Cattle Yard

Timber stockyard rails lean and split along a fence line in rural New South Wales, tussock grass threading through the base of each post. Behind them, a weatherboard shed has partially collapsed, its walls giving way at the joins. A dead gum stands bare above what remains of the roofline. Eucalypt-covered hills rise in the distance. Nothing in the frame is ornamental. Every element was built to do a job. Cattle yards of this kind were standard infrastructure on selector holdings across the Monaro and Hunter regions. The Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened Crown land to free selection in lots of up to 320 acres at £1 per acre, and the generations that followed built what they needed from what was at hand. Timber was split from local eucalypt species, posts were set directly into the ground, and rails were notched or lashed into place. The work was practical and the materials were finite; when the timber dried and the posts shifted, rails leaned, and nobody always had the time or the hands to straighten them. The 1890s brought drought and a rabbit plague that halved sheep numbers across New South Wales, and lower wool prices arrived alongside them. The Wool Reserve Price Scheme collapsed in 1991, delivering a final blow to marginal properties that had been carrying debt for decades. Buildings and yards like the ones in this photograph were abandoned in waves across more than a century, each wave leaving more structures standing empty on land that could no longer be made to pay. Photographed in 2016 as part of the A Place to Call Home series, this image is one of 59 subjects Brett Patman documented across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley. The series records the physical residue of rural settlement at the point where it has stopped being maintained but has not yet disappeared entirely.