Jindabyne Hut

In the alpine country above Jindabyne, a slab timber and corrugated iron hut stands in open pasture. The walls carry the characteristic weathering of structures exposed to Snowy Mountains winters without maintenance: timber darkened and checked, iron faded and beginning to lift at the edges. Nothing has been added and nothing taken away. The hut is what it always was, just older. Structures of this type served stockmen moving cattle and sheep through the high country during summer grazing runs. The Australian Alps National Parks record over 200 historic huts, buildings and structures across ACT, NSW and Victoria, built for the same purpose: shelter at altitude, where conditions changed without warning and the nearest town was a day or more away. The preferred construction timber in the high country was Alpine Ash, Eucalyptus delegatensis, chosen for its straight grain and the ease with which it split under a maul and wedge. A competent settler could raise a basic hut in two to three weeks using hand tools alone. Roofing progressed over the generations from bark sheets tied with kurrajong fibre, to wooden shingles, to the galvanised corrugated iron that eventually became the standard material across the Monaro and the mountains above it. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, directly displaced pastoral communities in the Jindabyne district, inundating thousands of hectares of farmland and homesteads to form Lake Jindabyne. What survived the water sat higher, on ground that remained pastoral country for a time, then was progressively absorbed into national parks as grazing leases lapsed. The cessation of pastoral grazing in Kosciuszko National Park removed the last high-country grazing families from the landscape; the huts they left behind entered a different kind of time. This photograph, made in 2018, is part of the A Place to Call Home series, which documents 59 rural structures across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley regions of New South Wales. Most sit outside formal heritage protection. The Kosciuszko Huts Association maintains the listed alpine huts using traditional building techniques. The structures between those categories, on private pastoral land with no register entry behind them, have no such arrangement. Collapse is the only trajectory most of them are on.