Hunter Hilltop

On an exposed Hunter hilltop, a derelict dwelling faces the valley with broken windows and walls that have begun their slow return to the ground. The roof line holds. The frames remain. But the glass is gone, and whatever once kept the weather out has long since failed. The structure sits in the open, with no shelter from the wind that moves across the ridge. Buildings of this kind represent the furthest reach of rural settlement across New South Wales. The Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened Crown land to free selection, allowing selectors to take up blocks of between 40 and 320 acres at £1 per acre. In practice, the arrangement was difficult. Only about one-third of the 62,000 selections taken up between 1861 and 1884 across New South Wales were genuine attempts to farm the land. The rest were speculative, or dummy selections made on behalf of squatters consolidating their runs. The families who did stay faced drought, falling wool prices, and land that, in marginal country, simply could not carry enough stock to sustain a household across generations. The Hunter Valley sits outside the Snowy Monaro heartland of this series, but the trajectory is the same: settled, worked, and eventually left. When a generation moved to town, or when the land could no longer be worked, the buildings stayed behind. Most sit in a gap between the formally protected alpine huts maintained by volunteer organisations and the heritage items listed in local environmental plans. For these structures, no such protection applies. What remains is what the weather has not yet taken. This photograph, made in 2019, records what is still standing. The valley below the hilltop is unchanged. The building is not. Part of the A Place to Call Home series, which documents 59 subjects across the Snowy Monaro region and Hunter Valley of New South Wales, photographed between 2016 and 2019.