Cottage

A timber cottage sits within the overgrown grounds of the Queen Victoria Sanitorium on Kings Tableland, Wentworth Falls. Its walls are weathered bare, the roofline partially collapsed, and the surrounding vegetation has pressed close enough to begin pulling at the structure. The building reads as one of the smaller residential or staff accommodation structures that formed part of the wider institutional campus rather than one of the purpose-built open-air patient chalets. 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 of approximately 500 acres had been purchased from businessman George Eccles Kelso King for GBP 1,250 after his wife Irene's death in 1900. The complex was designed by architect George Sydney Jones, who produced an Edwardian pavilion-plan campus where the buildings themselves were part of the treatment: open-air chalets, minimal enclosure, and exposure to the Blue Mountains plateau air at roughly 867 metres elevation on Kings Tableland. The institution passed from the original Fund Committee to the NSW Government in 1912, operating under the Public Hospitals Act. It ran as a tuberculosis sanitorium for 55 years before converting in 1958 to a hospital for the aged and chronically ill. It continued in that role until May 1999, a total of 96 years of continuous operation on the same site. After closure, the 372-hectare property was sold in 2000 for $2 million. Proposed redevelopments did not proceed. The buildings were left to the elements and the encroaching Kings Tableland bushland. Asbestos contamination has been documented across the site. This photograph, made in 2015, records what the cottage had become: timber and collapsed roofline, held in place by little more than the vegetation growing around it.