Front Yard

The path to the front of Big Hill Post Office is cracked paving stone and encroaching weeds. Rust has bled down the fence posts on either side, the kind of slow staining that comes from decades of wet winters at 658 metres above sea level. The entrance to the building sits at the end of this path, and it is not a grand entrance by any measure. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan just weeks earlier in the NSW Government Gazette of 8 October 1869. The building combined the post office function with the postmaster's family residence, the standard arrangement for rural NSW mail points of the period. The actual post-office portion was small: a kiosk window and a mail slot facing the road. The rest of the building was a family home. The settlement at Big Hill had grown downstream of Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur's Arthursleigh pastoral grant, first stocked in 1820. By the time the post office opened, fifty years of grazing had built a small community around a Methodist chapel, a school, and the post office. Mail to the district was carried by John Wade, who was awarded the contract on 29 November 1869 to run the route through 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. The building has sat abandoned since, the front yard slowly returning to scrub. When Brett Patman photographed the site in 2020, the paving stones were already well broken and the weeds well established. The fence posts held their rust. The path remained, leading to a door that no longer had mail behind it.