Cleaners Room

A small room inside the Queen Victoria Sanitorium at Wentworth Falls holds what a cleaner left behind. Buckets and brooms, coated in years of dust, sit on the floor beside a window so grimy the light coming through it barely qualifies as light. The walls and surfaces show the slow work of neglect: paint lifting, plaster softening, the kind of deterioration that takes decades to accumulate. The sanitorium was established by the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund Committee and formally opened on 18 February 1903 by the State Governor, with accommodation for 20 male tuberculosis patients. The site on Kings Tableland, at roughly 867 metres elevation and 4 kilometres south of the Great Western Highway, was chosen deliberately. The Blue Mountains climate and the remote open-air setting were the treatment. Architect George Sydney Jones designed the complex in the Edwardian pavilion-plan style, with open-air chalets intended to maximise the patients' exposure to fresh air. The institution passed to the NSW Government in 1912 when both Queen Victoria sanatoriums, Wentworth Falls and its sister facility at Thirlmere, became hospitals under the Public Hospitals Act. In 1958, after 55 years as a tuberculosis sanatorium, the function changed: the facility was converted to a hospital for the aged and chronically ill, and later a nursing home. It continued operating under Wentworth Area Health Service, to which management transferred in 1988, until May 1999. Ninety-six years of continuous use. Then the cleaning equipment stayed where it was, and the dust started settling. This photograph was made in 2015.