Hunter Hiding

Inside the decaying shell of a Hunter Valley homestead, a fox stands in the shadows and watches. Broken light falls through the failing walls, catching dust motes as they move through the air. Timber surfaces show the advanced work of weather and time. The forgotten corners of the interior hold their ground in the uneven half-dark. The A Place to Call Home series documents rural vernacular structures across the Snowy Monaro region and the Hunter Valley, photographed by Brett Patman between 2016 and 2019. The buildings in this series represent the physical residue of Australia's pastoral settlement: squatters' huts from the 1830s and 1840s, selector's cottages from the 1860s onward, and the consolidated outbuildings of the wool boom era. Their construction methods were direct and practical. Slab timber walls, galvanised iron roofing, single-room floor plans with a door at one end and a window at the other. Structures a settler could raise in two to three weeks using a maul, a wedge, and a broadaxe. The Hunter Valley locations in this series have no individually verified construction dates or named occupants on record. What the photograph does record is plain: a building in the late stages of collapse, its walls giving way, its interior now shared with whatever has moved in. The fox in this frame is not incidental. It is the current occupant. The homestead has passed from one kind of use to another, quietly and without ceremony, as these buildings tend to do. Brett Patman photographed this structure in 2019. The print is part of the A Place to Call Home series, which spans 59 subjects across Rural New South Wales, Australia.