Delegate Shearers Front

The facade of the Delegate shearers' quarters is built in the way most pastoral outbuildings across the southern Monaro were put together: weathered timber boards and corrugated iron, functional from the first nail and indifferent to anything else. The window openings are empty now, the paint long past holding. The corrugated iron has gone the colour that comes with serious age. What remains is the structure itself, still standing on its own terms. Delegate sits at the southern end of the Monaro tableland, close to the Victorian border, in country that was among the earliest pastoral frontiers in New South Wales. Robert Campbell of Duntroon occupied Delegate Station from 1827, one of the first European settlements on the Monaro. The runs that followed through the 1830s built the district's wool economy from the ground up, and the infrastructure of that economy, woolsheds, stockmen's huts, and shearers' quarters like this one, went up in timber and iron wherever the work required it. Shearers' quarters were working buildings without sentiment attached. A communal structure housing the gangs who moved from property to property through the clip, they were built to accommodate the labour and nothing more. When the work moved on, so did the men, and the quarters stood idle between seasons until the seasons stopped coming at all. The 1890s drought and rabbit plague halved sheep numbers across New South Wales and began the long decline of marginal pastoral properties on the Monaro. The 1991 collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme was the final economic blow for many. Properties that had run on wool for four or five generations could no longer carry the cost, and the buildings they left behind have been emptying and weathering ever since. Photographed in 2018 as part of the A Place to Call Home series, which documented pastoral structures across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley between 2016 and 2019.