Raw Material Processing

The raw material processing area of the Peters Creameries Pty Ltd factory at Chatham, NSW, is what a building looks like after the industry leaves but the structure stays. Concrete columns support a low ceiling of corrugated metal. Exposed pipework runs across it. The ribbed walls carry graffiti now. A staircase at the far end climbs toward a bright opening, the only directed light in the frame. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd broke ground in 1938 after the company's directors resolved to build a factory at Taree. The land was purchased from Christen Christensen, and the building contract was let to D. Gallagher, an experienced dairy factory builder who died before the work was finished. His estate completed the contract. The factory opened on 4 November 1939, before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, and was reported to have cost approximately £60,000. The plant was purpose-built as a steam-driven dairy processing facility, with machinery supplied by Richard Wildridge and Co. of Sydney rated at a capacity of 1,000 gallons of milk per hour. Four Babcock and Wilcox boilers ran the steam plant. A wharf on the Manning River allowed direct waterborne delivery of milk and cream by river boats, including the steamers "Yankee Jack" and "Viola", which collected from farms along the river and its tributaries for approximately four decades. A riverside pump house supplied 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. Initial products were condensed milk and butter. The factory was one node in a national network of Peters facilities that had grown from two rented rooms in Paddington in 1907 to a continental supply chain by the time the Chatham plant opened. The factory closed in the late 1990s as successive corporate owners consolidated production into fewer facilities. The building at Railway Parade remained. Brett Patman photographed the interior in 2016, the same year the Cundletown and Lower Manning Historical Society held a Dairy Factory Reunion on the site as part of the National Trust Heritage Festival. The structure in the frame is what that reunion walked through: columns, ceiling, pipework, and a staircase still pointing upward.