Dalgety Petrol Station

Three fuel pumps stand on a cracked concrete island at a closed roadside service station in Dalgety, on the Snowy River in the Monaro. The central pump is painted yellow and carries a hand-lettered Closed sign, and hoses still hang from the pumps either side of it. Rust streaks the white casings and vegetation pushes in from the dirt surrounds. A corrugated iron shed stands behind, a satellite dish bracketed to its left wall, under a heavy cloud-filled sky.

The station's operator, brand and operating dates are not documented anywhere the Lost Collective facts library can reach, so none of them are asserted here. The town is another matter. In 1903 a Federal Royal Commission proposed Dalgety, on the banks of the Snowy, as the site for Australia's national capital, and the Seat of Government Act named it as the seat of government in 1904. In the final parliamentary ballot in October 1908, Dalgety lost to Yass-Canberra. Brett photographed the pumps on 30 December 2018, on the Nikon D850. What the frame holds is a small country fuel stop that has simply stopped and been left standing rather than removed, in a town whose largest moment was a road not taken a century earlier.