Volunteer

An Australian magpie looks out from behind a tangle of lavender and green foliage at Bombala Railway Station, its black and white plumage just visible between the stems and one orange eye fixed to the side. In this photograph, made in 2016, the letters of the station name blur into the background and the station building is reduced to a single soft fragment behind the bird. The lavender is part of the working life of the site: local growers distil lavender oil in the goods shed. Bombala Railway Station opened for passenger services on 21 November 1921, the terminus of the Goulburn-Bombala branch line and the end point of a network that had pushed south from Joppa Junction since 1884. It took 37 years for the line to reach the southern Monaro tablelands. The station building is a NSW Government Railways Type 11 standard design, one of approximately 140 pre-cast concrete drop-panel structures built across regional NSW between 1919 and 1932. Heritage NSW has described it as one of the best pre-cast concrete structures to survive in the state. The station served the pastoral communities of the region for 65 years, the yard handling wool, beef cattle, superphosphate, and farm machinery. Regular passenger services ended in August 1974. The last train visited on 26 March 1986, three CPH railmotors. The branch line itself closed in May 1989 after the Numeralla River bridge at Chakola was declared unsafe. What the photograph records is what came after. The Friends of Bombala Railway have maintained the precinct through volunteer effort for well over a decade, keeping the station building, goods shed, signal box, footbridge, and yard infrastructure intact. The site is listed on the NSW State Heritage Register (SHR #01091), gazetted 2 April 1999. The lavender in the frame is part of that ongoing refusal to let the place disappear. The building stands.