Front Corner Window

The front corner window at Big Hill Post Office is a few steps from where the mail slot opens onto the road. That slot and a small kiosk window were, by all evidence, more or less the entire extent of the post-office function. The rest of the building was a residence, and this corner window belonged to it as much as to any official operation. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan a few weeks earlier in the NSW Government Gazette of 8 October that year. The notice described it simply as "Big Hill, near Marulan." Within two months, a mail contractor named John Wade had been awarded the run connecting Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week by horseback, at £45 per annum. The post office closed in 1945, after 76 years of operation. For all of that time, the building served the dual role common to rural NSW post offices of the period: one family's home and the district's only mail point. The construction follows that pattern too, vertical timber slabs and later weatherboard additions, internal walls plastered with newspaper against the sub-freezing winters at this elevation. Multiple bedrooms, each with its own fireplace. A verandah along one side, now partially collapsed. By the time this photograph was made in 2020, the window frame was working itself apart. Paint had peeled back to bare and rotting timber. The glass behind it, grimy from years without a hand to clean it, still held the light coming through. The corner of the building that would have faced anyone arriving at the kiosk to post a letter now faces nothing but an overgrown paddock. Big Hill Post Office has not handled mail in eight decades, but the window is still there, still letting the light in.