisation followed, and the Chatham factory closed in the late 1990s as production consolidated into more modern facilities elsewhere. By 2016, the building remained standing but had been vandalised and was largely empty. The Concentrate Room Mezzanine, recorded here in that year, preserves the raw industrial character of a dairy plant built to last and then quietly left behind.