Aerial Cottage Roof

From directly overhead, the roofline of a timber cottage and its attached shed fill the lower portion of the frame. A faded red corrugated iron roof covers both the main cottage and the lean-to section to its left, the iron sheeting worn to a pale, uneven finish across its surface. A pig stands beside a stone trough close to the doorway, unhurried. Post and rail fencing runs across the surrounding paddock, and a pair of large metal silos rises at the edge of the grassed yard. The property sits at Jembaicumbene in the Southern Tablelands, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The pastoral history of the land dates to the 1830s, when William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery established an estate on what is now 41 hectares of granite country bordering Jembaicumbene Creek. The site went on to support wheat cropping, thoroughbred horse breeding, and from January 1860, the operations of the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, a four-storey structure in locally manufactured brick and farm-sourced granite, its engineering works supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. Milling operations ceased in 1885. The current property, known as Mill Pond Farm, carries the full name Mill Pond Farm incorporating the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills. Its current livestock have included alpacas, horses, goats, and sheep. The cottage and outbuildings visible in this photograph are part of that broader working farm. The aerial vantage makes the organisation of the yard plain: the lean-to pressed against the cottage wall, the stone trough set close to the door, the silos standing apart in the open paddock. This photograph was made in 2022.