Milk Powder Room

The milk powder room at Peters Creameries' Chatham factory sits on Railway Parade, Chatham, in what was once the Manning Valley's most significant industrial building. Paint has lifted from the walls in broad sheets, exposing the layers put down across six decades of operation. Rust has taken the old machinery. The room is still and largely empty, light falling across surfaces that have been deteriorating since the factory closed in the late 1990s. The factory was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing plant, designed to handle condensed milk, butter, ice cream, and milk powder from farms across the Manning River district. The building contract was let in 1938 to D. Gallagher, an experienced dairy factory builder. Gallagher died before the work was done; his estate completed the construction. The factory opened officially on 4 November 1939 before a crowd of approximately 5,000, with the Minister for Works and Local Government presiding and free public access to tour the premises. The cost was approximately £60,000. The milk powder room's NIRO spray-drying plant was commissioned in 1953, with a capacity of 1 tonne per hour. It was one of several processing lines operating within a factory that ran four Babcock and Wilcox boilers and two large air compressors, and that drew on a riverside pump house supplying 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. Milk was collected within a 20-mile radius; cream came from farms as far as 50 miles away, delivered in part by the river steamers "Yankee Jack" and "Viola" working the Manning's farm wharves. Peters Creameries was the operating entity at Chatham, a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, the company Frederick Augustus Peters had established in 1907 in two rented rooms of a Paddington ice factory. The Chatham plant was one node in a national network spanning NSW, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. The factory closed in the late 1990s following corporate rationalisation under successive owners. The building remained standing at Chatham. This photograph, made in 2016, records the milk powder room as it was found.