Springvale Woolshed

Two corrugated iron sheds stand on open grazing land, their roof panels overtaken by rust. A third structure nearby has collapsed, its frame on the ground. Rolling hills carry the eye to the horizon behind them, the whole scene sitting under a pale, overcast sky that offers no shadows and no relief. Corrugated galvanised iron became the defining material of Australian rural construction from the 1850s, replacing bark and split-timber shingles across NSW pastoral country. Its durability and low maintenance suited the pastoral climate and the distances involved in sourcing materials. Timber framing beneath that iron cladding was typically local hardwood, red gum, grey gum, ironbark, or stringybark depending on the region, joined with mortise-and-tenon and lap-joint construction on the sheds that date from the 19th century. The woolshed was the operational centre of any wool-producing station. A working shed typically contained catching pens, numbered shearing stands served by mechanical overhead drives, a wool room where fleeces were skirted and classed, wool presses for baling, and storage for the finished clip. The stand count indicated the scale of the property and the size of the shearing team a station could run. Traditional shearing seasons in NSW ran spring, September through November, and large stations employed teams of itinerant shearers who moved from property to property across the clip. Many smaller woolsheds across the state fell out of regular use from the 1970s onward, as station consolidation, drought, and changes in land use reduced the number of operating sheep properties. Structures that once ran a full shearing team were left standing but unmaintained, the iron rusting at its own pace, the timber framing slowly losing the argument with gravity. This photograph, made in 2018, records what remains of one such group of buildings. The collapsed structure is not a dramatic event but a gradual one, the end point of a process that was always going to arrive.