Topdown

From above, the Big Hill Post Office is reduced to a geometry of rust. Corrugated iron sheets, stained brown and orange, stretch across the roof in long parallel ridges. Two skylights sit broken in the frame, their glass long gone, the structure beneath exposed to whatever the Southern Tablelands weather delivers. Vegetation crowds the edges of the site, pushing in from the paddock that surrounds the building on all sides. The post office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan just weeks earlier in the NSW Government Gazette of 8 October 1869. The notice was brief: "BIG HILL, near Marulan, on the 1st proximo." A mail contractor, John Wade, was awarded a three-year horseback run connecting Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week, effective from 1 January 1870, at £45 per annum. The building served simultaneously as the post office and the postmaster's family residence, the standard rural arrangement of the period. The actual post-office function occupied a small kiosk window and a mail slot at the front of the building. The rest was a home, with multiple bedrooms, fireplaces, a kitchen, and a verandah running along the bedroom wing. Walls were plastered with newspaper against the sub-freezing winters that come with the site's 658-metre elevation. The post office closed in 1945, after seventy-six years of operation. The building was used as a part-time residence for some time after that, then abandoned entirely. By the time the photograph was made in 2020, the verandah had partially collapsed, the wallpaper had disintegrated to a few remaining patches, and dense blackberry was consuming the back garden. The roof, visible here from the air, was well along the same path.