Front Lawn

The grass at the front of Peters Creameries Pty Ltd Factory has gone uncut long enough to read as deliberate. It presses against the base of the building's exterior walls, long and wild, reclaiming ground that was once maintained as part of a working industrial site. The factory complex behind it is vast, its walls shedding paint in broad sheets, its windows dark. The scale of the place is still legible from the outside, even stripped of everything that once animated it. The factory was built on Railway Parade in the Chatham suburb of Taree, adjacent to a rail spur off the main North Coast line, with a wharf on the Manning River allowing direct waterborne delivery of milk and cream. The building contract was let in 1938 to D. Gallagher, an experienced dairy factory builder who died before the work was finished; his estate completed the job. The official opening took place on 4 November 1939, before a crowd of approximately 5,000, with a temporary stage, broadcasting equipment, and free public access to tour the premises. Total construction cost was approximately £60,000. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd was a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, the company established in 1907 by Frederick Augustus Bolles Peters. The Chatham factory was one node in a national network of Peters facilities. At opening, it was equipped with steam-driven machinery capable of processing 1,000 gallons of milk per hour, and was planned for 70 to 80 workers across three shifts. A riverside pump house supplied 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. The boiler house held four Babcock and Wilcox boilers. Through the 1940s and 1950s, the site expanded significantly under contractor A. J. Hayter, adding amenity buildings including a canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool. Cream and milk arrived by river boat and road from farms across the Manning Valley for roughly four decades. By the late 1990s, successive corporate owners had rationalised production into fewer facilities, and the factory closed. This photograph, made in 2016, records what remains: the building standing, the lawn grown over, the walls in decline.