Through the Fence

The wire fence in the foreground is corroded through, its strands catching light in a way that draws the eye before the building behind it does. What stands beyond it is the front face of Big Hill Post Office, a combined post office and postmaster's residence that operated in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales for 76 years. The timber is warped and weathered now, the structure settling slowly into the paddock around it. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869. The gazettal notice, signed by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan on 7 October 1869 and published in the NSW Government Gazette two days later, announced it simply: "BIG HILL, near Marulan, on the 1st proximo." Within weeks, a mail contract had been awarded to John Wade to run the route by horseback between Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week, at £45 per annum. The post office portion of the building was small. One kiosk window and a mail slot facing the road. The rest of the structure was a residence, with multiple bedrooms each fitted with its own fireplace, a hallway connecting the living area through to the kitchen, and walls insulated against sub-freezing Southern Tablelands winters by newspaper plastered directly to the timber framing. The residence and its small attached operation served as the communications centre for a settlement that had grown downstream of Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur's Arthursleigh grazing grant, first stocked in 1819 and 1820. By the early twentieth century, Big Hill had a Methodist chapel, a school, and the post office. By 1945, the post office had closed. The school and chapel followed. What the 2020 photograph records is the fence line in front of what remains. The building behind it is still standing, but only just. The photograph was made during a single visit on 13 June 2020, one of 35 frames taken across the site that day.