Engine Room

The engine room of Peters Creameries Pty Ltd's factory at Chatham sits at the mechanical core of a purpose-built steam-driven dairy plant. Heavy industrial machinery, now dormant, fills the space: rust has traced patterns across pipes and gears, and dust has settled over every surface. The machinery was supplied by Richard Wildridge and Co. of Sydney, whose managing director A. Wildridge and staff attended the factory's official opening. What remains in the frame is the physical record of a plant that once processed 1,000 gallons of milk per hour, driven by four Babcock and Wilcox boilers in the adjacent boiler house. The factory was built by contractor D. Gallagher on land purchased from Christen Christensen in 1938, at a reported cost of approximately £60,000. Gallagher died before the building was complete; his estate finished the contract. The factory opened on 4 November 1939, with the Minister for Works and Local Government officiating before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people. Initial production focused on condensed milk and butter; the plant later expanded to manufacture ice cream, milk powder, oil, and yoghurt. A NIRO milk powder spray-drying plant, commissioned in 1953, added a capacity of 1 tonne per hour. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd was a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, a national corporation founded by American immigrant Frederick Augustus Peters in Sydney in 1907. The Chatham factory was one node in a continental network, connected to the Manning River dairy farming community by river boats and contract lorries that collected milk and cream from farms across the region. The factory operated from 1939 until the late 1990s. Corporate rationalisation under successive owners consolidated production into other facilities, and the Chatham plant closed. The building remains standing, vandalised and largely empty. This photograph was made in 2016.