Delegate Shearers Rear

The rear wall of the shearers' quarters in Delegate is corrugated iron and aged timber, its surfaces carrying the marks of long exposure and extended disuse. The iron has moved through the rust spectrum that comes with age. The timber framing beneath holds the structure in place, though the building has not been used for its original purpose for some time. Delegate sits at the southern end of the Monaro tableland, in country the Ngarigo people occupied for at least 21,000 years before European contact. Robert Campbell from Duntroon occupied Delegate Station in 1827, one of the first European settlements on the Monaro, with Donald Ross serving as first overseer. The pastoral district that grew around it became one of the earliest wool-producing frontiers in New South Wales. Shearers' quarters were a standard part of working station infrastructure across the Monaro. The research file for A Place to Call Home notes that larger communal structures on pastoral runs typically comprised huts with approximately ten bunks, accommodating the seasonal workers a station needed during the clip. The corrugated iron visible here is consistent with roofing and cladding material that replaced earlier bark and timber shingle across the region from the latter decades of the nineteenth century onward. What remains in 2018 is the building's bones: iron, timber, and the particular stillness of a structure that has outlasted its purpose. The broader Monaro pastoral economy moved through a series of contractions across the twentieth century, each wave leaving more buildings standing empty on private land. The shearers' quarters in Delegate is one of 59 subjects Brett Patman documented across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley for the A Place to Call Home series, photographed between 2016 and 2019.