Farmstead

The walls are going. Slab timber that was split from a eucalyptus trunk using nothing more than a maul and wedge, dropped between grooved posts and expected to last generations, is now pulling apart at the seams and leaning with the weight of neglect. The window frames are long gone, leaving open rectangles that look out over fields gone dormant. There is no roof to speak of. What remains is the skeleton of a structure that was built to be practical, not permanent, and has lasted well past anyone's expectations. Buildings like this one were the standard form of rural shelter across New South Wales from the 1830s onward. A settler with the right tools could erect a basic slab hut in two to three weeks. Slabs were split tangentially along the grain of preferred eucalyptus species, the most common being blackbutt, stringybark, and ironbark in the lower country. The walls went up between grooved posts; the roof started as bark sheets tied with kurrajong fibre, and over time, as circumstances improved, progressed through wooden shingles to galvanised iron. Interior walls were lined with newspaper or hessian to stop the draughts that came through as the timber shrank over dry summers. After the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened Crown land to free selection, structures like this one multiplied across rural New South Wales. Selectors could claim up to 320 acres at £1 per acre, with three years' residence required. Many tried. The land was hard, the droughts were ruinous, and by the 1890s the rabbit plague and collapsing wool prices had already begun pushing families off marginal country. Later pressures, displacement from the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme in the 1960s and the collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme in 1991, accelerated what the weather had started. This farmstead, photographed in 2016 as part of the A Place to Call Home series, sits in the gap between the formally heritage-listed alpine huts maintained by volunteer organisations and the town buildings covered by council listings. It belongs to neither category. It is simply there, on private pastoral land, losing ground to the elements at a rate that formal protection will not interrupt.