A timber-framed service kiosk inside a derelict building. The service window is open, the counter bare. Dust has settled across the surfaces. Faded signage remains on the kiosk. Natural light falls across the empty counter from the window opening.
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The service window of the Big Hill Post Office kiosk is small enough that it is easy to walk past without registering what it was. A timber-framed opening, a counter, a mail slot in the wall beside it, that is the post office. Not the whole building, just that one window. The rest of the structure was a family home, which is how rural post offices worked across New South Wales in the Victorian era. The postmaster's household took on the mail function and the public came to the front of their house to conduct their postal business through that window. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, following a gazettal notice signed by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan on 7 October 1869. The first mail contractor for the run, John Wade, was awarded a three-year contract on 29 November 1869 to carry mail 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 served the surrounding grazing district, country that had been continuously worked since Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur's Arthursleigh grant of 1819, fifty years before the post office opened. By the early twentieth century, Big Hill comprised a Methodist chapel, a school, and the post office. The post office closed in 1945, after 76 years of operation. The building at Big Hill, north of Marulan on the Southern Tablelands, was abandoned and continuing to deteriorate when Brett Patman photographed it in 2020. The kiosk window still faced the road. The counter was bare. Dust had settled across the surfaces and faded signage remained fixed to the timber frame. The rest of the residence, bedrooms with fireplaces, newspaper-plastered walls, a collapsing verandah, was still standing behind it. But the kiosk, as a photograph, tells the whole story of what this building was officially for, and how modest that function actually was.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
The kiosk window at Big Hill Post Office was, by Brett Patman's own account, more or less all that actually comprised the post-office function. A small service window and a mail slot set into the front of the building, the rest was a family residence. Opened on 1 November 1869 on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, the post office ran for 76 years before closing in 1945. By 2020, the kiosk stood intact but emptied, dust settled on the counter, faded signage still in place on the timber frame.
Brett Patman
05·SIZE GUIDE
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