Garden

The pathways visible in this photograph once threaded through maintained garden beds on the grounds of the Queen Victoria Sanitorium, a purpose-built tuberculosis sanatorium on Kings Tableland, roughly 4 kilometres south of Wentworth Falls. By 2015, the year this photograph was made, the planting beds had long dissolved back into the surrounding bushland. Native growth covers the path surface. The lines that once defined the garden remain faintly readable, but only just. The site was established on land sold to the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund Committee by George Eccles Kelso King in 1900, following the death of his wife Irene. King had built a country retreat on the tableland property around 1890; the Fund Committee purchased it for GBP 1,250 and began construction of the sanatorium complex shortly after. The facility opened on 18 February 1903, with accommodation for 20 male patients and a site encompassing approximately 500 acres. The complex was designed by architect George Sydney Jones, son of physician Sir Philip Sydney Jones, who had championed the open-air treatment of tuberculosis in New South Wales for decades. George Sydney Jones served as president of the NSW Institute of Architects across two terms, 1912 to 1914 and 1920 to 1921, during the same years he was completing the sanatorium complex. The pavilion-plan campus included open-air chalets, patient wards, staff accommodation, a farm, and by 1921 the Philip Sydney Jones Hall. The sanatorium was designed to be largely self-sufficient. The institution operated as a tuberculosis sanatorium for 55 years before converting in 1958 to a hospital for the aged and chronically ill. It closed in May 1999 after 96 years of continuous operation. Three separate owners over the following decade proposed redevelopment that never proceeded. The grounds, the pathways, the garden beds: all of it has been returning to Kings Tableland ever since.