Water Vessel

The water vessel photographed here is one of the larger remnants left standing inside the former Peters Creameries Pty Ltd factory on Railway Parade, Chatham. Rust blooms spread across its grey metal surface in broad, uneven patches. Paint has peeled back in layers, each one a record of some earlier maintenance cycle, the intervals between them growing longer as the factory wound down. Water was not incidental to what happened here. The plant was steam-driven, and a pump house on the bank of the Manning River supplied 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. Waste infrastructure handled 36,000 gallons per hour. The vessel in this frame was part of that system, built to a scale that matched the factory's ambitions. Those ambitions were considerable. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, resolved to build at Taree in 1938, purchasing land from Christen Christensen and letting the building contract to D. Gallagher, who died before the factory was completed. His estate finished the job. The official opening went ahead on 4 November 1939, before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people, with the factory reported to have cost approximately £60,000. Initial production focused on condensed milk and butter. The machinery, supplied by Richard Wildridge and Co. of Sydney, had a capacity of 1,000 gallons of milk per hour, and four Babcock and Wilcox boilers powered the plant. The factory operated until the late 1990s, outlasting cream boat deliveries on the Manning River, a major expansion program in the 1940s and 1950s, and successive changes in corporate ownership through Adelaide Steamship, Pacific Dunlop, and Nestle. Rationalisation eventually shifted production to more modern facilities elsewhere. The building at Chatham remains standing, largely empty and vandalised, this vessel among the things left behind. Photographed in 2016 as part of the Peters' Ice Cream Factory series.