Across the Paddock

Big Hill Post Office stands in Upper Lachlan Shire on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, north of Marulan, at an elevation of 658 metres. From across the paddock, the timber residence sits exposed with a second structure beyond it, its walls weathered and its windows broken or skewed hard in their frames. Tall grass and encroaching scrub have moved in around the building's base. There is nothing theatrical about its condition. It is simply giving way. The NSW Government Gazette gazettal notice was signed on 7 October 1869, and Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November that year. The post-office function itself was small. Brett Patman's caption for the kiosk frame is unambiguous: "This is more or less all that actually comprised the post offic[e]." A single window and a mail slot at the front of the building. The rest was a family's house, with multiple bedrooms, each with its own fireplace, a hallway running through to the kitchen, and internal walls lined with newspaper as insulation against sub-freezing winters. That was the arrangement across most of rural New South Wales at the time: one family, one front room set aside for public business, one mail slot facing the road. John Wade was awarded the mail contract for the Big Hill run on 29 November 1869, carrying mail by horseback on a three-stop loop through Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week, for £45 per annum. The post office ran on those terms, or terms like them, for seventy-six years, closing in 1945 as the settlement contracted around it. By the time Patman photographed the building on 13 June 2020, the side verandah had partially collapsed, blackberry had consumed the back garden, and what wallpaper remained was disintegrating to a few loose patches on the wall. One window pane held on in its frame, barely. The view from across the paddock, the one this photograph records, is straightforward: a building at the end of its time, in a paddock that has already moved on without it.