Stone Drover's Hut

The stone walls are still standing. That is the first thing. On a flat, treeless Monaro plain with dry grass spreading to the horizon in every direction and a wide sky overhead, the cottage holds its ground without a roof, corrugated iron leaning against one side as though someone left it there for a job they never came back to finish. This is the Teamsters Cottage on Coonhoonbula station, known locally as Coonie, in the Dalgety district of the Snowy Monaro. The stone construction is consistent with the granite-bearing country around Dalgety, the same material used for the town's 1876 Police Station and Court House. The Eccleston family held Coonhoonbula from the early 1860s to the mid-1920s. Henry John Eccleston was established at Coonghoongbula by 1864. His widow Elizabeth ran the station after his death and died there herself in 1893. Their son Napoleon Callistus Eccleston, known as N. C., managed the run for roughly half a century, consolidating land holdings through the 1870s and 1880s and operating Coonie as a working wool station through at least 1912. In 1919, the land title passed first from the Bank of New South Wales to N. C. Eccleston and then from N. C. to his son Hugh John Eccleston. N. C. retired to Moss Vale around 1924, and the family's occupation of Coonie ended. The cottage's specific function is recorded in oral history from the Lost Collective community: teamsters carting supplies up to Coonie would shelter here while waiting for the wool clip to be ready for carting back toward Sydney. Drovers also used it. At N. C. Eccleston's funeral in November 1926, among the floral tributes was a wreath from Coonie and the Cottage as a single mourning party, which places the building as a named and recognised part of the run within living memory. Photographed in 2018, the cottage sits in the gap between formally listed heritage structures and the protected alpine huts maintained by volunteer organisations. There is no restoration programme, no interpretive sign. The walls remain because stone tends to outlast everything else.