Front Corner

At the front corner of the Braidwood Hotel, paint has been peeling from rendered brick long enough for the layers to tell their own story. Each coat represents a different owner, a different decade, a different idea about what the building should look like from the street. The timber window frames are weathered to the grain. Sunlight works across the surface, finding every crack in the render and every gap in the paint. The building at 180 Wallace Street was constructed in 1859 at the height of the Gold Rush era. Braidwood was the primary supply town for the Araluen and Majors Creek goldfields, and the rush had drawn thousands of prospectors into the district. The hotel was built to serve them. By 1866, fourteen hotels were operating across the town, including the Doncaster, the Royal, and the Commercial. Most of those hotels are gone. The Commercial Hotel, now trading as the Braidwood Hotel, is still licensed and still open, making it the oldest continuously operating pub in Braidwood. The building is Georgian in style, consistent with the character of the Wallace Street streetscape the NSW State Heritage Register describes as "a fine collection of 19th century buildings." The heritage listing that covers the hotel, SHR #01749 "Braidwood and its Setting," was gazetted on 3 April 2006, making Braidwood the first entire town to receive a State Heritage Register listing. The hotel is also individually listed on the local heritage inventory as "Braidwood Hotel, including verandah and cast iron lacework," for the cast iron columns and decorative lacework on the second-storey balcony. The photograph was made in 2016, when the building's exterior showed exactly this kind of accumulated wear. The paint was peeling, the render was lifting, and the timber frames had the look of things that had been outside a long time. What the photograph records is not a building in decline but one in the middle of a very long life.