Overgrowth

The walls are still there, underneath. Timber or stone, the underlying structure holds its form, but only just. Vines have worked their way into every gap, across every surface, until the boundary between the building and the bush around it has become difficult to find. From the outside, the dwelling reads as a green mound more than a house. Its shape is still legible, but only because you know what you are looking for. Rural New South Wales produced thousands of buildings like this one across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Smallholder graziers, selectors, drovers, and station hands built homes on blocks ranging from a few dozen acres to several hundred, using whatever materials the land and the district offered. Slab timber was the common choice: split along the grain with a maul and wedge, set vertically or dropped horizontally between grooved posts, and roofed first with bark and later with galvanised iron. These were not permanent structures in any grand sense. They were built quickly, improved incrementally, and left when the economics of the land gave out. The economics gave out in waves. The 1890s brought drought, rabbit plague, and a wool price collapse that halved sheep numbers across NSW. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, inundated thousands of hectares of farmland and pushed pastoral families off country they had worked for generations. The 1991 collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme, which sent prices crashing to approximately $3 per kilogram, closed out the marginal operations that had somehow survived everything before it. What the photograph records is the end state of that long decline. The building is not ruined in any dramatic sense. It has simply been left long enough for the surrounding vegetation to make its claim. The vines do not distinguish between a dwelling and a fence post. They grow toward light and hold on. The silence that has settled here is not emptiness so much as the absence of the one thing that kept the bush at a distance: regular human presence. Photographed in 2016 as part of Brett Patman's A Place to Call Home series, which documents abandoned rural dwellings across the Snowy Monaro region of southern New South Wales and the Hunter Valley.