Verandah Walkway

The verandah walkway at Mill Pond Farm runs along a weathered timber building, its low corrugated roof casting shade over worn boards. A round stone well and a stone trough sit to one side; a timber bench occupies the foreground. Dry grass covers the ground beneath. These are the quiet, functional edges of a working property, the kind of structures that outlast everything around them precisely because nobody thought to remove them. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene in the Southern Tablelands, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood, on Walbanga country. The Roberts and Badgery pastoral estate established the homestead here in the 1830s, with William Henry Roberts acquiring the land in 1835 in partnership with his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery. The outbuildings, including the timber wagon barn and stables, followed in the 1840s. Stone wells and timber-framed structures from that period are consistent with what the wider property record documents. In 1859, Charles Edward Dransfield, a Yorkshire-born wool miller turned gold prospector, built the four-storey Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills on the property using locally manufactured brick and farm-sourced granite, with hardwood beams cut from the Budawang Ranges. The mill opened in January 1860, its 20-horsepower steam engine and engineering works supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. It served a creek-side settlement of over 1,000 miners. Milling operations ceased in 1885. From around 2008, antiques dealers Antony Davies and Andrew Gow undertook an 11-year restoration of the mill and homestead. The lower floors of the mill became the Wheatfield Gallery. The property was listed for sale in 2019. The 2022 photograph records what remains along the verandah: timber, stone, corrugated iron, and dry grass. The well has no rope. The bench has no occupant. The building holds its shape.