Wyndam Home

Inside the Wyndam Home, dust has settled across furniture left in place when the building was abandoned. Light enters through broken windows, crossing walls where paint has peeled back in layers, each coat a different period in the building's life. The floor and remaining surfaces carry the slow accumulation of years of exposure. The Wyndam Home is one of 59 pastoral dwellings, selector's cottages, and rural outbuildings photographed by Brett Patman across rural New South Wales between 2016 and 2019 for the A Place to Call Home series. The series spans the Snowy Monaro region and the Hunter Valley, documenting structures that represent the full arc of rural settlement in New South Wales: from the squatter huts of the 1830s and 1850s through the selector's cottages built after the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, to the consolidated pastoral infrastructure of the wool boom era from the 1870s to the 1890s. These buildings sit in a gap in heritage protection. The formally listed alpine huts of the Kosciuszko National Park have volunteer organisations and parks staff working to maintain them. Town buildings have council Local Environmental Plan schedules. The isolated pastoral structures between those two categories have neither, and the Wyndam Home is among them. The peeling walls visible in this photograph are consistent with the interiors of vernacular rural buildings across the region, where newspaper or hessian was used to line slab walls against draughts as the timber shrank over time. What is left now is the record of a domestic space that was once maintained, repainted, and lived in, photographed in 2016 before further deterioration takes it beyond recognition.