Dalgety Homestead

The verandah is going first. Timber uprights softening from the base, paint lifting from the weatherboards in long curled strips, the wall surface returning to something closer to raw wood than painted facade. The homestead stands open to the weather now, its rooms emptied of furniture and sound, its domestic geometry still legible in the floor plan and the spacing of windows and doors. Selector's cottages built to this pattern appeared across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley from the 1860s onward, following the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, which allowed free selection of up to 320 acres of Crown land. Timber weatherboards and stumped foundations characterise the later examples in the region, post-1880s construction that marked a step up from the split-slab huts of the earlier squatting era. A family would have worked the land around a place like this through successive seasons, through the drought and rabbit plague of the 1890s that halved sheep numbers across New South Wales, through the long wool-price decline that continued into the twentieth century. The Snowy Monaro's pastoral communities absorbed three distinct waves of economic pressure: the 1890s collapse, the displacement caused by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme between 1949 and 1974, and the final blow of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme's collapse in 1991. Each wave left more buildings standing empty on private pastoral land, without the heritage protections that cover the alpine huts or the town buildings on local environmental plan schedules. Brett Patman photographed this homestead in 2018 as part of A Place to Call Home, a series documenting 59 subjects across the Snowy Monaro region and Hunter Valley. The photograph records what the building has become: a shell that still holds the proportions of domestic life, verandah and wall and window, with the weather working steadily through every gap.