Window Panes

The windows at Big Hill Post Office are barely holding on. The glass is grimy, the panes broken, the timber frame skewed within the wall opening and the paint peeling back to bare wood on all sides. Sunlight comes through regardless, falling into a room stripped back to its bones. Big Hill Post Office opened on 1 November 1869, gazetted by NSW Postmaster-General Daniel Egan on 7 October that year. It served the district of Big Hill, north of Marulan, in what is now Upper Lachlan Shire on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The settlement had been grazed continuously for fifty years before the post office opened, growing up around Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur's Arthursleigh pastoral grant of 1819. By the time the post office was established, the village comprised a Methodist chapel, a school, and the post office itself. The post-office function was small. The public-facing part of the building was a single kiosk window with a mail slot cut into the front wall. Everything behind it was a family residence: multiple bedrooms, each with its own fireplace, a hallway, a kitchen and dining area still holding leftover items decades after the building was abandoned. The interior walls were plastered with newspaper, pressed directly onto the timber framing as draught insulation against the cold winters at 658 metres elevation. Mail arrived by horseback from the first months of operation. On 29 November 1869, John Wade was awarded the contract to run the route covering Mooroowoolen, Long Reach, and Big Hill three times a week, at £45 per annum, effective from 1 January 1870. Big Hill Post Office closed in 1945, after seventy-six years of operation. The verandah along the bedroom wing has partially collapsed. Dense blackberry has consumed the back garden. The windows, skewed and cracked, still face the same direction they always did. This photograph was made at the building in 2020.