Yoghurt Culture Vats

These stainless steel yoghurt culture vats are among the last pieces of equipment remaining inside the former Peters Creameries Pty Ltd factory in Chatham, a suburb of Taree on the Manning River. They stand on a concrete floor marked with rust, in a building that has been empty and vandalised since production ceased in the late 1990s. Peters Creameries Pty Ltd, a subsidiary of Peters' American Delicacy Co. Ltd, resolved to build at Taree in 1938. The directors purchased land from Christen Christensen and let the building contract to D. Gallagher, an experienced dairy factory builder who died before the work was finished. His estate completed the contract. The factory was reported nearing completion on 4 August 1939 at a cost of approximately £60,000, and was officially opened on 4 November 1939 before a crowd of approximately 5,000 people. The Minister for Works and Local Government performed the opening. A temporary stage was erected with broadcasting and amplification equipment, and the public was given free access to tour the premises. The plant was steam-driven, with four Babcock and Wilcox boilers in the boiler house and a capacity of 1,000 gallons of milk per hour. A riverside pump house supplied 25,000 gallons of water per hour for condensing operations. Milk was collected from farms within a 20-mile radius; cream came from within 50 miles, much of it delivered by river boat along the Manning River by the steamers "Yankee Jack" and "Viola". The factory produced condensed milk, butter, milk powder, oil, and yoghurt. A NIRO milk powder spray-drying plant, commissioned in 1953, added a capacity of 1 tonne per hour. During the 1940s and 1950s, the site expanded substantially under contractor A. J. Hayter. A canteen, recreation hall, gardens, and a swimming pool were added for staff. The river cream boat deliveries, a feature of the Manning River economy for roughly four decades, ceased around the 1970s. Successive corporate owners rationalised the Peters network. Pacific Dunlop sold the Peters ice cream division to Nestle in the mid-1990s, and the Chatham factory closed in the late 1990s as production consolidated into newer facilities elsewhere. The building remains. These vats, photographed in 2016, record what the rationalisation left behind.