Trap

Inside Leichhardt House, a rusted steel jaw-trap rests open on the floorboards. A sliver of light cuts across the interior and catches the jaws and the dust hanging in the air above them. The boards beneath are grimy and worn, the surrounding walls built from rough-sawn hardwood slab in the manner typical of colonial selector dwellings across rural New South Wales. The building is a single-storey rectangular slab hut, constructed around 1890 in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. Slab huts of this era were built from locally available eucalypt timbers, split into flitches with mauls and wedges and fitted into mortised grooves or stacked between grooved posts. A settler could raise a basic structure in two to three weeks. The result was functional, low, and dense, built from timber that in many cases proved more resilient than the lighter-framed construction that followed it in later decades. Leichhardt House was built during the free-selection era, when smaller landholders were carving farms from pastoral runs under the Crown Lands Acts of 1861 and 1884. At some point after its original use as a dwelling ended, the end wall containing the chimney was removed and replaced with large doors, converting the building to an agricultural shed. The interior still holds the objects left from both phases of its life: a hardwood washstand with ornate brass drop handles, a pair of dust-covered counter scales, a hanging scale with a rusted dial frozen in place, and the trap visible in this photograph. Traps were a standard fixture on Southern Tablelands pastoral properties, used for rabbit and fox control across generations of working farms. This one remains where it was left, open, on the floorboards of a building that has now stood for around 130 years. Brett Patman photographed Leichhardt House in 2020, producing an 18-image series. The property and family remain anonymous at the owner's request.