Dalgety Down The Range

The road unspools down the range in a single unhurried line, pale dust against dry grass, the valley floor somewhere below and the blue ranges holding the far edge of the frame. There is no traffic on it. There is no fence along it. It is simply a road through the high country, the kind of road that exists because someone needed to get from one place to another and eventually enough people made the same trip that the ground wore bare. That settlement below is Dalgety. It was surveyed and officially named in 1874 by surveyor J. R. Campbell. A Catholic school opened the same year. Two years later, in 1876, David Scarlett built the Police Station and Court House, the first public building in the town. The bridge across the Snowy River opened on 30 September 1889, a metal lattice structure designed by J. A. McDonald. By 1902 the town was being seriously evaluated as a potential site for Australia's national capital. The decision ultimately went elsewhere, to the Canberra district in 1908, and Dalgety remained what it had always been: a small pastoral town at the edge of the Monaro tableland, the Snowy River running past it. European settlement in this part of the world began in 1832, when Edward Buckley established a farm at what would become Buckley's Crossing, later Dalgety. The broader Monaro had been Ngarigo country for at least 21,000 years before that, an estimated 16,000 km² of tableland extending from Queanbeyan in the north to Delegate in the south. The squatters came first, then the selectors after the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, then the wool boom, then the droughts and the rabbit plague of the 1890s, then the slow attrition that continued through the twentieth century. Photographed in 2018 as part of the A Place to Call Home series, this image does not document a building. It documents the country between buildings, the road that connected the pastoral runs and the settlements and the shearing sheds that the series records elsewhere. The Monaro tableland is large enough that the distance between places is part of the story.