The track keeps going. Dirt, ruts, gates that need opening and closing. Half an hour of it, then another half. I had come down to the Braidwood area looking for farm buildings I could shoot from the roadside, crossed paths with a property owner who was a bit cagey at first, then said: "I've got two huts next to my house. You can go let yourself in and take photos of them if you want. I'm heading into town." She gave me directions and went.
The directions did not survive contact with the country. After enough wrong turns to stop trusting them, I gave up, turned around and started for the highway. A second property owner stopped me on the way out. I explained again. He told me I had been within a couple of hundred metres of the place the first time.
This is what arriving at Woolla looks like. Two slab huts under one big tree, on a bend of the Deua River south of Braidwood. By the time I had the camera out, I had one lens on the body, no time to change it, and a stranger's permission running on a clock. I went in.
Inside, that first time
The first hut is a kitchen. Dresser, table, hearth, doorway open to the second hut. The walls are hand-split slab, cut from the timber that was standing on the property, with newsprint glued behind the wallpaper to keep the wind out. That trick worked. The wallpaper is still there. The newsprint is still there. The wind doesn't come through.
The second hut is the sleeping quarters. Three rooms. Beds, mattresses, suitcases on the floor and stacked under them. The suitcases are not props. Vern and Neta stored their clothes in them because there were no wardrobes. They are full.
I did not photograph the outside that first time. The everyday clutter of an occupied property sat where it had been left, and rearranging belongings on someone else's land when no one was home felt like the wrong thing to do. I took the interior, packed up, and drove back through the gates.
A family, three generations
Woolla is on the Deua River near Braidwood. Helena Davis, known as Nellie, took up the freehold title in 1910. The original huts weren't completed until 1927, when she moved in with her son Everid and daughter Neta. Vern was born to Neta in 1928. Myrtle, the youngest, in 1930.
By 2008, the architect Phil Rose had measured the place up. His drawing of the homestead shows the floor plan of both huts and four elevations, the kitchen and the sleeping quarters laid out as built, the verandah, the water tanks, the concrete laundry tubs. The same arrangement that is there today.
Nellie died in 1977. Everid had moved to Sydney and passed away in the mid-1980s. Myrtle moved to Braidwood to run a cattle property and died there in 2015 after a stroke. Neta died at Woolla in 1990, the same year Vern was struck by Parkinson's. He was moved to a nursing home in Braidwood and passed away in Braidwood Hospital in 2004.
Continuous family ownership from 1910 to 2004. Same hut, same wallpaper, same suitcases.
No wardrobes, just suitcases
How Vern and Neta lived day to day is most of why everything inside the hut sits where it does.
The walls were lined with old newspaper underneath the wallpaper, pasted up to seal the cracks between the slabs. Where the wallpaper has lifted, the newsprint shows through. Some of it is still readable.
A Grace Bros mail-order millinery hatbox sits on top of two leather suitcases, the printed label still legible. An Underwood typewriter on a chair under a draped cloth. A tin of Udorian Talcum Powder, a glass vase, a dried rose. A box of Aspro tablets. A bottle of Parker Quink ink and a strip of salt tablets.
None of it staged. None of it cleaned up. None of it moved.
Vern and Neta lived this way at Woolla until 1990. Other people in rural New South Wales were on town water, supermarket weekly shops, double-brick houses and the rest of late twentieth-century rural life. The Davis family was not. They were aware the world outside had changed; they preferred not to. That makes Vern and Neta some of the last Australians to live a colonial-style rural life through to its actual end.
It was not always quiet. The Chris Woodland Collection includes a photograph from 1952, taken after a bushfire ran through Woolla and stripped most of the trees on the property. Myrtle is at the top of one of the few apple box trees still standing, lopping the upper branches with a ladder against the trunk, to feed the cattle.
The calendars on the wall
The calendars came up in the comments on the first set of photographs I shared. People wanted to know the dates. So many people that I drove back to Woolla a few weeks later to photograph every one of them. An eight-hour round trip.
They are not arranged in any order. Vern liked them as pictures, so they got hung and stayed hung. Reading the wall now is like reading the directory of the businesses Vern and his family bought from across half a century.
Braidwood, Goulburn, Moruya, Batemans Bay. Vern's wall is a map of where the family got its supplies. The dates run from 1972 through to 1991.
Not decorative in the way calendars sold at gift shops are decorative. Decorative in the older sense: pictures on the wall, because pictures on the wall are good company.
The second time around
The trip back was not only for the calendars. I dropped off a set of prints for the owners, took the calendar photographs, and spent the afternoon photographing the place properly. More time, calmer mindset, better light. The clutter that had been outside the first visit had been moved, so the exteriors finally worked.
Inside, I went for the small belongings rather than the rooms. The open fireplace and a cast-iron pot. A button-back chair. The old fridge. A record player. The hatbox up close.
These are the photographs the Woolla series is built from. The full set is in the shop, made to order on Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag.
The museum question
A lot of the comments on the original post said the items should be in a museum. I asked the owner what he thought of that idea. He made a point I keep coming back to.
If you take the suitcases and the calendars and the Quink and the Talcum Powder out of Woolla, they stop being part of Woolla. They become items in someone else's collection. The history is not the objects on their own. The history is the objects in this room, in this hut, under this tree, on this bend of the Deua. Move them out, and the history breaks.
The personal items inside the hut are not a museum display. They are what's left of how a family lived here. They belong in place.
Kept, not restored
The owners are husband and wife, with a modern house nearby. Woolla itself sits as its own pair of huts on the property, kept as a separate thing. They are not trying to restore it. They are trying to keep it from falling down.
Emergency remediation work has been done. Ongoing maintenance is in place. The hut came through the 2019–2020 Black Summer bushfires that ran through the south coast and forced evacuations across the region. It came out the other side because the people who hold it now were watching it.
Anyone who has driven country New South Wales has seen the lone chimney in a paddock or the slumped farmhouse falling in on itself. Woolla is not on that path. The building is almost 100 years old, hand-cut from the timber that was standing around it, and lived in by one family for three generations. It will never be like new. The work to keep it standing is real, slow, and not cheap. The fact that it is still standing is what's in front of you when you walk up to it.
The property is in safe hands.
