Floral

A wall in one of the bedrooms at the Big Hill Post Office is plastered with newspaper sheets from the 1940s, including a layer of floral-printed wallpaper underneath. The newspapers were applied directly over the vertical timber slabs that form the building's structure. Where the paper has lifted, the slabs underneath are visible, dark with age. The floral wallpaper sits between the paper and the slab in places, partially obscured. Headlines and advertising fragments are still readable on the newspaper layer. The walls give the impression of a room papered for warmth rather than decoration.

Newspaper-on-slab is a common interior treatment in Australian rural buildings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The slabs were the structural wall, but their gaps let cold air through, and pasted newspaper sealed the joints. The papers also gave the room a finished surface and, by accident, created a record of what was being read at the time the wall was made. At the Big Hill Post Office, layers of paper were added over decades. The most recent layer dates from the 1940s, around the time the post office was closed. The room has been preserving its own decade ever since.