Storage Shed

The corrugated iron storage shed at Big Hill Post Office is a secondary structure, standing in the paddock alongside the main timber residence. Where the residence held bedrooms, fireplaces, a kitchen, and the small kiosk that constituted the post office proper, the shed held what every working rural property needed stored and kept dry. Its walls have rusted through to deep orange and brown, the iron skin of the building now more colour than material. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, its establishment gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan on 7 October that year. The settlement at Big Hill had been fifty years in the making by then, downstream of Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur's 1819 Arthursleigh grant on the Wollondilly River. By the time the post office opened, Big Hill had a Methodist chapel, a school, and enough of a community to warrant its own mail service. John Wade was awarded the mail contract in November 1869, running a three-stop loop to Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week by horseback, for £45 per annum. The post office ran for 76 years, closing in 1945. The building it occupied was a combined post office and postmaster's residence, the typical rural arrangement of the period: one family's home that also happened to be the local mail point. The actual post-office function amounted to a kiosk window and a mail slot on the front of the building. The rest of it was rooms, fireplaces, newspaper-plastered walls keeping out the Southern Tablelands winter, and this shed in the paddock alongside. Photographed in 2020, the shed stands as it has for some time: iron going back to iron, the paddock holding it in place. The wider complex is abandoned, the residence beside it with its verandah collapsing and blackberry pressing in from the back garden. The storage shed is the simpler of the two structures and, in its way, the more honest. It was built to hold things. It held them. Now it holds nothing but weather.