First Floor

The first floor of the Peters Creameries Pty Ltd factory at Chatham sits under sunlight that falls across concrete long since stripped of its working life. Paint has peeled from the walls in broad sheets, the layers beneath it exposed. Debris covers the floor. There is no machinery left here, no fittings, nothing to suggest what the room once held. What remains is the building itself: concrete, light, and the slow work of decades without maintenance. The factory was built in 1938 and 1939 by contractor D. Gallagher on land purchased from Christen Christensen on Railway Parade, Chatham, a suburb of Taree on the Manning River. Gallagher had extensive experience building dairy factories but died before the Chatham building was completed. His estate finished the contract. The official opening went ahead on 4 November 1939 before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, opened by the Minister for Works and Local Government, with a temporary stage, broadcasting equipment, and free public access to tour the premises. The building had cost approximately £60,000 and was designed to run with capacity for 70 to 80 workers across three shifts. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd was the Taree operating entity of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, a national company founded in Sydney in 1907 by Frederick Augustus Peters, an American immigrant credited as the first person to manufacture ice cream commercially in Australia. The Chatham factory was one node in a continental network that stretched across New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. Milk was collected within a 20-mile radius; cream came from as far as 50 miles, much of it by river boat along the Manning. Steam-driven machinery processed up to 1,000 gallons of milk per hour. Four Babcock and Wilcox boilers powered the plant. The factory operated into the late 1990s, when corporate rationalisation under successive owners consolidated production elsewhere and the Chatham plant closed. The building has remained standing since, vandalised and largely empty. Brett Patman photographed the interior in 2016 as part of the Peters' Ice Cream Factory series.