Wireless Front On

Inside Leichhardt House, on the surface of a timber dresser, a portable valve radio sits with its lid propped open. The casing is covered in textured grey fabric, the kind used on mid-twentieth-century portable sets designed to survive being carried between rooms, or between properties. The HMV badge is still readable inside the lid. The cream control knobs are coated evenly in dust, suggesting the set has not been moved in a long time. Leichhardt House is a slab hut cottage in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, built around 1890 by a family that has held the land across multiple generations. The walls are rough-sawn timber, consistent with colonial vernacular slab construction common across rural NSW from the late eighteenth century through to around 1920. Selectors working the Tablelands under the Crown Lands Acts of 1861 and 1884 typically built in locally available hardwood, split into flitches and fitted between grooved posts, and a capable builder could have a basic structure standing within a few weeks. This one has lasted more than 130 years. The radio is a detail that places the building's domestic life firmly in the mid-twentieth century. Wirelesses became common in rural NSW from the 1930s onward, and a portable set like this one would have brought broadcast reception into a working household with no easy access to towns. Its presence, alongside the hardwood washstand and dust-covered counter scales also found inside the building, confirms the cottage was still functioning as a home well after its construction, likely until a larger residence on the same property was destroyed in the 1964-65 fire season and eventually rebuilt elsewhere on the block. After that, the cottage's end wall containing the original chimney was removed and replaced with large doors, converting the structure to agricultural shed use. The domestic objects stayed where they were. The 2020 photograph records the radio exactly as it was left: open, labelled, and waiting for a signal that stopped coming a long time ago.