First Floor Laboratory

On the first floor of Peters Creameries Pty Ltd Factory at Chatham, a green first aid kit sign still hangs above a gutted doorframe. Paint has lifted from the walls in broad sheets. Graffiti covers the plasterwork on both sides of the opening. In the passage beyond, an abandoned machine sits where someone last left it. This is what the building looks like now: stripped, vandalised, and largely empty. The factory was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing plant for Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, constructed by building contractor D. Gallagher on land purchased from Christen Christensen in 1938. Gallagher died before the building was finished; his estate completed the contract. The factory opened on 4 November 1939, before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, at a reported cost of £60,000. 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 plant was built to process condensed milk and butter, with capacity for 1,000 gallons of milk per hour, fed by a riverside pump house drawing 25,000 gallons of water per hour from the Manning River. Milk was collected within a 20-mile radius; cream came from within 50 miles, including by river boat. Two steamers, "Yankee Jack" and "Viola", ran those river collections for four decades. Through the 1940s and 1950s, the site expanded significantly under contractor A. J. Hayter, adding a canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool for workers. A NIRO milk powder spray-drying plant, commissioned in 1953, brought capacity to 1 tonne per hour. The factory closed in the late 1990s following a pattern of corporate rationalisation under successive owners. The building remains in Chatham. The first aid sign is still there. Photographed in 2016.