Abattoir Managers Quarters

The cottage sits in a hollow, low to the ground, as though the land has been slowly pulling it down. Scrub has closed in on three sides. The corrugated iron roof has rusted deep brown-red. A dirt track climbs the hill behind, and power lines cross the ridge above, the only indication that the outside world is still nearby. Nothing moves in the frame. Timber cottages like this one went up across rural New South Wales from the 1860s onward, following the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, which allowed selectors to take up to 320 acres of Crown land at one pound per acre, with a deposit of five shillings per acre and a requirement of three years' residence. The Acts were intended to open pastoral land to small farmers, but in practice only about one-third of the 62,000 selections taken up between 1861 and 1884 across New South Wales were genuine. The rest were dummies, speculators, or squatters buying their own runs. The buildings that came out of that era were typically vernacular timber cottages: walls of split slab or weatherboard, galvanised iron roofs replacing the earlier bark and shingle, single-room floor plans with a door at one end and a window at the other. A settler with a maul, a wedge, and a broadaxe could raise a basic hut in two to three weeks. These were not buildings designed to last; they were built to be lived in, and were lived in until the land or the economics made that impossible. Three waves pushed these buildings toward abandonment. The 1890s drought and rabbit plague halved sheep numbers across New South Wales. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, inundated thousands of hectares of farmland and displaced pastoral communities in the Jindabyne and Adaminaby areas. And in 1991, the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme crashed wool prices to around three dollars per kilogram, making marginal properties economically unviable. This photograph was made in 2016, as part of Brett Patman's A Place to Call Home series documenting 59 structures across the Snowy Monaro region and the Hunter Valley. The cottage now belongs to the scrub.