Oliver's Hardware, Grenfell, NSW Australia

This is Oliver's Hardware in Grenfell, photographed not long before it was demolished last year. The shed in the foreground belongs to the IGA next door, and it's due to come down soon too. The painted sign on the green wall, the rust-streaked roof, the corrugated iron walls patched and weathered over however many decades this place stood, all of it is gone or going.

It's a familiar story in country towns across Australia. A building outlives its usefulness, or the land underneath it becomes worth more than what's standing on it, and it comes down. Nobody is being careless or unsentimental about it, it's just the economics of small towns, and there's rarely a case strong enough to keep an old shed standing once a business has moved on or closed. But something does get lost each time. The iron in that roof and those walls has a history nobody will record, and once it's gone, it's just gone.

We don't have a tidy ending for this one. It's part of why we do what we do, taking material like this and giving it somewhere to go rather than letting it end up in landfill, but that's a small consolation against the loss of a building like Oliver's. Some of what disappears in towns like Grenfell can't really be replaced.