Wagon Tray

The wagon tray has come to rest at an angle against the wall of a derelict outbuilding, its timber planks split and greened over with lichen, rusted chains still attached to the frame. Corrugated iron sags above it. Behind, the open paddock stretches away into cleared grazing country. Nothing about the arrangement looks deliberate. It has simply settled where it stopped being useful. Leichhardt House is a slab hut cottage in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, constructed around 1890 by a family who have held the property across multiple generations since. The building was erected during the later phase of free-selection settlement in the region, when the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 and the Crown Lands Act of 1884 had opened Tablelands country to smaller selectors who could not compete with the established squatter runs. A basic slab hut of this era could be raised in a matter of weeks using locally available eucalypt timber, split into flitches and fitted between grooved posts, dense and low to the ground. The cottage is that construction. Rough-sawn slab walls, single-storey, colonial vernacular in form. It originally featured a chimney in the end wall. At some point after the 1964-65 fire season, which swept 530,000 hectares across the Southern Tablelands and Snowy Mountains and destroyed a larger family home that had been built nearby in the early 1900s, the chimney wall was removed and replaced with large doors. The slab hut survived those fires and was converted to shed use. The newer house did not survive them. The wagon tray in this photograph is among the horse-drawn era equipment still on the property. In 2020, Brett Patman photographed the site across an 18-image series. The family and the property's exact location remain anonymous at the owner's request.