Home On the Range

A weatherboard cottage sits low on open grazing land, its rusted corrugated iron roof meeting a sky thick with storm cloud. A timber picket fence runs along the front. A single poplar stands to the left, planted at some point to mark the boundary or break the wind. A power line runs from the building out to a pole at the paddock's edge, a detail that locates the place somewhere in the mid-to-late twentieth century, when the electricity grid finally reached properties like this one across rural New South Wales. The cottage represents the selector's typology that spread across the region from the 1860s onward. The Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened Crown land to smallholders, allowing free selection of up to 320 acres at a pound per acre, with a deposit of five shillings per acre and a residency requirement. Tens of thousands of selectors took up that offer across New South Wales in the following decades, erecting modest timber dwellings on blocks that were often marginal from the start. Weatherboard construction, common in later-period selector cottages, replaced the earlier split-slab walls of the squatting era and signalled a small step up in resources and intention. The grazing land around the cottage tells its own story. Three waves of decline reshaped the pastoral economy of rural New South Wales: drought and rabbit plague in the 1890s halved sheep numbers across the state; the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, directly displaced pastoral communities and inundated thousands of hectares of farmland; and the 1991 collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme, which sent prices crashing to approximately three dollars per kilogram, made marginal properties unviable for good. Cottages like this one were left standing when the families moved on. The photograph was made in 2018 as part of A Place to Call Home, a series documenting abandoned rural structures across the Snowy Monaro region and the Hunter Valley. The storm front building overhead gives the frame an urgency the building itself no longer has.