Kitchen

The kitchen of the Big Hill Post Office is a small room now defined by what rust and neglect have left behind. Appliances sit where they were last used, their surfaces corroded. Paint lifts from the walls in curling sheets. Empty shelves hold nothing but a layer of dust that has settled undisturbed for years. The room is quiet in the way that only genuinely abandoned places are quiet. The building this kitchen belongs to opened as a post office on 1 November 1869, when the NSW Postmaster-General gazetted its establishment with a notice signed on 7 October that year. The post-office function itself was modest: a kiosk window and a mail slot facing the road, which is more or less all that actually comprised the post office. The rest of the building was a residence, the kind of combined arrangement that was standard practice for rural NSW post offices of the period. A family lived here. The kitchen fed them through winters that dropped hard at 658 metres elevation on the Southern Tablelands, north of Marulan. The settlement at Big Hill had been farming country for fifty years before the post office opened. By the time the building was taking its first deliveries, the district already had a Methodist chapel and a school alongside the new mail point. The post office ran until 1945, a span of 76 years, before the contraction of small rural settlements and improved connections to larger towns made the service redundant. After 1945 the building passed into irregular use and then into none. By the time Brett Patman photographed the Big Hill Post Office in 2020, the kitchen looked as it does in this frame: rusted, peeling, and empty, with dust settled on every surface. The appliances are still there. The shelves are still there. The building is still standing, just.