Wireless

Inside Leichhardt House, a wireless receiver sits where it was last left, its casing cracked, its wires frayed, every surface sealed under a uniform layer of dust. It is a small object in a large silence. The decaying timber walls of the building press in around it, the rough-sawn slab construction still holding after more than a century. Leichhardt House is a slab hut cottage in the NSW Southern Tablelands, built around 1890 by a family that has occupied the land for multiple generations. The building is a single-storey rectangular structure in the colonial vernacular tradition: locally sourced eucalypt timbers, split and fitted by hand, raised without the architectural ambition of the squatter homesteads but built with a density and durability those larger structures could not always match. An end wall that once contained the original chimney has since been removed and replaced with large doors, converting the cottage to agricultural shed use. The domestic interior remained largely intact through that transition, and the wireless receiver is part of what was left behind. Wirelesses became common in rural NSW from the 1930s onward, the ABC's national service bringing news, weather, and radio drama to properties that were otherwise well beyond the reach of any city. That this set is still here, decades after the cottage changed function, says something about how these transitions work in practice. The conversion happened; the clearing out did not. A larger family home, built on the same property in the early 1900s, was destroyed in the fires that swept the Southern Tablelands in 1964-65. The slab hut survived. The wireless inside it survived too, though its useful life ended long before the building's did. The photograph made here in 2020 records both facts: what the building held, and what it has become.