Colac Garden Shed

The corrugated iron roof of this garden shed near Colac has been losing its shape for some time. The framing beneath has rotted to the point where the roof line sags visibly, the iron bowing and separating where it once sat flat. Through the gaps in the timber wall cladding, shafts of sunlight enter and catch the dust suspended inside, the particular stillness of a structure that has not been opened with purpose in a long while. Small outbuildings like this one were a standard feature of rural pastoral properties across Australia. While the woolshed or shearing shed drew the attention of the station calendar, the garden shed and its equivalents were where the everyday work of a property was maintained: hand tools, fence wire, oil tins, spare parts, the accumulated material of seasons. Corrugated galvanised iron became the dominant roofing and cladding material on Australian rural buildings from the 1850s onward, valued for its durability and ease of transport to remote properties. Timber framing was typically local hardwood, cut and joined on site, and on small outbuildings was often lighter in section than the heavy mortise-and-tenon construction found in working woolsheds. The abandonment pattern for structures like this one is unremarkable in the best sense: the property changed use, or consolidated, or the shed was simply superseded and left to stand. From the 1970s onward, as smaller sheep holdings across the region reduced their operations, outbuildings were among the first structures to be left without maintenance. What remains is the iron and the timber in their slow negotiation with weather. The Woolshed series documents rural pastoral buildings photographed across New South Wales. This frame was made in 2017.