Numbla Vale Cottage

Numbla Vale Cottage stands in open country in the Snowy Monaro region of rural New South Wales, its timber walls leaning gently under years of weather, paint peeled back to bare grain. The corrugated iron roof has turned the deep red-brown that comes only with serious age. Nothing about the structure announces itself. It simply stands, quietly, in a wide and silent landscape. The NSW State Heritage Inventory records Numbla Vale as a listed locality, placing it within a region that carries one of the densest concentrations of nineteenth-century rural heritage in New South Wales. The Cooma-Monaro Local Environmental Plan 2013 lists 230 heritage items across the district. Most of the structures in the A Place to Call Home series sit outside formal protection entirely, on private pastoral land where no heritage listing applies and where collapse is the only likely outcome. Cottages of this type were the physical result of the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, which opened Crown land to free selection at one pound per acre. Selectors could take up to 320 acres, pay a deposit of five shillings per acre, and settle the balance over three years, with a residence requirement attached. In practice, the land was hard and the economics harder. The 1890s brought drought, rabbit plague, and a collapse in wool prices that halved sheep numbers across New South Wales. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, inundated thousands of hectares of Monaro farmland. The 1991 collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme took prices to around three dollars per kilogram. Each wave left more buildings empty. Timber walls like these were typically split from local eucalyptus, maul and wedge driven along the grain, the slabs dropped between grooved posts or set vertically against wall plates. A competent settler could put up a basic hut in two to three weeks. Roofing moved from bark to wooden shingles to galvanised iron as circumstances allowed; by the time iron appeared, it was usually there to stay. Photographed in 2018 as part of the A Place to Call Home series, which documents 59 subjects across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley regions. This is what remains.