Harness Wall

Inside one of the outbuildings at Mill Pond Farm, old leather and metal harness pieces hang from a corrugated iron wall, suspended at roughly the same height they would have been placed after a working day. A worn timber post rises through the centre of the shed, its surface marked by years of contact. On the dirt floor below, fallen timber beams and a forked branch lie where they came down, with loose straw scattered around them. The shed itself is timber-framed, clad in corrugated iron, open enough that light finds the floor between the structural members. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene on the Southern Tablelands, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The property was established in the 1830s by William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery as a pastoral estate, with the timber wagon barn and stables constructed in the 1840s. Both Roberts and Badgery were avid racehorse enthusiasts, and the adjacent property, Exeter Farm on Majors Creek Road, is where Archer, winner of the first two Melbourne Cups in 1861 and 1862, was foaled and later retired. The outbuildings predate the property's most ambitious construction by roughly two decades. In 1859, Charles Edward Dransfield, a Yorkshire wool miller who had made his fortune in wheat and gold leases, built a four-storey flour mill on the property using bricks manufactured on site and granite sourced from the farm. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, with engineering by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney, and served a creek-side settlement of more than 1,000 gold miners. Milling operations ceased in 1885. The harness wall in this photograph records a much quieter chapter. The horses are long gone, the straps and fittings left in place, the shed settling slowly around them.