Reclaimed Home

A broken window is doing what broken windows do: letting in light and letting in everything else. Vines have worked their way across the floor and up the walls, filling the room with the kind of slow, patient growth that takes years to reach this point. The timber surfaces are well past weathered. Whatever was left inside is gone. What remains is the structure itself and the plants that have decided it belongs to them now. The dwelling is one of the abandoned rural homesteads photographed across New South Wales between 2016 and 2019 for the A Place to Call Home series. The series spans the Snowy Monaro region and the Hunter Valley, documenting 59 subjects: family homesteads, shearers' quarters, drovers' huts, and pastoral outbuildings. Most sit outside formal heritage protection. The alpine huts further into the high country have volunteer organisations and parks staff looking after them. Town buildings have local environment plan listings. These structures, on private pastoral land between those two categories, largely do not. The buildings in the series represent the full arc of rural settlement across the region. The Robertson Land Acts of 1861 allowed selectors to claim up to 320 acres of Crown land at £1 per acre, with a requirement to live on the land for three years. Of the 62,000 selections taken up across New South Wales between 1861 and 1884, only about one third were genuine. The rest were dummy selectors, speculators, or squatters buying back their own runs. The families who did stay built their homes in slab timber, stone, and eventually galvanised iron, and worked the land through the drought and rabbit plague of the 1890s, the displacement caused by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme in the 1960s, and the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme in 1991. Each of those events left more buildings standing empty. This photograph, made in 2018, records what one room looks like when the family has been gone long enough for the vines to finish moving in.