Bemboka Blues

The wall is what holds the eye. Blue paint, faded to something closer to grey at the edges, peeling back from weatherboard timber in broad curling sheets. Sunlight comes in hard through the broken windows, and wherever it falls it picks up the dust suspended in the still air of the room, the kind of light that makes you aware of how quiet a place has become. The farmhouse stands in Bemboka, a small settlement in the Bega Valley of southern New South Wales. European selectors first arrived in the Bemboka district in 1829. The Imlay Brothers established a cattle station they called Old Bemboka in the 1830s, and the first formal selections of land around Bemboka followed in 1862 under the Robertson Land Acts, which allowed free selection of up to 320 acres of Crown land at one pound per acre. The weatherboard construction visible here represents a later phase of rural building than the slab-timber huts of the high Monaro. Where the earliest settlers split timber tangentially with a maul and wedge to produce rough vertical or horizontal slabs, the weatherboard style came with more settled times and access to a sawmill. The blue paint on this wall would have been applied at some point in that more settled life, when there was still reason to maintain the place. The Bega Valley Local Environmental Plan 2013 lists 261 heritage items across the region. The specific building photographed here sits outside formal heritage protection, as do most of the structures documented across the A Place to Call Home series. The documented decline of pastoral communities in southern New South Wales moved through several distinct waves: the Federation drought and rabbit plague of the 1890s, the displacement caused by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme in the 1960s, and the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme in 1991. Structures like this one were left behind at various points along that arc. What the photograph records in 2018 is the wall, the light, and the dust. The paint keeps peeling. The windows stay broken. The air inside does not move.