Timber Feed Trough

Inside one of the outbuildings at Mill Pond Farm, a timber feed trough runs along the back wall of a weathered shed. The boards are grey and bleached, their surfaces worn smooth over years of use. Straw lies across a stone and earth floor. Above, corrugated iron lines a gabled roof, and the whole space carries the particular quiet of a building that was built to work and has simply continued doing so. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene on the Southern Tablelands, approximately 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The property traces its origins to the 1830s, when William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery established a pastoral estate on the land. The 1840s saw timber outbuildings constructed across the property, including a wagon barn and stables, as wheat cropping began in earnest. The same decade that produced those early structures also produced this working landscape of paddocks, sheds, and feed runs. The wider property encompasses more than pastoral history. Charles Dransfield constructed a four-storey steam flour mill on the site in 1859, using bricks manufactured on the property and granite sourced from the farm itself. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, serving the goldfield community that had grown along Jembaicumbene Creek. Milling operations continued until 1885. But while the mill became the property's most prominent structure, the pastoral operations that preceded it never stopped. The sheds, stables, and feed troughs continued their quieter purpose alongside the industrial work. This photograph, made in 2022, records what remains of that pastoral infrastructure: one shed, one trough, straw on the floor. The image does not reach for significance. It simply describes what is there.