Office

The office inside the former Peters Creameries Pty Ltd factory at Chatham holds a desk, a chair, and a floor scattered with papers and debris. Sunlight pushes through a grimy window, illuminating the dust that has settled over everything in the years since the building was last in use. Whatever administration happened here, ordering, scheduling, correspondence, left no trace beyond what the room itself contains. The factory was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing plant, constructed by building contractor D. Gallagher on land purchased from Christen Christensen in 1938 at a cost of approximately £60,000. Gallagher died before the building was completed; his estate finished the contract. The factory opened on 4 November 1939, before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, with the Minister for Works and Local Government officiating and a temporary stage erected for broadcasting and amplification equipment. From that opening, Peters Creameries Pty Ltd operated the plant as a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, the company Frederick Augustus Peters had founded in two rented rooms in Paddington in 1907. At Chatham, steam-driven machinery processed 1,000 gallons of milk per hour, fed by four Babcock and Wilcox boilers. Milk was collected within a 20-mile radius; cream came from as far as 50 miles away, carried in part by river steamers running along the Manning River. In the 1940s and 1950s, contractor A. J. Hayter expanded the site considerably, adding a canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool for workers. A NIRO milk powder spray-drying plant, commissioned in 1953 with a capacity of 1 tonne per hour, extended the factory's product range further. The plant closed in the late 1990s following corporate rationalisation under successive owners. The building at Railway Parade, Chatham remains standing. The office, its desk and chair still in place, was photographed for Lost Collective in 2016.