Rear Residence Topdown

Seen from directly above, the rear residence of Big Hill Post Office is a set of open rooms. The roof has come down, and what remains are the outlines of walls, the geometry of a house plan, and vegetation pushing in from every edge. It is the kind of view that makes a building look like a diagram of itself. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan in notice [1653] of the NSW Government Gazette dated 8 October 1869. The establishment notice describes the location simply as "Big Hill, near Marulan." The post office was one of many opened across rural New South Wales in the late 1860s as the colony's population spread into Selection Act country. The site sits at 658 metres elevation in what is now Upper Lachlan Shire, north of Marulan, on the Southern Tablelands. The building served the typical mid-Victorian rural pattern: the post office function occupied a small kiosk at the front of the structure, with a mail slot facing the road, while the residence behind it housed the postmaster's family. The two were, practically speaking, one building with two purposes. By the time Big Hill also had a Methodist chapel and a school, the post office had been running for some decades. The complex ran for 76 years before closing in 1945. What the 2020 aerial frame records is what that building looks like after another seven decades without maintenance. The walls are still standing, weathered timber holding the outline of rooms that once had ceilings and fires in winter. The vegetation visible from above has been working at the structure steadily, filling the spaces the roof no longer covers. This photograph was captured in 2020 using a DJI Mavic 2 Pro as part of a single-visit documentation of the Big Hill Post Office complex.