Multiple abandoned timber-framed buildings stand in a cluster. Corrugated iron roofs show heavy rust staining. Timber frames sag visibly under their own weight. No movement, no signs of recent occupation. The surrounding land is open and quiet.
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Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards
03·THE STORY
About thisprint.
At Numbla Vale, a cluster of timber-framed buildings leans into its own decline. The corrugated iron roofs are stained deep brown-red with rust, the frames beneath them bowed by years of load and weather. There is more than one structure here, and they share that quality common to small pastoral holdings across the Snowy Monaro: built to last long enough, and now lasting well past any intention. The Snowy Monaro was among the earliest pastoral frontiers beyond the settled districts of New South Wales. Squatters pushed into the region from 1827 onward, running sheep and cattle across the Ngarigo country that had been occupied for at least 21,000 years before them. The Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened the Monaro to selectors, allowing the purchase of up to 320 acres of Crown land at £1 per acre. The buildings that followed were vernacular by necessity. Timber slabs were split tangentially along the grain using a maul and wedge, set vertically or horizontally between grooved posts, and roofed first in bark, then in shingles, then in the corrugated iron that now rusts back into the landscape. A capable settler could raise a basic hut in two to three weeks. The Numbla Vale area is listed in the NSW State Heritage Inventory (Item ID 2410060). The broader Snowy Monaro carries more than 230 heritage items under the Cooma-Monaro LEP 2013, and the Australian Alps National Parks are National Heritage listed, with over 200 historic huts and structures across the range. The buildings photographed here sit outside formal protection, on land where no maintenance schedule applies and no volunteer association turns up with traditional tools to keep the walls standing. Three waves of decline shaped what the Snowy Monaro looks like now. The 1890s drought and rabbit plague halved sheep numbers across New South Wales. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, displaced pastoral communities and inundated thousands of hectares of farmland. The collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme in 1991 removed the last economic rationale for marginal holdings. The buildings at Numbla Vale are a physical record of that arc. Photographed in 2018 as part of A Place to Call Home, a series documenting rural structures across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley regions of New South Wales.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
At Numbla Vale in the Snowy Monaro, a group of timber-framed buildings stands in various stages of collapse. Corrugated iron roofs, stained deep with rust, rest on frames that have lost their square. The buildings are the kind that went up fast, erected by settlers who knew how to work timber and had little else to work with. Slab construction and galvanised iron were the materials of the Monaro. What remains here is what the land and the weather have not yet taken.
Brett Patman
The series
A Place to Call Home
2015–2020 · 60
photographs
A series of rural homesteads from the Snowy Monaro region of southern New South Wales, with a few from the Hunter Valley. Most were family homes left behind when a generation moved to town; others when the land could no longer be worked. The buildings are smaller than the industrial sites that anchor most of Lost Collective and tend to be older. Most are timber-framed.
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