Home In The Valley

A weatherboard farmhouse stands in open paddock, the verandah collapsed at one end, sheets of corrugated iron lifting away from the roofline. A brick chimney holds its line against the sky where much of the rest has given way. Dry grass covers the ground on all sides, running to the base of the walls and out across the flat toward a low ridge of rolling hills. There is no shade left and nothing to mark where the yard once ended. Timber-framed selector's cottages of this kind were built in large numbers across rural New South Wales following the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, which opened Crown land to free selection at £1 per acre. A settler could erect a basic slab or weatherboard hut in two to three weeks; later generations added verandahs, brick chimneys, and iron roofs as circumstances allowed. The buildings in the A Place to Call Home series represent the full arc of that rural settlement: squatter huts of the 1830s through to consolidated pastoral structures of the wool boom era and the more modest selector cottages that followed. Three waves of decline cut through the communities that built these places. The 1890s Federation drought and rabbit plague halved sheep numbers across New South Wales and drove down wool prices at the same time. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, displaced pastoral families and inundated thousands of hectares of farmland in the Jindabyne and Adaminaby areas. The 1991 collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme, when prices fell to approximately $3 per kilogram, was the final economic blow to many marginal properties across the region. What the 2016 photograph records is the cumulative result of that long decline: a structure that was once someone's house, now open to the paddock, the chimney outlasting everything built around it. Home In The Valley is one of 59 subjects in the A Place to Call Home series, photographed by Brett Patman across the Snowy Monaro region and Hunter Valley between 2016 and 2019.