Through the Garden

Sunlight finds its way through the canopy and lands on a wall that has not been maintained in decades. Vines have crossed the facade of Big Hill Post Office and taken the path with them. The garden is not decorative at this point, it is structural, holding the place in a kind of slow compression. The post office opened on 1 November 1869, established by a notice signed by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan on 7 October that year and published in the NSW Government Gazette on 8 October 1869. The notice was brief: "BIG HILL, near Marulan, on the 1st proximo." That was the full announcement. Within weeks, a mail contract had been awarded to John Wade, horseback, three times a week, running Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill on a three-year term worth £45 per annum. The settlement at Big Hill was already fifty years old when the post office opened. Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur had been granted 1,000 acres in the parish of Eden Forest in September 1819, and by 1820 he had 1,854 sheep and 165 cattle on the Wollondilly River flats below the mountain. By the time the post office was gazetted, the district had a school and a Methodist chapel as well. The building itself is a combined post office and postmaster's residence, the standard arrangement for rural NSW in that period. The actual post-office function occupied a small kiosk with a mail slot facing the road. The rest of the building was a family home, with multiple bedrooms, fireplaces in each room, and walls insulated against the sub-freezing winters at 658 metres by newspapers pressed flat and pasted over the timber framing. Big Hill Post Office closed in 1945, after 76 years of operation. By the time Brett Patman photographed it in 2020, the blackberry had consumed the back garden and the vines had moved around to the front. The photograph records that moment, the building still standing, the garden deciding otherwise.