Camden Park’s rotating round dairy set a dizzy pace
THE Macarthur family’s Camden Park rotolactor that opened in 1952 was a massive technological leap, one that wasn’t more broadly adopted in Australia until the late 1980s.
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THE Macarthur family’s Camden Park rotolactor that opened in 1952 was so far advanced it would almost have been unfathomable to the Australian dairy industry.
The spinning dairy was a massive technological leap, one that wasn’t more broadly adopted in Australia until the late 1980s.
This week Benedict Industries and Mirvac announced plans to turn the dairy and creamery into a restaurant and entertainment precinct.
It was only the second such dairy in the world, in an era when many cows, including some owned by the Macarthur family, were still milked by hand.
At the time the journal, Building and Engineering, labelled it a monument to initiative and enterprise. The Macarthur-Onslow family called it La Ronde au Lait, or round milk, it cost £67,000 — $2.3 million today — and was architecturally designed, constructed from glass, concrete and steel when dairies were still tin and timber. The circular building had 50 milking machines, powered by two electric motors, on an 18m diameter metal platform mounted on 30cm roller bearing steel wheels that rotated anticlockwise about 2m above the floors.
Commissioned by Edward Macarthur-Onslow, cows walked up a passage and on to the platform, with 10 attendants spinning with them, and exited down a curved interior ramp and out a tunnel under the platform. Each took five to seven minutes to milk, with 50 cows milked at a time, up to 375 an hour and more than 1000 cows twice a day. The best hand milkers could do were 10 cows per hour.
Dairy consultant Geoff Kirton, who grew up nearby, says it was well ahead of it time. “The rotolactor was really a giant leap forward. It was totally innovative,” he says.
Kirton says Camden Vale dairy was famed for the “gold top” milk sold into Sydney, produced by one of the world’s biggest herds of Guernsey cows. Up to 2000 people a week went as tourists, many schoolchildren were bussed there and you could buy milkshakes with milk directly from the dairy.
Mark Stanham is of the seventh generation descended from John Macarthur. He grew up in Camden Park House and says family legend had it that Edward’s first cousin once removed, Jim, then 15, had drawn Edward’s attention to cow milking techniques in America.
“The concept was so far ahead of its time it wasn’t funny,” he says. He would like to see the dairy and associated buildings, that perhaps date to the late 1800s, restored for their heritage value.
“From everybody’s point of view, the family, the Australian public, it would be a tragedy to see it knocked down and built over,” he says. “I think it has a story to tell. They are a significant collection of buildings.” The family sold the dairy in 1973. Others operated it until 1983, and it has sat unused since.
Camden Park was founded by wool industry pioneer John Macarthur, whose bombastic self-promotion and scheming set the bar for colonial colourful characters. Born in 1767 to a mercer in Plymouth, in 1788 when he married Devon farmer’s daughter Elizabeth Veale, her family considered him “too proud and haughty for our humble fortune”.
After they arrived in Sydney with son Edward in June 1790, Macarthur was soon reprimanded by Governor Arthur Phillip. In 1792, Macarthur’s new commanding officer Francis Grose made him regimental paymaster and doubled his pay. Grose, as acting-governor in 1793, appointed Macarthur public works inspector, with extensive control of colonial resources, and gave him 40ha of prime land at Parramatta, which he called Elizabeth Farm.
Given unrestricted access to convict labour, Macarthur was the first colonial to clear and cultivate 20ha of land, earning another 40ha. In 1797 he was among several purchasers of the first Spanish merinos, imported by Captain Henry Waterhouse. Governor John Hunter noted Macarthur’s “restless, ambitious and litigious disposition”; Macarthur sent criticisms of Hunter to the colonial secretary of state, who had Hunter recalled.
Camden Park was ostensibly a reward for Macarthur’s promotion of Australian wool while in Britain to face a court martial, after he shot and almost killed commanding officer William Paterson in a duel in 1801. When papers were lost, the court martial lapsed.
Governor Philip Gidley King had sent NSW fleeces to botanist Joseph Banks before Macarthur arrived in 1802, carrying fleeces from Elizabeth Farm which he showed English clothiers, who appraised them as “a very superior quality, equal to the best” from Spain.
Against Banks’ scepticism, Macarthur used English contacts to approach Colonial Secretary Lord Camden, John Jeffreys Pratt, to allow him to supervise development of a colonial wool industry. Camden gave him 2024ha of prime pasture land, to increase by 2024ha if Macarthur produced results, along with 10 Spanish sheep from England’s royal flocks.
Macarthur named his grant Camden, later known as Camden Park, after his benefactor. He died in 1834, after being declared insane.
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