Collapsed Roof Room

The roof has gone in one section, a wide gap in the corrugated metal leaving the timber rafters bare to the sky. Daylight drops straight into the room, catching the rendered walls on the way down and pooling across a floor of broken boards. A torn red rug covers part of the damage. In the right-hand wall, a small four-pane sash window holds its glass. The timber door at the far end stands open onto a grassy paddock, the outside world framed and close. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene in the Southern Tablelands, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The homestead was established in the 1830s as part of the Roberts and Badgery pastoral estate, with William Henry Roberts acquiring the land in 1835 and forming a partnership with his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery. The stables, wagon barn, and associated outbuildings followed in the 1840s, constructed in timber on granite country that borders Jembaicumbene Creek. The property's centrepiece was the four-storey flour mill built in 1859 by Charles Dransfield, using bricks manufactured on site and stone from farm-sourced granite, with massive hardwood beams cut from the Budawang Ranges. The Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills opened in January 1860, the engineering works and 20-horsepower steam engine supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney, one of the largest engineering operations in colonial Australia. Milling operations continued until 1885. The outbuildings date from a period when Jembaicumbene Creek supported more than 1,000 miners, the broader property running wheat crops and a pastoral operation alongside the industrial mill. After milling ceased, the station continued as a farm. The room photographed here in 2022 records that longer, quieter life after the steam engine was gone: a domestic or working space on a Southern Tablelands property, now slowly returning to the sky through its own ceiling.