GMC Hood Emblem

A pressed metal nameplate reading "General Motors Truck" holds to a faded blue body panel, the surrounding steel long past the point of saving. Rust has crept under the paint across the entire visible surface, lifting and curling it away. A metal hook below the nameplate has bent outward under corrosion. The fender is pitted and streaked, the original blue now mostly orange-brown at the edges. Whatever the vehicle once was, this panel is what remains. Mill Pond Farm sits on 41 hectares of granite country in Jembaicumbene, New South Wales, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood on the Southern Tablelands. The property takes its name from a spring-fed millpond that still sits on the land. Its origins run back to the 1830s, when William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery established a pastoral estate here, running dairy and wheat operations across what would eventually be recorded as approximately 1,200 acres. The defining structure came later. In 1859, Charles Edward Dransfield constructed a four-storey flour mill on the property using bricks manufactured on-site and granite sourced from the farm itself, with massive hardwood beams cut from the nearby Budawang Ranges. The engineering works and a 20-horsepower steam engine came from P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney, one of the largest engineering operations in colonial Australia at the time. The building was designed by Sydney surveyor C.E. Langley. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, serving a creek-side settlement of more than 1,000 gold miners, approximately 600 of whom were Chinese. Milling operations ceased in 1885. The steam engine and fittings were eventually dismantled and sold. The mill building stood. From around 2008, restorers Antony Davies and Andrew Gow spent approximately 11 years returning the mill and homestead to use, with the lower mill floors operating as the Wheatfield Gallery. The vehicle recorded here, corroded to its bones, sits in a different register to all of that history, and fits it perfectly.