Cathcart Corner

The interior walls of Cathcart Corner carry their history in layers. Paint has peeled and curled away over the years, leaving behind a cross-section of the building's occupied life: each colour sitting beneath the next, each one representing a different period and a different hand. A single window interrupts the wall, its glass still intact, framing an overgrown garden that has long since been left to return to grass and scrub. No furniture remains. The room holds nothing but those walls and that light. The locality of Cathcart sits in the southern Monaro, in what is now the Snowy Monaro region of New South Wales. It began as Taylor's Flat, where James Taylor moved stock around 1828 to 1829. The settlement served as the final staging post for teamsters carting wool and produce from the Monaro tableland to Twofold Bay at Eden on the coast. It was a working point on a working route, and the buildings that grew around it were built accordingly: functional, plain, and durable enough to serve the passage of men and goods. The broader Monaro was one of the earliest pastoral frontiers beyond the settled districts of New South Wales. Squatting runs were established from 1827 onward, followed by the wave of free selectors who took up smaller blocks after the Robertson Land Acts of 1861. The buildings that survive represent that full arc of settlement: squatter huts, selector cottages, and the consolidated infrastructure of the wool boom years. Cathcart Corner was photographed in 2018 as part of the A Place to Call Home series, which documents abandoned rural structures across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley. The series records buildings that sit outside formal heritage protection, on private pastoral land, where collapse is often the only trajectory. This photograph holds what the walls still carry: the colours of a place that was lived in, looked after, and then left.