Top of the Mill

At the apex of the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, a timber ladder leans against the whitewashed brick gable wall. Two red-framed sash windows open on either side, letting field light fall across a worn wooden floor. The exposed roof framing above is unadorned. It is a spare, functional space, the kind that working buildings keep at their highest point, away from the noise and machinery below. Charles Dransfield built the mill in 1859. He was a Yorkshire wool miller who had come to the Braidwood district in the 1850s, made his fortune growing wheat and selling gold leases, and married into the Roberts family of the adjacent Exeter Farm. The building he constructed was substantial: four storeys of locally manufactured brick and farm-sourced granite, with massive hardwood beams cut from the nearby Budawang Ranges. The engineering was supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney, one of the largest industrial works in colonial Australia, who fitted the mill with a 20-horsepower steam engine, chaff cutters, and a lift. The building was designed by Sydney surveyor C.E. Langley. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, serving a goldfield settlement of over 1,000 miners working Jembaicumbene Creek, around 600 of them Chinese. By 1885, milling operations had ceased entirely. The steam engine and fittings were dismantled and sold. The building stood on. From around 2008, Antony Davies and Andrew Gow spent 11 years restoring the mill and the wider Mill Pond Farm property. The timber sash windows were remade by Amish craftsmen in Pennsylvania to match the originals. The lower floors became the Wheatfield Gallery. The upper levels, including the gable space recorded in this photograph, remained as the building left them. This photograph was made in 2022.