The main bedroom floor is covered in dust and scattered plaster fragments. Faded linoleum runs beneath the debris. The surface shows years of undisturbed deterioration. No furniture remains in the frame.
Edition
Open edition
Open edition Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.
Limited edition A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.
$100.00 AUD
Size
Type
Colour
✓
Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 5 to 10 business days (unframed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.
The floor of the main bedroom at Big Hill Post Office is barely visible beneath the dust and plaster that has settled across it over the decades since the building was last lived in. Faded linoleum, its pattern worn to near-nothing, lies under a scattered layer of fallen ceiling material and grime. The room is still. Nothing has been moved. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan just weeks earlier. The building followed the standard rural pattern of the period: the post-office function occupied a small kiosk at the front of the structure, with a mail slot facing the road, while the rest of the building served as the postmaster's family residence. Multiple bedrooms, each with its own fireplace, made up the private half of the operation. The post office served the settlement at Big Hill, north of Marulan, on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, a district that had been grazed continuously since Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur established the Arthursleigh property on the Wollondilly River in 1819. The mail run in the post office's early years was carried on horseback. John Wade was awarded the contract on 29 November 1869, running a three-stop loop through Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week, on a three-year contract at £45 per annum. Big Hill Post Office closed in 1945, after 76 years of operation. The settlement had contracted through farm amalgamations and easier access to larger nearby towns. The building passed into part-time use before being abandoned entirely. By the time Brett Patman photographed it in 2020, the verandah along the bedroom wing had partially collapsed, blackberry had consumed the back garden, and the interior had been left to its own slow deterioration. The main bedroom floor is what remains: linoleum, dust, and the quiet evidence of a long time undisturbed.
04·FROM THE FIELD NOTES
The main bedroom of Big Hill Post Office sits in the residence half of a building that doubled as the local mail point for 76 years. From 1 November 1869 until 1945, the same structure served as both a working post office and a family home on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The bedroom floor, once covered in linoleum, now lies beneath a settled layer of dust and fallen plaster. The building has been abandoned since the post office closed, and the slow collapse of the interior continues undisturbed.
Brett Patman
05·SIZE GUIDE
Printsizes.
The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.
