Southeastern Corner

The southeastern corner of the Peters Creameries Pty Ltd Factory at Chatham sits largely as it was left. Light comes through broken windows, tracing the line of peeling paint across walls that once ran warm with steam. Machinery stands where it was last used, covered in the dust that settles into every abandoned industrial building eventually. The photograph records a space in the process of being reclaimed by neglect. The factory was built in 1938 and 1939 by contractor D. Gallagher on land purchased from Christen Christensen in Chatham, a suburb of Taree on the Manning River. Gallagher, who had extensive dairy factory construction experience, 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 presiding, a temporary stage fitted with broadcasting and amplification equipment, and free public access to tour the premises. The cost was approximately £60,000. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd was a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, the company Frederick Augustus Bolles Peters had founded in two rented rooms of a Paddington ice factory on 27 August 1907. By the time the Chatham plant opened, Peters had been dead for two years, but his company had grown into a national network of facilities across New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia. The plant was steam-driven, with a processing capacity of 1,000 gallons of milk per hour, four Babcock and Wilcox boilers in the boiler house, and two large air compressors. A riverside pump house supplied 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. Cream and milk arrived from farms along the Manning River by boat and by road, sustaining a riverine collection infrastructure that ran for approximately four decades before the cream boat deliveries ceased in the 1970s. The factory expanded substantially through the 1940s and 1950s under contractor A. J. Hayter, adding a canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool for workers. It continued operating until the late 1990s, when successive corporate owners consolidated production into larger, more modern facilities and the Chatham plant was closed. The building remains, vandalised and largely empty. This photograph was made in 2016.