Steering Wheel Detail

Inside the cab of an abandoned truck at Mill Pond Farm, Jembaicumbene, a dust-covered steering wheel sits before a faded blue dashboard. A round gauge cluster and a knobbed pull control remain in place on the dash. Cobwebs drape the open door frame and the windows are filmed with years of grime. The cab is still, the controls untouched, the whole interior suspended in the particular quiet of machinery that has not moved in a long time. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood, on Walbanga (Yuin) country. The property was established in the 1830s as part of the Roberts and Badgery pastoral estate, with William Henry Roberts acquiring the land from 1835 in partnership with his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery. The site encompasses 41 hectares of granite country bordering Jembaicumbene Creek, fenced into twelve paddocks, with a spring-fed millpond that gave the property its current name. The most substantial structure on the site is the four-storey flour mill, constructed in 1859 by Charles Dransfield using bricks manufactured on the property and granite sourced from the farm itself. The mill's massive hardwood beams were cut from the nearby Budawang Ranges. Sydney surveyor C.E. Langley designed the building; the engineering works, including a 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 over 1,000 miners then working the Jembaicumbene goldfield. All milling operations ceased in 1885. The property was restored over approximately 11 years from around 2008 by Antony Davies and Andrew Gow. At the time of photography in 2022, the pastoral life of the farm continued alongside the mill's conversion to the Wheatfield Gallery. The truck cab recorded here is part of that working farm landscape, the instruments and wheel still in place, waiting for an operator who has not come back.