An aerial view of the front facade of Big Hill Post Office, photographed from above and to the side. The timber structure stands against open sky. The roofline shows decorative sheet metal work. Decay has taken hold across the facade, with weathered timber and sagging structural elements visible.
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Big Hill Post Office sits on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, north of Marulan in Upper Lachlan Shire, at an elevation of 658 metres. The building is a timber structure, originally constructed in vertical slabs with later additions clad in weatherboards. The roofline carries decorative sheet metal work on the chimneys, added by a previous occupant. From the air, the front facade presents as a considered piece of civic architecture, the kind of building that was meant to signal permanence in a young settlement. The post office was gazetted on 7 October 1869, when NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan published notice [1653] in the NSW Government Gazette announcing that Big Hill Post Office, near Marulan, would open on 1 November 1869. Within weeks, a mail contract was awarded to John Wade to run the route between Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week by horseback, at £45 per annum, effective from 1 January 1870. The post office function was concentrated in a single kiosk window and mail slot at the front of the building. The rest of the structure was a family residence, the postmaster's home doubling as the community's mail point, the standard rural arrangement of the period. Multiple bedrooms each had their own fireplace. Walls were plastered with newspaper, a practical response to the sub-freezing winters that came with the elevation. By the early twentieth century, Big Hill comprised a Methodist chapel, a school, and the post office. The post office closed in 1945, after seventy-six years of operation, as the settlement contracted through farm amalgamations and improved transport to larger towns. The building passed through part-time residential use before being fully abandoned. This photograph, made in 2020 from a drone, records the front facade from above. The structure still stands. The decorative roofline is still legible. The timber is weathering back toward the landscape around it.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan just weeks before. The building served as both the local post office and the postmaster's family residence, a typical arrangement for rural NSW in the period. From a drone vantage, the front facade reads as a substantial civic presence against the Southern Tablelands sky, its decorative roofline details still legible despite decades of abandonment. The post office closed in 1945 after seventy-six years of operation, and the building has stood empty since.
Brett Patman
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