Dalgety Blues

Blue paint peels from the weatherboard walls in long, curling strips. Dust has settled across the empty rooms, undisturbed. Light finds its way in through the gaps that time has opened in the structure. There is no furniture, no evidence of recent occupation. What remains is the building itself: the particular blue that someone once chose, and the slow process by which it is returning to the boards beneath. Dalgety sits on the Snowy River in the southern Monaro, a district that saw its first European settlement in 1827 and was drawing selectors and graziers steadily through the following decades. The town itself was surveyed and officially named in 1874. Edward Buckley had established a farm at what became Buckley's Crossing, the same location, as early as 1832. The first public building, the Police Station and Court House, was built by David Scarlett in 1876. The local Catholic church followed in 1878. Stone was the dominant building material in the Dalgety area, owing to the granite outcrops of the district, though later construction moved to weatherboard and corrugated iron as the pastoral economy consolidated through the 1880s and 1890s. Between 1902 and 1903, Dalgety was evaluated as a potential site for Australia's federal capital. Federal Parliament selected the town in 1904, before the decision was reversed in favour of the Canberra district in 1908. The expectation that the town would become the centre of a new nation did not last, and Dalgety settled into the quieter future that followed. Henry Charles Merrett, a long-standing local identity who served as the first President of Dalgety Shire and was among those who took a leading part in advocating for the town's selection, died at the Coonghoongbula homestead on 20 January 1914. The A Place to Call Home series documents structures across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley, photographed between 2016 and 2019. This building was photographed in 2018. The blue paint on its walls is what the series came to find.