Dust settled across a back corner of an abandoned timber building. Paint peeled from the walls in large sections, exposing layers beneath. A grimy window admitted little light. The floor and surfaces are undisturbed by any recent presence.
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The back corner of the Big Hill Post Office residence is a quiet place. Dust coats every surface. Paint has peeled from the timber walls in long strips, the layers beneath telling the story of successive attempts to keep a draughty building liveable through the sub-freezing winters typical at this elevation. A window, its glass filmed with years of grime, barely admits enough light to show what remains. This corner sits along the bedroom wing, which ran off a side verandah. By the time Brett Patman photographed the building in 2020, that verandah had partly collapsed at one corner, and the blackberry had moved in hard against the back garden. The building stood in the kind of stillness that takes decades to settle in. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan in the Government Gazette of 8 October 1869. The post office served the grazing district at Big Hill, north of Marulan on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, a settlement that had been running sheep and cattle since Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur established the Arthursleigh property on the Wollondilly River in 1819. By the time the post office opened, fifty years of grazing had built a small village around a Methodist chapel, a school, and the post office itself. The post office function occupied a modest kiosk at the front of the building, a single window and a mail slot facing the road. The rest of the structure was the postmaster's residence, multiple bedrooms each with its own fireplace, a kitchen, a dining area, and hallways connecting them. Newspaper was pressed into the internal walls for draught insulation. Mail contractor John Wade ran the route to Big Hill from 1 January 1870, covering Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week by horseback on a three-year contract worth £45 per annum. Big Hill Post Office closed in 1945, seventy-six years after it opened. The building was photographed for Lost Collective in 2020.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
The back corner of the Big Hill Post Office residence sits in the kind of quiet that accumulates over decades. Paint peels from the walls in long strips, each layer a record of a different occupant's attempt to keep the place liveable. A window, filmed with grime, lets in enough light to show what has been left behind. The verandah running along this wing has partly collapsed at one corner. The post office served the Southern Tablelands district from 1 November 1869 until 1945, seventy-six years of mail through one front door.
Brett Patman
05·SIZE GUIDE
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