Hunter Shack

The corrugated iron roof has gone the colour of old blood, the slow result of decades without paint or maintenance. Weathered timbers frame a single window, its glass long gone, the opening left to look out across whatever remains of the surrounding country. At the base of the walls, vegetation has begun the patient work of pulling the structure back into the ground. This is the Hunter Shack, one of the rural dwellings Brett Patman photographed across New South Wales between 2016 and 2019 for the A Place to Call Home series. The Hunter Valley locations in the series, of which this is one, sit in the part of the collection where specific histories have not yet been traced to a verified record. What the building shows is enough: a single-room form, corrugated iron over a timber frame, a window at one end, the whole thing small enough that two people would have filled it. The vernacular rural dwelling of this kind was built to function, not to last. Roofing progressed across generations from bark sheets to wooden shingles to galvanised iron, and the iron, once it arrived, changed slowly from silver-grey to the deep brown-red visible here. Walls of split timber were never intended to be permanent; they shrank as they dried, and interiors were lined with newspaper or hessian to keep the draughts out. The structure standing in this frame has been through all of that, and is now well past it. The A Place to Call Home series documents 59 subjects across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley, photographed between 2016 and 2019. Most sit outside formal heritage protection, in the gap between the alpine huts maintained by volunteer organisations and the town buildings listed in local environmental plans. The Hunter Shack is firmly in that gap. The 2019 photograph is what remains of the record.