Rusted Roof

A weatherboard farmhouse stands in open pasture, its corrugated iron roof consumed by rust. The iron has gone deep red-brown across every surface, and sheets have pulled free from the rafters and lie scattered across the ground below the eaves. A brick chimney rises at the left gable end, still standing. Behind the rear wall, old-growth trees press in close, their canopy overhanging the collapsed roofline. The surrounding pasture is open and flat, the kind of country that defines the rural districts of New South Wales. Timber weatherboards and a brick chimney are the material indicators of a later-period selector's cottage, the building type that spread across the Monaro and its surrounding districts after the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened Crown land to smallholders at one pound per acre. The acts allowed free selection of up to 320 acres, requiring three years' residence and improvements to the land. The buildings that followed were modest by design: a single-storey dwelling, a chimney at one end, weatherboards over a timber frame, a corrugated iron roof replacing the bark sheets and wooden shingles of the earlier squatter period. The rural districts of New South Wales endured three successive waves of decline across the twentieth century. Drought and rabbit plague in the 1890s halved sheep numbers across the state and began the slow withdrawal of pastoral families from marginal country. The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, constructed between 1949 and 1974, inundated thousands of hectares of farmland and directly displaced pastoral communities around Jindabyne and Adaminaby. The 1991 collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme, with prices crashing to approximately three dollars per kilogram, was the final economic blow to many smallholdings on the margins. What remains in 2018 is a farmhouse standing without a roof, its chimney intact, its walls still holding their line. The iron has returned to rust. The trees behind have grown to fill the skyline. The ground holds the sheets that could no longer hold the weather. This photograph is part of the A Place to Call Home series, documenting vernacular rural structures across New South Wales photographed by Brett Patman between 2016 and 2019.