On Sydney’s urban fringe the local historic and iconic Menangle Rotolactor, once located on the Macarthur family’s historic colonial property of Camden Park, is at the centre of a stage where a series of actors are contesting rural space over issues of urban development.

The Rotolactor dairy, once a piece of agricultural modernism with its rotating milking platform, sits abandoned in a paddock while the forces of community activism, neo-liberal capitalism, state planning and local parochialism battle it out.

In late 2017 thousands of visitors embraced Rotolactor nostalgia and participated in  a successful community festival themed around the dairy icon using the slogan a ‘Milk Shake Up’. The Menangle Community Association revived memories of the village heyday when 2000 tourists a week  witnessed the milking marvel as cows were spun around.

Festival organisers used nostalgia to raise awareness of the state of the abandoned dairy and the threat posed by the commodification of its heritage from urban development. Many villagers see these processes as a direct assault on the history and heritage, of not only the Rotolactor, but the ownership of the narrative of the village story, its landscape aesthetic and their rural lifestyle.