Hand Water Pump

A green cast iron hand pump stands on a square pedestal in an open paddock at Mill Pond Farm, Jembaicumbene. Tall grass has grown up around the base. A galvanised metal bucket hangs from the spout. Trees and a low granite hillside sit behind under a grey sky. Nothing about the scene is ornamental. The pump is there because water is needed and this is how you get it. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene in New South Wales's Southern Tablelands, approximately 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The property takes its name from a spring-fed millpond that has supplied the land since William Henry Roberts and Andrew Badgery established their pastoral estate here in the 1830s. The site encompasses 41 hectares of granite country bordering Jembaicumbene Creek, with two spring-fed wells and a 25-acre wetland among its water sources. The estate's early decades were built on dairy farming, wheat cropping, and thoroughbred breeding. In 1859, Charles Dransfield constructed a four-storey flour mill on the property using brick manufactured on site and stone from farm-sourced granite, with heavy hardwood beams cut from the nearby Budawang Ranges. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, its steam engine and equipment supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. It served a settlement of more than 1,000 miners working Jembaicumbene Creek during the gold rush years. Milling operations ceased in 1885. The hand pump in this frame stands apart from that industrial history. It belongs to the working paddock, to the daily business of keeping livestock watered on granite country where the creek is the boundary and the spring-fed wells are the resource. The grey sky, the uncut grass, the practical bucket: none of it has been arranged. This is a farm photograph of a farm object, on land that has been farmed for close to two centuries.