Myrtle Mountain Shack

The shack on Myrtle Mountain is held together more by habit than by structure. Its corrugated iron roof has sagged along the ridge, the sheets pulling away from the rafters beneath. The exterior timber walls have shed their paint in long peeling strips, exposing layers going back through decades of maintenance and neglect, each coat a record of someone who still cared enough to paint it. Buildings like this one were put up across rural New South Wales from the 1830s onward. The methods changed little for generations: split timber, corrugated iron when it became available, a door at one end and a window somewhere along the wall. A settler could raise a basic hut in two to three weeks using a maul, wedge, and broadaxe. The expectation was not permanence but shelter, and shelter was enough. The Snowy Monaro region and surrounding rural districts saw waves of construction tied directly to economic conditions: the squatter runs of the 1830s and 1840s, the selector period following the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, the wool boom consolidation of the 1870s and 1880s, and then a long succession of pressures that made marginal country unworkable. The 1890s drought and rabbit plague halved sheep numbers across New South Wales. The 1991 collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme pushed prices to around $3 per kilogram. Each wave left more buildings standing empty. Myrtle Mountain shack sits in that longer story. No formal heritage listing protects it. No volunteer organisation maintains it. The iron will keep lifting at the edges, the timber will keep moving with moisture, and the paint will keep finding new places to peel. What the 2018 photograph records is a structure still upright, still legible, still there to be looked at before it is not. Part of the A Place to Call Home series, documenting rural vernacular buildings across New South Wales photographed between 2016 and 2019.