Entertainment Room

Dust lies thick across the floor of the Queen Victoria Sanitorium's entertainment room. Light enters through broken windows and falls across a silent stage, picking out the texture of decay on walls and ceiling. Whatever was once kept here is long gone. The room holds only stillness and settled years of neglect. The Queen Victoria Sanitorium opened on 18 February 1903 on Kings Tableland, 4 kilometres south of the Great Western Highway at Wentworth Falls. It was established by the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund Committee to treat tuberculosis patients in the clean air of the Blue Mountains plateau, at an elevation of around 867 metres. The site encompassed approximately 500 acres at opening. The original nucleus of the complex was a timber homestead with a bullnosed veranda, built around 1890 by Sir George Eccles Kelso King and his wife Irene. King sold the property to the Fund Committee for GBP 1,250 after Irene's death in 1900. The entire complex was designed by architect George Sydney Jones, working between 1902 and 1921. Jones was the son of Sir Philip Sydney Jones, the physician who led the tuberculosis treatment campaign in New South Wales, and grandson of David Jones, the department store founder. His design followed the Edwardian pavilion-plan model: open-sided wards, twelve open-air chalets that maximised patient exposure to fresh air, cold-bath facilities, a crematorium with twin flues for the daily incineration of sputum-contaminated materials, and a recreation hall named for his father. The Philip Sydney Jones Hall opened in 1921. It was the social centre of the sanitorium: a place for concerts, euchre competitions, garden parties, and Anzac Day services. For patients who could spend years on site, it represented a rare break from the clinical routine of the chalets and wards. The sanitorium operated as a tuberculosis facility for 55 years. In 1958, with tuberculosis in decline, it converted to a hospital for the aged and chronically ill, and later a nursing home. It closed in May 1999 after 96 continuous years of operation. This photograph was made in 2015. The stage is intact. The windows are not.