Chakola Shack at A Place to Call Home, a weatherboard shack sits low against a grassy ridge near Bunyan, south of Canberra.
Chakola Shack at A Place to Call Home, a weatherboard shack sits low against a grassy ridge near Bunyan, south of Canberra.

Chakola Shack

Provenance

Camera
NIKON D810
Lens
80.0-400.0 mm f/4.5-5.6
Settings
320mm · f/8.0 · 1/1600 · ISO 1000
Paper
Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

A small timber shack stands in open bush. The walls are weathered grey, the timber bleached by sun and rain over many years. A corrugated iron roof, heavily rusted, sits over the structure. The interior is visible through gaps in the decaying walls.

Edition
Open edition

Open edition
Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.

Limited edition
A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

$100.00 AUD
Size
Type
Colour
✓
Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 10 to 20 business days (framed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.
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In situ

Chakola Shack at A Place to Call Home, a weatherboard shack sits low against a grassy ridge near Bunyan, south of Canberra.Chakola Shack at A Place to Call Home, a weatherboard shack sits low against a grassy ridge near Bunyan, south of Canberra.Chakola Shack at A Place to Call Home, a weatherboard shack sits low against a grassy ridge near Bunyan, south of Canberra.Chakola Shack at A Place to Call Home, a weatherboard shack sits low against a grassy ridge near Bunyan, south of Canberra.Chakola Shack at A Place to Call Home, a weatherboard shack sits low against a grassy ridge near Bunyan, south of Canberra.
01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title
Chakola Shack
Series
A Place to Call Home
Catalogue
PCH-014
Process
Giclée
Captured
27 December 2016
Camera
NIKON D810
Lens
80.0-400.0 mm f/4.5-5.6
Aperture
f/8.0
Shutter
1/1600 s
ISO
1000
Focal length
320 mm
Paper
Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size
290 × 200 mm
Location
Rural New South Wales and ACT, Australia
Authenticity
C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by
Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards
03 THE STORY

About this print

The Chakola Shack stands in the Australian bush, its timber walls bleached to a pale grey by years of sun and rain. A corrugated iron roof, heavily rusted, shelters the decaying interior. The building is a vernacular slab timber structure, the kind erected by selectors and smallholders across rural New South Wales from the 1860s onward using hand tools and locally split eucalyptus. Walls of this type were built from timber flitches split tangentially along the grain with a maul and wedge, set between grooved posts, then lined with newspaper or hessian to keep out the draughts as the slabs shrank. Roofing progressed across the region from bark sheets to wooden shingles to galvanised iron, and the rusted corrugated iron visible here represents that final stage of incremental improvement. The broader landscape these structures occupy was one of the earliest pastoral frontiers beyond the settled districts of New South Wales. Squatters pushed into the Snowy Monaro from the 1820s, and the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened the country to smaller selectors, granting up to 320 acres at one pound per acre to those willing to work the land and remain on it for three years. The buildings that survived are the physical residue of that wager. Drought and rabbit plague in the 1890s halved sheep numbers across New South Wales. The wool price collapse of 1991 delivered the final economic blow to many marginal properties. Each wave of hardship left more buildings standing empty on country that families could no longer work. No formal heritage protection applies to the specific structures in this series. They occupy a gap between the formally listed alpine huts maintained by volunteer organisations and the urban buildings covered by council heritage schedules. Collapse, not conservation, is the trajectory for most of them. Brett Patman photographed the Chakola Shack in 2016 as part of A Place to Call Home, a series documenting 59 abandoned rural structures across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley before they are gone entirely.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

The Chakola Shack stands in the Australian bush, its split timber walls long since bleached to grey by decades of sun and rain. A rusted corrugated iron roof, the kind that replaced bark and wooden shingles across rural New South Wales from the mid-nineteenth century onward, shelters what remains of the interior. Structures like this one were built by selectors and smallholders working country that was hard to hold and harder to leave. When the land could no longer sustain a family, the buildings stayed behind. Photographed in 2016 as part of the A Place to Call Home series, which documents abandoned rural structures across the Snowy Monaro region and Hunter Valley.

Brett Patman

A Place to Call Home

The series

A Place to Call Home

2015–2020 · 60 photographs

A series of rural homesteads from the Snowy Monaro region of southern New South Wales, with a few from the Hunter Valley. Most were family homes left behind when a generation moved to town; others when the land could no longer be worked. The buildings are smaller than the industrial sites that anchor most of Lost Collective and tend to be older. Most are timber-framed.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.

Anatomy · true ratio
07 MORE FROM A PLACE TO CALL HOME

59 other prints in this series

All prints
Stone Drover's Hut at A Place to Call Home, a stone cottage sits low against open grassland, its rough-cut walls catching.
Stone Drover's Hut $100.00
House On The Hill at A Place to Call Home, a single concrete structure sits on an exposed ridge above the Snowy Mountains.
House On The Hill $100.00
Gunningrah Drover's Hut at A Place to Call Home, corrugated iron walls, faded to pale blue-grey, hold together.
Gunningrah Drover's Hut $100.00
Timber Weatherboards at A Place to Call Home, an early 20th century home just outside of Cathcart.
Timber Weatherboards $100.00
08 BY POST · NO SPAM

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