Stone Wheel Frame

Inside a timber-framed shed at Mill Pond Farm, a foot-powered grindstone sits on splayed wooden legs, its round stone wheel set above the frame at working height. To the left, a large conical metal vessel rests on the straw-covered floor. Chain hangs coiled on the rear wall beside a louvred timber shutter, and a caged lamp is fixed to the boards above. Light enters from the left, cutting across the floor and catching the pale straw in detail. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The original pastoral estate was established in the 1830s by William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery. In the 1840s, timber outbuildings including a wagon barn and stables were constructed on the property, and wheat cropping began. The 1840s structures are among the oldest surviving on the site. In 1859, Charles Dransfield built the four-storey steam flour mill using bricks manufactured on the property and granite quarried from the farm, with heavy hardwood beams cut from the nearby Budawang Ranges. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, with engineering works and a 20-horsepower steam engine supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. The building was designed by Sydney surveyor C.E. Langley. The mill served a creek-side community of more than 1,000 gold miners working Jembaicumbene Creek, and the property produced wheat through to 1885, when all milling operations ceased. From around 2008, Antony Davies and Andrew Gow undertook an 11-year restoration of the mill and homestead. The lower mill floors became the Wheatfield Gallery. Outbuildings including the wagon barn and stables were preserved as part of the broader working farm. This photograph, made in 2022, records the interior of one of those outbuildings: tools and implements still in place, straw on the floor, the grindstone frame holding its wheel as it has for generations.