Long Timber Table

A long timber table with turned legs stands near the centre of the room, its top filmed with dust, straw spread across the floorboards around it. Light falls through windows on either side, catching the surface and throwing the grain of the timber into relief. A bare ceiling of exposed rafters and battens runs the length of the space above, with a single pendant fitting suspended near a central partition. Whatever this room was used for, the table is now the only piece of furniture left in it. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, roughly 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The property's origins go back to the 1830s, when William Henry Roberts established a pastoral holding here in partnership with his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery. The timber wagon barn and stables on the property followed in the 1840s, built as the estate expanded into wheat cropping. In 1859, Charles Dransfield constructed a four-storey flour mill on the site using bricks manufactured on the property and granite sourced from the farm itself, with massive hardwood beams brought down from the Budawang Ranges. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, its steam engine and fittings supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. Milling operations continued until 1885, when they ceased entirely. The property's outbuildings, some of them among the oldest surviving structures on the site, have passed through more than 180 years of use and disuse since the wagon barn and stables first went up. The photograph made here in 2022 records what remains: a table, a floor of straw, a ceiling open to its own bones, and light moving through windows that have been there for a long time.