Scales Detail

The wall has been doing this for a long time. Paint applied over paint, layer on layer across decades of use, has reached the point where it can no longer hold. It lifts from the surface in curved scales, each one peeling back to reveal an earlier coat beneath. Dust has settled into every gap and fold, filling the crevices between layers with the fine grey accumulation of years. The effect is intricate and unhurried, the kind of slow collapse that happens when a building is used but not maintained, inhabited but not watched. Leichhardt House is a slab cottage built around 1890 in the NSW Southern Tablelands, on a pastoral property whose owners have asked to remain anonymous. The building is constructed in the colonial vernacular slab hut tradition, using rough-sawn hardwood timbers of the kind selectors across the Southern Tablelands relied on during the free-selection era. Slab huts of this type were built quickly from locally available eucalypt timber, split into flitches and fitted between grooved posts, and were the standard dwelling for smaller landholders who took up selections under the Robertson Land Acts of 1861 and the Crown Lands Act of 1884. The cottage is around 130 years old. A c.1920 photograph of two young boys at its entrance survives in the family's possession, the earliest known documentation of the structure. At some point after 1965, when fires swept the Southern Tablelands and destroyed the larger family home that had been built nearby in the early 1900s, the slab cottage was converted to shed use: the end wall containing the original chimney was removed and replaced with large doors to allow equipment access. The domestic interior remained: a hardwood washstand, counter scales, a wireless set, animal traps. The wall in this photograph carries no context beyond itself. What it records is duration: the building still standing, still used, still slowly changing from the inside out.