Hanging Scale

The hanging scale inside Leichhardt House has not moved in a very long time. Its dial is frozen, the face faded to near-illegibility, and a uniform layer of dust covers the metal frame and housing. It hangs in the dim interior of a building that was already old when most of the things around it were new. Leichhardt House is a slab cottage built around 1890 in the New South Wales Southern Tablelands, on a working pastoral property that has remained in the same family across multiple generations. The building is colonial vernacular construction: rough-sawn hardwood slabs fitted in the manner common across rural NSW from the later decades of the nineteenth century, when selectors working smaller land parcels under the Crown Lands Acts of 1861 and 1884 built quickly and locally, using whatever eucalypt timber the surrounding land offered. The cottage functioned as a dwelling for most of the twentieth century. A c.1920 photograph held by the family shows two young boys at the entrance, placing people inside the building at a point when the hanging scale, the washstand, and the other domestic objects now left behind would have all been in regular use. A wireless set inside the building suggests occupation continued well into the mid-twentieth century. At some point after the main family residence was established elsewhere on the property, the cottage was converted to shed use. The end wall carrying the original chimney was removed and replaced with large doors to allow equipment access. The interior fittings remained. The 2020 Lost Collective series records the building as it stands now: the slab walls intact, the domestic objects sitting undisturbed inside an agricultural shed, the hanging scale still in its place. The dial reads nothing. The building itself, built by an anonymous selector in the 1890s, is still standing.