House On The Hill

The house sits on the crown of a bare hill with no tree, no fence, no outbuilding left standing nearby to give it company. The timber facade has been bleached by years of sun and wind to the colour of dry bone. The windows are broken, the frames open to whatever weather comes. From a distance the building reads as a silhouette; up close, the grain of the timber and the slow working of the elements become the whole subject. The A Place to Call Home series documents vernacular rural structures across the Snowy Monaro region of southern New South Wales and the Hunter Valley, photographed by Brett Patman between 2016 and 2019. The buildings in the series represent the full span of European rural settlement in those regions: squatter huts established from the late 1820s onward, selector's cottages built after the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened Crown land to purchase at one pound per acre, and the consolidated pastoral infrastructure of the wool boom era of the 1870s to 1890s. Three waves of decline shaped what survives. 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 and displaced pastoral communities at Jindabyne and Adaminaby. The collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme in 1991 drove wool prices to approximately three dollars per kilogram and removed the last economic margin from properties that were already struggling. Each wave left more buildings standing empty. Most of the structures in this series fall outside formal heritage protection. The alpine huts of the Australian Alps National Parks have volunteer organisations and parks staff maintaining them. Town buildings appear in council heritage registers. The isolated pastoral buildings between those two categories occupy a gap where no protection applies. This house on its hill is one of them. The photograph is what remains of a record.