Stripped Interior

The wall lining is gone. What remains in this narrow corridor of the Braidwood Hotel is the building's structural logic laid bare: timber wall studs on both sides, ceiling joists exposed overhead, loose electrical wiring hanging from above in loose loops. Bare floorboards run the length of the passage toward a multi-pane window at the far end, its lower half blocked by a sheet of plywood. Daylight finds its way through regardless. The Braidwood Hotel stands at 180 Wallace Street, built in 1859 as the Commercial Hotel during the Gold Rush-era expansion of the town. Braidwood was the primary supply centre for the Araluen, Majors Creek and Mongarlowe goldfields; by 1861 the surrounding goldfields held approximately 8,199 people, and the town's Wallace Street had filled with Georgian commercial buildings to service them. The Commercial Hotel was among those built during that period of rapid growth, constructed in rendered brick over stone foundations, with the Georgian proportions characteristic of the town: high ceilings, a symmetrical facade, cast iron columns and decorative lacework on the second-storey balcony. The town's population contracted sharply after the goldfields declined. That contraction, which might elsewhere have brought redevelopment, instead left the 19th-century streetscape largely untouched. The NSW State Heritage Register listing for "Braidwood and its Setting," gazetted on 3 April 2006, notes this directly: the rural recession paradoxically preserved the fabric of the town. The SHR listing, the first to cover an entire town and described by Heritage NSW at the time as "by far the most complex listing" it had undertaken, covers the hotel within a conservation area of state significance. Through all of it, the hotel has operated continuously as a licensed premises since 1859. The stripped corridor photographed in 2016 was part of an ongoing restoration programme. Wall linings removed, wiring exposed, floorboards bare: this is what a building in the middle of being worked on looks like, not a building in decline. The photograph records a moment of transition, the old fabric of the building visible before it is covered again.