Scales

The counter scales sit exactly where someone left them, their pans corroded, their base buried under decades of accumulated dust. They are domestic objects in a building that stopped being a home some time after 1965, when the end wall containing the original chimney was removed and large doors were fitted in its place to allow equipment access. The scales stayed. Leichhardt House is a slab timber cottage built around 1890 in the NSW Southern Tablelands, constructed using the colonial vernacular method common across rural New South Wales from roughly 1790 through to 1920. Locally available hardwood timbers were split into flitches and fitted between grooved posts, producing walls that proved more resistant to fire and decay than the lighter framed construction that followed in subsequent decades. The building is a single-storey rectangular structure, consistent with the slab hut typology that sheltered selectors across the Tablelands during the free-selection era that followed the Crown Lands Acts of 1861 and 1884. The cottage sits on a working pastoral property whose family has asked to remain anonymous. They hold a photograph taken around 1920 showing two young boys at the cottage entrance. That image and the 2020 Lost Collective series form the two ends of a roughly 100-year visual record of the same structure. The slab walls are the constant. The larger family home built nearby in the early 1900s did not survive the 1964-65 fire season. The Chatsbury-Bungonia fire burned 250,000 hectares between Goulburn and the South Coast between 5 and 14 March 1965, destroying homes and sheds across the region. The slab cottage endured. After the fire, the main residence was rebuilt elsewhere on the property and the old cottage was repurposed as a shed. The scales, along with a hardwood washstand, a hanging scale with a rusted frozen dial, and a wireless set, record a domestic interior that has been given over to agricultural storage but not cleared. In 2020, Brett Patman photographed the building across an 18-image series. The scales appear as the building left them: still, quiet, and covered in the particular dust of a room no one has hurried through in a long time.