Old Timber Home

The walls are split slab timber, vertical or near-vertical, the kind that a settler could raise in two to three weeks with a maul and wedge and nothing more. They are pulling apart now, each piece following its own slow trajectory as the framing beneath them fails. The roof has partially collapsed, exposing the remaining rafters to whatever comes: rain, frost, summer heat. This is what a vernacular colonial dwelling looks like when no one is left to patch it. Structures of this type were the physical residue of the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, which allowed free selection of up to 320 acres of Crown land at £1 per acre. In practice, only about one-third of the 62,000 selections taken up across New South Wales between 1861 and 1884 were genuine family operations. The rest were dummies, speculators, or squatters consolidating their own runs. The families who did stay built what they could afford: slab walls split tangentially along the grain from blackbutt, stringybark, or ironbark; roofs that moved from bark sheets to wooden shingles to galvanised iron as money allowed; floors of bare earth or crushed termite mound, later replaced with sawn timber boards. Three waves of decline emptied these places out. The Federation drought and rabbit plague of the 1890s 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 and displaced pastoral communities at Jindabyne and Adaminaby. Then, in 1991, the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme pushed prices to approximately $3 per kilogram, a final blow to marginal pastoral properties that had been carrying debt for decades. This photograph, made in 2018, records what remains. The timber is still standing, just. The roof is open. The dry grass has moved in around the base of the walls. It is one of 59 structures Brett Patman documented across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley between 2016 and 2019, each one sitting outside formal heritage protection, each following the same slow arc toward the ground.