Shearers Quarters

Sunlight enters through a roof that has given way in sections, throwing defined shafts across an interior that has been left alone long enough for dust to settle into layers. Paint peels from the walls in strips, exposing the timber framing beneath. The floorboards and structural members are splintered, some pulling apart along the grain. Nothing has been removed so much as left behind, and the building is now doing what all unattended timber structures eventually do: returning to the ground it was cut from. Shearers' quarters like this one were a standard feature of working pastoral runs across New South Wales from the squatting era onward. They were communal by design, built to accommodate the gangs of itinerant workers who arrived for the annual shearing, worked hard for a concentrated period, and moved on. The research record for this series notes that quarters of this type typically comprised a row of bunks, with head stockmen, blacksmiths, saddlers, bullock drivers and horse breakers all housed in similar structures on the larger runs. The construction was functional rather than permanent: slab timber where it was available, galvanised iron for the roof, and as little material as the job required. Across the Snowy Monaro and Hunter Valley, buildings of this type were erected and extended through the wool boom years of the 1870s to 1890s, then left to stand as the pastoral economy contracted. The 1890s drought and rabbit plague halved sheep numbers across New South Wales. The 1991 collapse of the Wool Reserve Price Scheme, which sent prices crashing to roughly $3 per kilogram, marked the final economic blow to many marginal properties. The buildings did not fall all at once; they simply stopped being maintained. Brett Patman photographed this interior in 2016 as part of A Place to Call Home, a series documenting 59 subjects across the Snowy Monaro region and Hunter Valley. What the photograph holds is the quality of light inside a structure that has been open to the sky long enough to feel almost like the outdoors, and the specific texture of materials that were always basic and are now at the end of their life.