Brooding Skies

The farmhouse in this photograph is a timber slab structure: walls of split eucalyptus set between posts, built by hand, built fast, built to last long enough to matter. The Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened the Monaro and surrounding districts to free selectors, offering up to 320 acres of Crown land at £1 per acre with a deposit of five shillings per acre and the balance due within three years, plus a residency requirement. Families came and built accordingly. A basic slab hut could go up in two to three weeks using a maul, wedge, broadaxe, and draw-blade. The walls that still stand here are the direct product of that calculation. The buildings in A Place to Call Home document the full arc of rural settlement across the Snowy Monaro region and the Hunter Valley: squatter huts from the 1830s and 1850s, selector cottages from the 1860s onward, and pastoral infrastructure built during the wool boom of the 1870s and 1880s. The 1890s drought and rabbit plague cut sheep numbers across New South Wales by half. Lower wool prices compounded the damage. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, inundated thousands of hectares of farmland and displaced pastoral communities at Jindabyne and Adaminaby. The Wool Reserve Price Scheme collapsed in 1991, crashing prices to approximately $3 per kilogram. Each of these events left more structures standing empty. This farmhouse, photographed in 2016, shows what that sequence of reversals looks like at ground level. The windowpanes are gone. The timber walls have been working through their colour range for decades, from the pale grey of fresh-split eucalyptus toward something older and darker. The sky above carries the particular weight of the Monaro in a grey season. No single catastrophe ended the life inside this building. The land simply stopped making the arithmetic work, and the family moved on, and the structure stayed.