Farm Shed

Sunlight finds its way into this farm shed through the gaps where the corrugated iron has pulled away from the frame. It falls across broken timbers and rusted sheeting, catching the texture of materials that have been weathering for a long time without anyone to slow them down. Sheds of this kind were the practical infrastructure of pastoral properties across rural New South Wales. Not the homestead, not the woolshed, but the outbuilding that kept the work moving: storing equipment, sheltering animals, housing the accumulated material of a working property. They were built to a vernacular pattern, using whatever was to hand, and they were repaired the same way. Corrugated iron replaced bark and timber shingles as roofing materials became available and affordable; the progression is visible in many surviving structures across the region. The A Place to Call Home series documents 59 subjects across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley, photographed by Brett Patman between 2016 and 2019. The buildings in the series span the full arc of rural settlement in these regions: from the squatting era of the 1830s through the selector period that followed the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, to the consolidated pastoral infrastructure of the wool boom years and beyond. Each wave of economic pressure, the 1890s drought and rabbit plague, the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme displacing communities from the 1960s, the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme in 1991, left more buildings standing empty on the landscape. This shed sits in that longer story. The corrugated iron is deep with rust, the timbers have given way in places, and the structure is returning to the ground on its own schedule. What the photograph records is the light still getting in, and the bones of the building still holding, at least for now.