Rusted Roof Sheds

The two timber sheds in this photograph stand on open grass at Mill Pond Farm, near Braidwood on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. Their corrugated iron roofs have rusted to a deep oxide red, the ridgelines bowed slightly with age. A small skillion-roofed porch projects from the left. Behind them, two galvanised grain silos with conical metal caps catch the light above a timber post-and-rail fence, the kind of functional infrastructure that accumulates on a working property across generations. Mill Pond Farm sits on Majors Creek Road at Jembaicumbene, 10 km south-west of Braidwood. The original pastoral estate was established in the 1830s by William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery. Wheat cropping began in the 1840s and continued through to 1885. In 1859, a Yorkshire-born gold prospector named Charles Dransfield constructed a four-storey flour mill on the property using locally manufactured brick and farm-sourced granite, with massive hardwood beams cut from the nearby Budawang Ranges. The engineering works and 20-horsepower steam engine were supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, serving a creek-side settlement of more than 1,000 gold miners. Milling operations ceased in 1885. The outbuildings in this frame are not the four-storey mill, and they are not the 1840s timber wagon barn documented elsewhere on the property. They are working sheds, the kind built and rebuilt as a farm changes hands and changes purpose, their materials replaced as budgets allowed, their roofs left to rust because rust does not always mean failure. The grain silos behind them suggest the property continued to handle grain long after the steam-powered mill fell quiet. This photograph was made in 2022, during the Lost Collective documentation of Mill Pond Farm.