Ando Shack

A small ruined shack sits in open paddock near Ando in southern NSW, the timber walls leaning into the slope, the corrugated-iron roof partly collapsed on one side. The shack is the kind of single-room hut that ran across the rural NSW landscape through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries: split-slab timber walls, hessian or newspaper lining no longer visible, a door at one end and a single small window at the other. The roof iron has rusted to dark brown. The land around the shack is dry-yellow late-summer pasture. Low blue ranges sit on the horizon behind. The afternoon light is warm and slanting.

Ando is a locality in the Monaro region of southern NSW, between Bombala and Berridale, in the country where the Snowy Mountains meet the western tablelands. Small shacks like this one were built by the smallholder graziers, drovers and station hands who worked this country from the second half of the nineteenth century onward. Many have collapsed; some still stand. A Place to Call Home is the Lost Collective collection that documents what survives of that vernacular building type across rural NSW and the ACT. Brett photographed the Ando shack at 17:50 on 29 December 2018, on the Nikon Z 7, in the last working light of the summer afternoon.