Main Bedroom Interior

The main bedroom of the Big Hill Post Office holds a timber bed frame against a wall stripped back to bare plaster and lath, its surface peeling in long curls. Daylight pushes through a grimy window and catches the dust suspended in the air, settling across floorboards that have not carried weight in decades. It is a spare room, almost nothing left in it, and that absence is its own kind of record. The building that contained this bedroom was never a large operation. The post-office function occupied a small kiosk at the front of the structure, a single service window and a mail slot facing the road. Behind that, the rest of the building was a residence, with multiple bedrooms, each fitted with a fireplace to hold off the winters that settle hard at 658 metres on the Southern Tablelands. The walls were insulated against draughts with layered newspaper, a practice that was common in rural timber construction of the period and is still visible in the bedroom above the bed. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869. The NSW Government Gazette notice, signed by Postmaster-General Daniel Egan on 7 October 1869, announced it simply: "BIG HILL, near Marulan, on the 1st proximo." From January 1870, mail arrived by horseback on a contract held by John Wade, who ran a three-stop loop covering Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week at £45 per annum. The post office ran for 76 years and closed in 1945. The building has been abandoned since, the verandah giving way along one side, the garden consumed by blackberry. This photograph was made in 2020.