Garden Verandah

The garden verandah at Queen Victoria Sanitorium shows paint lifting from timber in long curling strips, the boards beneath gone silver and soft with weathering. Sunlight reaches the surface directly, throwing the texture of the decay into sharp relief. No furniture remains. The structure stands, but only just. Queen Victoria Sanitorium was established on Kings Tableland, a plateau at approximately 867 metres elevation, 4 kilometres south of Wentworth Falls and the Great Western Highway. The land was originally a private country retreat built by businessman George Eccles Kelso King around 1890. After his wife Irene's death in 1900, King sold the Tableland property to the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund Committee for GBP 1,250. The sanatorium was formally opened on 18 February 1903 by the State Governor, with accommodation for 20 male patients across a site of approximately 500 acres. Buildings cost approximately GBP 5,000 at opening. The architect was George Sydney Jones, who designed the complex between 1902 and 1921 and who was responsible for the pavilion-plan layout of open-air structures intended to expose consumptive patients to the mountain air. The original nucleus of the complex was King's c. 1890 homestead, with its bullnosed veranda retained at the centre of the institution. The facility operated as a tuberculosis sanatorium for 55 years before converting in 1958 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. Three separate ownership interests attempted redevelopment after closure; none succeeded. The 372-hectare site remains abandoned, with asbestos contamination documented and perimeter fencing in place. The garden verandah, photographed in 2015, records the Edwardian fabric of the complex at a point of advanced deterioration, the timber and paint returning slowly to the plateau bushland that surrounds it.