Bath

Inside the slab timber walls of Leichhardt House, a cast iron clawfoot bath sits on a worn Persian rug. Vertical light enters through the gap-sawn cladding in thin parallel lines, falling across the timber floor. A curved timber cabinet stands alongside the bath. A wicker basket sits nearby. The rough-sawn walls show the grain and weathering of dense hardwood, split from locally available eucalypt timber in the manner common to slab construction across rural NSW during the colonial period. The building is a single-storey rectangular structure consistent with the slab hut typology built across the Southern Tablelands from the 1860s onward, when free selectors were opening smaller pastoral holdings across the region under the Robertson Land Acts. The cottage is around 130 years old, placing its construction in approximately the 1890s. Its walls are slab timber: flitches of hardwood fitted either vertically into mortised grooves or stacked horizontally between grooved posts, a construction method that a basic builder could execute in two to three weeks using timber from the surrounding land. The building originally featured a chimney in its end wall. That wall has since been removed and replaced with large doors, converting the cottage to shed use. When the change was made is not confirmed. The domestic objects that remain inside sit at an angle to that agricultural life: the bath, the rug, the cabinet. Nothing in the frame suggests they were placed; they look as though they simply stayed. The building around them has outlasted a larger, more recently built family home that once stood nearby and was destroyed in the fires of 1964-65, while this structure endured. Dense hardwood slab construction, close to the ground, proved more resilient than the lighter-framed building beside it. Photographed in 2020 as part of an 18-image series, with the property's location and the family's identity withheld at the owner's request.