Inside a modest room at Netherby, Fagan Park in Galston, a volunteer carefully lifts a photograph from its sleeve. Four sisters stare back. The image is old enough that the photographer would have asked them to hold still for several seconds, maybe longer. They did. And here they are.
Fagan Park holds a collection of photographs donated over the years by members of the Fagan family, and taken together, they sketch out something you don’t often get from official records: what life on a working citrus farm in the Hills actually looked like.
Bruce Fagan and his jersey cows. Samuel Fagan’s homestead. Weddings. Children. And one photograph in particular that the volunteers treat with particular care: the last known photo of Leslie Fagan before he shipped out to fight in the First World War.
Leslie didn’t come home. But the photograph stayed.
The collection also includes a range of early cameras, among them portable folding bellows cameras used from 1890 through to 1930, and a Kodak Brownie, the boxy little camera that democratised photography for ordinary families across Australia. These weren’t just tools for capturing memories. For places like Netherby, they’re evidence that the memories existed at all.
Netherby is open every Tuesday from 9 am to 4 pm, and on the second Sunday of each month. Group tours can be booked through Hornsby Shire Council.
