Backyard

The backyard of Leichhardt House is a quiet space. Grass and low vegetation press in from the edges. Rusting metal sits among the growth. Nothing moves. The scene has the stillness of a place that no longer needs tending, though the building it surrounds remains in active use. The cottage itself is a slab timber structure, built around 1890 by a family whose name has been withheld at their request. It sits in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, a region opened to smaller selectors under the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 and the Crown Lands Act of 1884. Settlers arriving under those acts carved farms from pastoral runs using whatever the land offered. An average selector could raise a basic slab hut in two to three weeks using locally split eucalypt timber. The building is consistent with that tradition: colonial vernacular, single storey, rectangular, built to be functional rather than formal. For most of the twentieth century, the cottage served as a dwelling alongside a larger family home constructed nearby in the early 1900s. In the 1964-65 fire season, one of the most destructive in NSW history to that point, fires swept the Southern Tablelands. The larger home was destroyed. The slab hut survived. Dense hardwood construction, close to the ground, proved more resilient than the lighter framing of its newer neighbour. After the fires, the chimney end wall was removed and large doors fitted in its place, converting the cottage to shed use. That is the role it still serves. By 2020, when Brett Patman photographed the property, the backyard recorded a domestic space that had not been domestic for decades. The photograph holds that transition without comment: the grass advancing, the metal rusting, the cottage standing as it has stood for around 130 years.