Smaller Bedroom

The smaller bedroom inside the Big Hill Post Office sits at the residential end of a building that was, for 76 years, simultaneously a family home and the sole mail point for a remote grazing district on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. What the photograph records is a room in an advanced state of deterioration. Paint has peeled back from the walls in broad sections, exposing the layers beneath, each one a different colour, a different decade. Dust has settled across every surface. A single window, its glass clouded with grime, admits a weak light that falls across the damage without softening it. Nothing remains in the room to suggest its former function beyond the walls themselves. The Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, its establishment gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan in the NSW Government Gazette of 8 October that year. The building served a district that had been continuously grazed since Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur's Arthursleigh estate was established on the Wollondilly River in 1819. By the time the post office opened, fifty years of pastoral settlement had produced a small village: a Methodist chapel, a school, and the post office. The post-office function occupied only a small portion of the structure, a kiosk window and a mail slot facing the road. The rest of the building was the postmaster's residence: multiple rooms, each with its own fireplace, a hallway connecting the living area through to the kitchen and dining room, and a verandah running along the bedroom wing. The smaller bedroom is one of those rooms. The post office closed in 1945 after 76 years of operation. The building has been abandoned since, and the 2020 photograph finds it still standing but coming apart steadily. Paint falls from the walls. The window holds its position in the frame without admitting much of the world outside. The room records the kind of quiet that follows a long time of being left alone.