Truck Cab Interior

Inside one of the outbuildings at Mill Pond Farm, an old truck cab has been sitting long enough that the steering wheel has turned to rust and the bench seat has worn through in places. The blue dashboard is still intact, one round gauge facing a driver who hasn't been there in some time. Through the shed windows behind the cab, a red vehicle is visible in the yard. It is an ordinary kind of still life, the sort of accumulation that happens on a working property over many decades. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, roughly 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood. The property's history runs well beyond any single vehicle. A homestead was established on the land in the 1830s as part of the Roberts and Badgery pastoral estate. By 1859, Charles Dransfield had constructed a four-storey flour mill on the property using locally manufactured brick and farm-sourced granite, with heavy hardwood beams cut from the nearby Budawang Ranges. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, with steam engineering by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney, and the building designed by Sydney surveyor C.E. Langley. Milling operations continued until 1885. From c. 2008, Antony Davies and Andrew Gow undertook an 11-year restoration of the mill and homestead. Davies was noted for a passion for vintage vehicles and horse-drawn carriages alongside the broader restoration work. The lower floors of the mill became the Wheatfield Gallery. The truck cab in this photograph is part of that layered accumulation: the pastoral, the industrial, the restored, and the left-behind, all present on the same 41 hectares. Photographed in 2022.