The front facade of the Big Hill Post Office viewed from above. Peeling paint on weathered timber boards. Upper-floor windows without glass. The entrance visible below, set within the building's front face. The surrounding paddock visible at the frame's edge.
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The 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. This aerial photograph, made in 2020, looks down across the front facade: weathered timber boards with paint lifting in sheets, upper-floor windows open to the weather, the entrance below still readable as the public face of a building that once held a community's mail. The post office opened on 1 November 1869, following a gazettal notice signed by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan on 7 October that year. The building operated as a combined post office and postmaster's residence, the standard rural NSW arrangement of the period, in which a family ran the mail service out of their own home. The post-office function itself was small, a kiosk window and a mail slot set into the front of the building. The rest of the structure was a house: multiple bedrooms each with a fireplace, a hallway running through to a kitchen and dining area, internal walls insulated against sub-freezing winters with layers of newspaper pressed flat against the timber framing. The first mail to arrive came by horseback. On 29 November 1869, the NSW Government Gazette recorded that John Wade had been awarded the mail contract for the route covering Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill, three stops, three times a week, at £45 per annum. He began the run on 1 January 1870. The post office ran for 76 years, serving a small settlement that had grown around the grazing country first opened by Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur's Arthursleigh grant of 1819. By the time Big Hill Post Office closed in 1945, the village had contracted. Farm amalgamations and improved transport had drawn people toward larger nearby towns, and the mail run that had once defined the rhythm of daily life here came to an end. By the time Brett Patman photographed it in 2020, the building had been abandoned for decades. The verandah along the bedroom wing had begun to collapse. Blackberry had consumed the back garden. The facade visible in this frame had shed its paint down to bare timber. The windows on the upper floor held no glass. The building remains on the paddock, slowly returning to the landscape that surrounded it long before the first letter passed through its door.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
The Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan just weeks earlier. The building served as both the local mail point and the postmaster's family residence, a combined arrangement typical of rural NSW in that period. The post-office function itself occupied little more than a kiosk window and a mail slot facing the road. The rest was a family home. The building ran this way for 76 years before closing in 1945, sitting in Upper Lachlan Shire on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, north of Marulan, at 658 metres elevation. By 2020, when this photograph was made, the facade had shed most of its paint and the upper windows stood empty.
Brett Patman
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