Kitchen to Bath

A doorway opens between kitchen and bath inside Leichhardt House, a slab timber cottage built around 1890 in the NSW Southern Tablelands. Peeling paint falls from the walls in long curling strips. Debris and dirt accumulate across the floorboards. Light enters from one side of the frame and casts shadows deep into the second room, picking out the texture of rough-sawn timber walls and the small domestic details of a space that once served a working rural family. The building is colonial vernacular in form: a single-storey rectangular structure with walls of locally split hardwood, consistent with the slab hut typology common across rural NSW from around 1790 through to 1920. Selectors in the Southern Tablelands favoured this method because it required only locally available eucalypt timber and basic tools. An experienced pair of hands could raise a basic hut in a matter of weeks. The property has been in the same family for generations. A photograph taken around 1920 shows two young boys at the cottage entrance, the same doorway opening that still stands today. In the years after the 1964-65 fire season, which burned across the Southern Tablelands and destroyed a larger family home on the same property, the slab cottage was converted from dwelling to agricultural shed. The original chimney wall was removed and replaced with large doors to allow equipment through. The interior domestic fittings remained. What the photograph records is the threshold between two rooms that once organised daily life: cooking on one side, washing on the other. The paint that covered the walls has returned to the floor. The shadows that fall across it now are longer and quieter than any the building knew in its working years. Brett Patman photographed the property in 2020, with the family's consent and at their request for anonymity. The location remains undisclosed.