Corrugated Barn Doors

The corrugated metal panels of these barn doors have absorbed a long time of Southern Tablelands weather. The timber framing behind them, the arched top sections, the weathered grey cladding of the surrounding wall: these are the details of working farm architecture, built to be useful rather than admired. A concrete pad fronts the entry. A timber gate stands to the right. The wagon barn at Mill Pond Farm dates to the 1840s, making it one of the earliest structures on a property established in the 1830s as part of the Roberts and Badgery pastoral estate. William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery ran sheep and horses on this Walbanga country, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood on the Southern Tablelands. The outbuildings came first; the mill followed. Charles Dransfield, a Yorkshire wool miller turned gold-era wheat farmer, built the four-storey Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills on the property in 1859, using bricks manufactured on site and granite sourced from the farm. The mill opened in January 1860 with a steam engine and fittings supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. By then, more than 1,000 miners were working Jembaicumbene Creek, and the mill served the settlement that had grown up around the goldfield. Milling operations ceased in 1885. The barn doors in this photograph are not part of the mill. They belong to the older fabric of the property: the working outbuildings that predate the industrial operation by nearly two decades and outlasted it by well over a century. Restoration of Mill Pond Farm began around 2008 under Antony Davies and Andrew Gow, with the lower floors of the mill eventually becoming the Wheatfield Gallery. The outbuildings, the homestead, and the paddocks remained in use throughout. This photograph, made in 2022, records the barn doors in their weathered state: closed, functional in appearance, set into a wall that has stood through every phase of the property's history.