Dining Area

The tables and chairs in the dining area of the Queen Victoria Sanitorium have not moved in a long time. Sunlight comes through the windows and lands across surfaces that have been accumulating dust and decay for more than two decades. The room has the particular stillness of a place that once ran to a timetable and now runs to nothing at all. The complex at Wentworth Falls was opened on 18 February 1903, formally inaugurated by the State Governor on a plateau of Kings Tableland, approximately 4 kilometres south of the Great Western Highway. The site was purchased from businessman George Eccles Kelso King, who had built a country retreat there with his wife Irene around 1890. After Irene's death in 1900, King sold the property to the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund Committee for GBP 1,250. The complex was designed by architect George Sydney Jones, who worked on the site from 1902 through to 1921. Jones was son of Sir Philip Sydney Jones, the physician and leading tuberculosis specialist in New South Wales who founded the institution, and grandson of David Jones, the department store founder. His design followed the Edwardian pavilion-plan model, with twelve open-air chalets intended to maximise patient exposure to fresh mountain air. The elevation of Kings Tableland, at approximately 867 metres, was central to the treatment philosophy. The chalets were unheated and patients bathed daily in cold water; the buildings were not shelters so much as instruments. The sanatorium operated as a tuberculosis facility for male patients until 1958, when it converted to a hospital for the aged and chronically ill. Management transferred to Wentworth Area Health Service in 1988. The facility closed in May 1999, after 96 continuous years of operation. What the photograph records is what remains: a dining room with its furniture still in place, lit by the same windows that served patients across nearly a century of meals.