Window and Field

The window is a twelve-pane timber sash, its glass filmed with dust, cobwebs strung across the lower sash and the frame. Beyond it, a green paddock runs to a treeline under flat overcast sky. A single power pole and line stand in the middle distance. Nothing else interrupts the view. Mill Pond Farm sits at Jembaicumbene in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, on Walbanga country. The property was established in the 1830s as part of a pastoral estate by William Henry Roberts and his brother-in-law Andrew Badgery. The 1840s saw a timber wagon barn and stables added, and wheat cropping begin in earnest. When Charles Dransfield constructed a four-storey steam flour mill on the property in 1859, using locally manufactured brick and farm-sourced granite, the surrounding creek was running with more than 1,000 gold miners, around 600 of them Chinese. The mill opened in January 1860 as the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, its 20-horsepower steam engine and milling equipment supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney. Milling operations continued until 1885. The farmhouse the window belongs to dates to the 1830s, built in Victorian vernacular style with Gothic Revival bargeboards. Its rooms and paddocks outlasted the flour mill, outlasted the gold rush, outlasted the dredges that worked Jembaicumbene Creek in the early twentieth century and the public school that closed in 1934. A restoration begun around 2008 brought the mill and homestead back from significant deterioration over an 11-year period. Photographed in 2022, the window looks out over paddocks that have been grazed for close to two centuries. The dust on the glass and the cobwebs in the frame are their own record: this corner of the building is quiet now, whatever movement once passed through it long since stopped.