Porch Saws

The saws on the porch at Leichhardt House are the kind of tools that rarely get thrown out on a working property. A crosscut saw or a rip saw earns its place on a wall simply by being useful, and on a slab timber building that needed regular maintenance and repair, saws would have been in regular use. They rest now with their teeth rusted and their handles worn to a familiar smoothness, left where they were last put down. The cottage they belong to was built around 1890, somewhere in the NSW Southern Tablelands. Its walls are split hardwood slabs in the colonial vernacular tradition, the default construction method for selectors who could access local eucalypt timber but not the cost of milled weatherboard. Blackbutt, stringybark, ironbark: dense, close-grained species that split cleanly under a maul and wedge and resisted decay and fire in ways that lighter-framed construction often did not. A basic slab hut could be raised in a few weeks by a small team working with locally available materials. The same qualities that made the material practical in the 1890s have kept the building standing. When fires swept the Southern Tablelands in 1964 and 1965, destroying a larger family home that had been built on the same property in the early 1900s, the slab cottage survived. It has since been converted to agricultural shed use: the end wall containing the original chimney was removed at some point after the fires, and large doors were installed to allow equipment access. The building remains in active use on a working pastoral property. The porch saws are catalogued among the objects still present in the 2020 series: part of the same layer of material left behind from the building's long domestic life, alongside a hardwood washstand, counter scales, animal traps, and a wireless set. Each object places a different decade. The saws could belong to almost any of them. Photographed in 2020 as part of the Leichhardt House series.