Truck in Barn

The timber wagon barn at Mill Pond Farm is among the oldest structures on the property, built in the 1840s alongside the stables that served the Roberts and Badgery pastoral estate. The barn's corrugated iron roof and heavy timber framing have survived the better part of two centuries on this stretch of Majors Creek Road, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood on the Southern Tablelands. Inside, an old truck sits front-on, its body faded blue and rusted, the chrome of its slatted grille and round headlights still catching the light from a small window set high in the wall above the cab. A sheeted shape rests to one side. Whatever is under the sheet, it has not moved in some time. The property these objects now inhabit was established in the 1830s by William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery, who ran it as a pastoral and dairy operation. Wheat cropping followed in the 1840s, and in 1859 Charles Dransfield constructed the four-storey steam flour mill that still dominates the site, its locally made brick and farm-sourced granite walls built to serve the 1,000-plus miners working Jembaicumbene Creek at the height of the gold rush. The mill opened in January 1860 and ceased all operations in 1885. The barn outlasted the mill's working life, outlasted the goldfield, and outlasted the wheat crops. It was still standing when Antony Davies and Andrew Gow began their 11-year restoration of the property from around 2008, and it was still standing when this photograph was made in 2022. The truck faces the window as if waiting. The light comes in just enough to read the grille, the headlights, the rust along the body panels. The sheeted shape alongside it keeps its own counsel. Part of the Mill Pond Farm series.