Timber Weatherboards

The paint has come away in layers, grey over grey, each coat applied in a different decade by someone trying to keep the timber sound. What remains is a cross-section of effort: the raw wood exposed in strips and patches where the paint has lifted, the boards themselves still holding their horizontal lines, the surface raked by sunlight that shows every crack and open joint. This is a timber weatherboard cottage somewhere in rural New South Wales, derelict now, the structure still standing but no longer maintained. Weatherboard construction arrived on the Monaro later than the split-slab technique that preceded it. The research file for A Place to Call Home notes that timber weatherboards and stumps are characteristic of the later selector-period cottages, buildings that came after the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 opened Crown land to smaller selections of between 40 and 320 acres. Where the earlier slab hut could be erected in two to three weeks using a maul, wedge, and broadaxe, the weatherboard cottage represented a further investment, milled or pit-sawn timber, a more finished exterior, some expectation of permanence. By the 1880s and into the early twentieth century, these structures were the standard form for the smaller pastoral holdings that had replaced the great squatting runs across the southern tablelands. The broader story of the Monaro is one of compounding pressure on those holdings. The 1890s drought and rabbit plague halved sheep numbers across New South Wales. The Wool Reserve Price Scheme collapse in 1991 was the final economic blow to many marginal properties. The buildings that remain, this one among them, are what that long sequence of pressures left standing. Brett Patman photographed this cottage in 2016 as part of A Place to Call Home, a series documenting 59 structures across the Snowy Monaro region and Hunter Valley. The series covers the full arc of rural settlement on the southern tablelands: squatters' huts of the 1830s and 1840s, selector cottages from the 1860s onward, and the consolidated pastoral infrastructure of the wool boom era. This weatherboard exterior, its paint peeling back to bare timber, sits in the later part of that arc.