Dining Area

The dining room of the Big Hill Post Office residence is framed by a corrugated iron ceiling, its surface blackened with mould. The ceiling sits low, pressing down over a room that has been coming apart for decades. A timber dresser still stands against the wall. On the floor around it: upturned buckets, a green drum, scattered newspapers, and, behind the debris, the brick face of a fireplace buried under fallen timber. The building that housed this room opened on 1 November 1869, when the NSW Postmaster-General gazetted the Big Hill Post Office into existence. The gazette notice, signed by Daniel Egan on 7 October 1869, described it simply as "Big Hill, near Marulan." The post office operated for 76 years, closing in 1945. For most of that period, the arrangement was the one typical of rural NSW in the period: a family ran the post office out of their own home, with the public-facing kiosk at the front of the building and the rest of the structure given over to domestic life. The dining room, the fireplace, the dresser, these were the private side of that arrangement. Big Hill sits at 658 metres on the Southern Tablelands, in the Upper Lachlan Shire, north of Marulan. The settlement grew out of a grazing district established around Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur's Arthursleigh property from 1819. By the time the post office opened fifty years later, the village had a Methodist chapel and a school alongside it. By 1945, when the post office closed, farm amalgamations and better transport to larger towns had reduced the community enough that the service was no longer viable. What the 2020 photograph records is the room as it has been left: the dresser upright, the fireplace intact behind its debris, the ceiling intact but advancing steadily toward the floor. The newspapers scattered across the ground echo the newspapers that once lined the walls of the bedrooms here as draught insulation against the sub-freezing winters at this elevation. Different newspapers, same building, same silence.