Grindstone in Barn

Inside the 1840s wagon barn at Mill Pond Farm, Jembaicumbene, a large stone wheel rests on a timber frame. A worn plank door stands to one side, a louvred window beside it. Straw covers the dirt floor. Rough-hewn beams carry a corrugated iron roof overhead. The barn is one of the oldest surviving structures on the property, constructed in the 1840s alongside the stables as the Roberts and Badgery pastoral estate developed its wheat-farming operations on Walbanga Yuin country, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The property's history runs deeper than the barn. William Henry Roberts acquired the land in 1835 and entered a pastoral partnership with his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery. By the 1840s, wheat cropping was underway; by 1851 gold had been discovered on the property itself. In 1859, with over 1,000 miners working Jembaicumbene Creek, Charles Dransfield built a four-storey flour mill in locally manufactured brick and farm-sourced granite, with massive hardwood beams hauled from the Budawang Ranges. Engineering works including a 20-horsepower steam engine came from P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills and ran until 1885. The wagon barn outlasted the milling era, the gold rush, and most of the buildings that once surrounded it. The stone wheel in this photograph is not identified in the property's records; it sits in the barn without annotation, its original purpose unrecorded. That absence is part of what the photograph holds: a large, heavy, worked object that has clearly been on this land a long time, in a structure that has been here longer still. The 2022 photograph records both of them as they stand now, on a property that spent 11 years under restoration before this frame was made.