Dalgety Valley

The Dalgety Valley occupies the southern end of the Snowy Monaro, a broad tableland that was among the earliest pastoral frontiers beyond the settled districts of New South Wales. European squatters established runs here from 1827 onward; by 1834, the explorer Lhotsky found pastoral stations already well established throughout the region. The structure visible in this photograph, a solitary building of faded timber and rusted corrugated iron, belongs to that long history of occupation and slow retreat. Buildings of this type on the Monaro were constructed using vernacular techniques passed down through necessity rather than instruction. Slab walls were split tangentially along the timber grain using a maul and wedge, set vertically or horizontally between grooved posts. Roofing progressed from bark sheets to wooden shingles to galvanised iron as circumstances and economics allowed. A capable settler could erect a basic hut in two to three weeks. What stands in the valley now is the end point of that construction: iron gone deep brown-red with rust, timber stripped of paint by decades of exposure, the surrounding pasture working steadily at the footings. The Robertson Land Acts of 1861 transformed the Monaro from large pastoral runs into a patchwork of smaller selections, each up to 320 acres at one pound per acre. Of the roughly 62,000 selections taken up across New South Wales between 1861 and 1884, only about one-third were genuine. The rest were dummies, speculators, or squatters buying their own runs back. The buildings that survive are the physical residue of that wager against the land. Three successive blows did the most damage to the communities that built them. The Federation drought and rabbit plague of the 1890s halved sheep numbers across New South Wales. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, inundated thousands of hectares of farmland in the Jindabyne and Adaminaby areas. And the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme in 1991 drove wool prices to approximately three dollars per kilogram, finishing off many of the marginal pastoral properties that had survived everything else. The Dalgety Valley photograph, made in 2018, records what that accumulated pressure produced: a structure left standing because there was no longer anyone with a reason to maintain it.