Hills

Mounds of dust and rubble have settled into the contours of the timber floor, forming low ridges and hollows that give this photograph its name. Light comes in through broken windows and falls across the debris field, tracing the grain of the boards beneath the accumulation and the rough-sawn slab walls that have been standing for around 130 years. The building is a slab cottage in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, constructed in the colonial vernacular method common to the free-selection era. Selectors working the Tablelands from the 1860s onwards built in whatever locally available hardwood they could split and haul, fitting the timber into grooved posts or stacking it horizontally, raising a weatherproof structure in weeks rather than months. This one dates to around 1890 by owner estimate, placing its construction in the later phase of smaller pastoral selections across the region. It was built as a family dwelling and remained one long enough to accumulate the domestic objects still found inside: a hardwood washstand with brass drop handles, counter scales and a hanging scale with a frozen dial, a wireless set, animal traps, a horseshoe. Occupation continued well into the mid-twentieth century. In the 1964-65 fire season, fires burned more than 530,000 hectares across the Southern Tablelands and Snowy Mountains. A larger family home on the same property, built in the early 1900s, was destroyed. The slab cottage survived. It was subsequently converted to shed use: the end wall containing the original chimney was removed and replaced with large doors to allow equipment access. The domestic life of the building ended; the building itself did not. The 2020 photographs record a floor that time and weather have gradually reclaimed, mounds of dust and debris accumulating in the quiet of a shed that no longer needs to be kept clean. The light still finds its way in.