Deddick Valley Woolshed

Near Deddick Valley, a woolshed stands in a state of advanced decay, its corrugated iron walls rusting unevenly, the weathered hardwood framing grey and checked from decades of sun and wet. The catching pens are empty. No equipment remains. The structure holds its shape, but only just. Woolsheds like this one were built to a practical logic that changed little across generations. Timber framing, most commonly local hardwood, red gum, ironbark, or stringybark depending on what grew nearby, was mortise-and-tenon joined and clad in corrugated galvanised iron, which had become the dominant rural roofing material from the 1850s onward. The layout followed the work: catching pens feeding the shearing board, a wool room where fleeces were skirted and classed, a wool press for baling. The stand count told you the size of the operation. The shed was the centre of the station's year. The Australian wool industry built much of its infrastructure during the pastoral expansion of the 1880s to 1920s. NSW and Victoria were the primary producing states, with merino the dominant clip. Shearing seasons in NSW traditionally ran through spring, employing teams of itinerant shearers who moved between properties as the work came on. For the duration of the cut, a shed like this one would have been loud and full of purpose. The collapse of the wool reserve price scheme in 1991, combined with station consolidation and competition from synthetic fibres, reduced the number of operating sheep properties across southern NSW through the decades that followed. Many smaller woolsheds fell out of regular use from the 1970s onward. This photograph, made in 2018, records the Deddick Valley shed in the quiet that comes after a long working life: timber returning to grey, iron returning to rust, the pens waiting for sheep that will not arrive.