Outside gold miners' huts, Mount Dromedary, 1890s

• This asset shows a typical Australian miner's hut of the late 19th century, consisting of a single room with one door and no windows - the fireplace and chimney were built out from the rest of the dwelling to minimise the chance of the hut accidentally catching fire.
• It shows a hut constructed largely of local pit-sawn planks with a dirt floor - corrugated iron has been used as a cheap and effective roofing material on both buildings in the picture and a slab of bark runs along the apex of the hut as ridging.
• It shows that the men have cleared a minimal amount of bush to construct their hut - accommodation tended to be temporary as the miners often moved from place to place in their search for gold.
• It shows tree ferns in the bush behind the hut - this suggests that the men were on the southern side of Mount Dromedary, as tree ferns prefer a cool, moist, shady habitat near streams and waterfalls, where the humidity is high.
• It shows a hilly, inhospitable terrain, indicating that miners often suffered hardship in their attempts to find gold - they have had to carve out a narrow terrace in the hillside in order to create some flat land to accommodate their hut.
• It indicates that the miners had no running water - water had to be collected in buckets from rivers and streams, and carried back to the hut.
• It shows working men's clothing of collarless cotton shirts with rolled-up sleeves, and heavy moleskin trousers with bowyangs tied around the knees - a bowyang was a string or strap worn around the trouser-leg just below the knee to help support the weight of the moleskins and to keep the upper part of the trouser-leg loose, so that the wearer could kneel or stoop easily.
• It is an example of a photograph by William Henry Corkhill, whose photography over a 20-year period from 1896 documents life at Tilba Tilba, a small farming and gold mining community in southern New South Wales.

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