Upper Mill Room

The upper room of the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills occupies one of the four storeys Charles Dransfield built in 1859 on a pastoral property in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The walls are whitewashed brick, made from clay fired on the property itself. The floor is bare timber plank. Exposed ceiling joists span the width of the space, and two multi-pane sash windows open the room to daylight, one of them flanked by a rough timber post that reads as part of the original frame. A discoloured rectangular panel marks the far wall where something once sat flush against the brick. A low timber frame rests on the floor near the windows. The room does not offer much in the way of clues to its former use. Dransfield, a Yorkshire wool miller who came to New South Wales during the gold rush years, built the mill to serve a settlement of more than 1,000 miners working Jembaicumbene Creek below. The engineering was handled by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney, one of the largest industrial works in colonial Australia, who supplied the milling equipment and a 20-horsepower steam engine. The building was designed by Sydney surveyor C.E. Langley. Bricks were manufactured on the farm. Granite came from stone on the property. The massive hardwood beams were cut from the Budawang Ranges nearby. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills. It operated for 25 years before all milling ceased in 1885, by which point the goldfield population had thinned and the broader district had changed around it. The steam engine and its fittings were eventually removed and sold. This photograph, made in 2022, records the upper room as it stands now: structural, spare, and largely unaltered in its fabric. The brick and the joists and the timber floor remain from 1859. The windows let in the same light they always have.