Numbla Vale Cottages & Woolshed

Numbla Vale is listed on the NSW State Heritage Inventory (Item ID 2410060). The timber cottages and woolshed photographed here in 2018 are the kind of structures that defined pastoral life across the Snowy Monaro: vernacular buildings put up by selectors and graziers using locally split timber, maintained through successive generations, and then left to the weather when the land or the economics or the family line gave out. The paint peeling from the cottage walls tells that story in layers. Each coat represents a period when someone was still there to apply it, still invested in the upkeep of the place. The outermost layers are the most recent, the thinnest, the most faded. Underneath, older colours show through where the timber has contracted and the paint has lifted. The woolshed beside the cottages is further gone, its framing exposed, the corrugated iron on the roof working loose. Buildings like these sit in a particular gap in heritage protection. The alpine huts of Kosciuszko National Park are maintained by the Kosciuszko Huts Association and parks staff. Town buildings across the region appear in council Local Environmental Plan schedules, with the Cooma-Monaro LEP 2013 alone listing 230 heritage items. But isolated pastoral structures on private or Crown land, structures like these at Numbla Vale, often have no organised protection. The NSW State Heritage Inventory listing records their existence; it does not guarantee their survival. The Snowy Monaro's rural buildings represent the full arc of European settlement on Ngarigo country: squatter huts from the 1830s and 1840s, selector cottages built after the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, and consolidated pastoral infrastructure from the wool boom of the 1870s to the 1890s. Three subsequent waves, the 1890s drought and rabbit plague, the displacement caused by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme in the 1960s, and the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme in 1991, left more and more of these buildings standing empty. This photograph, made in 2018, is part of the A Place to Call Home series documenting what remains.