Fireplace

The fireplace sits inside the homestead at Mill Pond Farm, a property on Walbanga country at Jembaicumbene, in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The brickwork around the hearth opening is thickly stained with soot, the product of years of use in a house that the research record shows held seven open fireplaces across its five reception rooms. Cold ash remains in the firebox. The surround is crumbling. No mantelpiece or fittings survive in the frame. The homestead dates to the 1830s, when William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery established the pastoral estate on this stretch of Majors Creek Road, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The property ran dairy and wheat farming from its earliest years. By 1859, Charles Edward Dransfield, a Yorkshire wool miller turned gold-rush wheat farmer who had married into the Roberts family, began construction of a four-storey flour mill on the site, using bricks manufactured on the property itself and stone drawn from farm-sourced granite. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, its 20-horsepower steam engine and fittings supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. At the time, more than 1,000 miners were working Jembaicumbene Creek below the property. Milling operations ceased in 1885. The steam engine and fittings were eventually dismantled and sold. The homestead and mill sat largely dormant until around 2008, when Antony Davies and Andrew Gow began an 11-year restoration of the buildings and grounds. Seven fireplaces in the homestead, Gothic Revival bargeboards on the exterior, the 1840s wagon barn and stables: all recorded, all attended to. This photograph was made in 2022. What the frame holds is simpler than the history behind it: a brick hearth, cold ash, a wall that once held warmth against a Southern Tablelands winter, and the long silence that followed.