Backyard

The back of Big Hill Post Office is corrugated iron and cracked concrete, weeds coming up through every joint and gap. There is nothing decorative about this corner of the building. It is the working end, the part nobody stood in front of for photographs, and that is probably why it looks exactly the way it does now. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869. The NSW Government Gazette ran the establishment notice on 8 October that year, signed by Postmaster-General Daniel Egan, naming the place as "Big Hill, near Marulan." The post office ran for 76 years before closing in 1945. For most of that time it followed the standard rural arrangement of the period: the postmaster's family lived in the building, the post office itself occupied a kiosk window and a mail slot at the front, and the rest of the structure was a house. The yard behind it was the house's yard. The settlement at Big Hill had been taking shape for fifty years before the post office opened. Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur received his Arthursleigh grant of 1,000 acres on the Wollondilly River in September 1819, and within a year he had 1,854 sheep and 165 cattle on the country. By the time the post office was gazetted in 1869, the district had grown to include a Methodist chapel and a school alongside the post office. By 1945, when the post office closed, farm amalgamations and better roads to larger nearby towns had reduced the need for a local mail point. The building that remained after 1945 continued through partial occupation for some period before being fully abandoned. This photograph, taken in 2020, records what the backyard looks like now: concrete cracked apart by decades of frost and weed, corrugated iron walls carrying rust and peeling paint in layers, the whole yard given over to whatever grows through concrete when nobody is watching. The post office kiosk is around the front. This is the part that was always out the back.