Over the Bed

The bed frame is still there. That is the first thing the photograph tells you. Bare iron, pushed against a wall that has been peeling itself apart for decades, paint curling away from plaster in broad ragged sheets. Beneath the plaster, pressed flat against the timber framing of the wall, layers of newspaper. Not decoration. Insulation. At 658 metres on the Southern Tablelands, the winters at Big Hill drop hard, and whoever lived in this room needed every layer they could get between themselves and the cold coming through the walls. This was the postmaster's residence. The Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan just weeks earlier. The post-office function itself occupied almost nothing, a kiosk window and a mail slot on the front of the building, facing the road. The rest of the structure was a family home, the way most rural post offices of the period worked. One family ran the mail counter and lived behind it. The first mail to reach this building came by horseback. John Wade won the mail contract on 29 November 1869, running the route between Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week for £45 a year. The post office ran for 76 years before closing in 1945, as farm amalgamations and improved transport drew the district's population toward larger towns. What the 2020 photograph records is the bedroom as it has been left: the frame, the wall, the light falling across surfaces that have had a long time to come apart. The newspaper in the plaster is still doing what it was put there to do, holding the wall together a little longer than it would have managed on its own.