Gunningrah Drover's Hut

Gunningrah Drover's Hut is a small slab-walled hut in the high country of southern NSW, set on a slope above a creek. The hut is timber-framed with vertical hardwood slabs forming the walls. The roof is corrugated iron, low-pitched. A single timber door is set into the front wall. There are no windows; light enters through gaps between the slabs and around the eaves. A small chimney pokes from one end. The hut sits in scrubby grass with eucalypts close behind. Near the front door is a pile of split firewood, partially weathered.

Drovers' huts were the original infrastructure of cattle and sheep work in the high country. Built every twenty kilometres or so along established stock routes, they gave drovers somewhere to spend the night with a fire and a roof while the stock grazed nearby. The hut at Gunningrah dates from somewhere in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It is no longer used for droving, since that practice has largely ended, but the hut is still standing, partly maintained by the property owner and partly used by bushwalkers. The firewood pile by the door is current. Whoever last used the hut left it ready for the next person.