Hallway

The hallway runs the full length of one of the Queen Victoria Sanitorium's ward buildings at Wentworth Falls, its walls shedding paint in broad, slow curls. Each layer that falls away is a record of maintenance carried out across nearly a century of institutional life: a new coat applied over the old one, year after year, ward round after ward round, until there were no more rounds to make. Light reaches in from windows at the far end of the corridor, catching the dust that has settled in the air since the building was vacated. The sanitorium sits on Kings Tableland, about 4 kilometres south of the Great Western Highway, on a 372-hectare site originally purchased for the institution in 1900. It was designed by Sydney architect George Sydney Jones, whose pavilion-plan campus was conceived specifically to treat tuberculosis through maximum exposure to fresh mountain air. The complex opened on 18 February 1903, accommodating 20 male patients at first, on a site of approximately 500 acres. The buildings were not designed for comfort in the conventional sense; the open-air chalets were unheated, the treatment regime included daily cold baths, and the architecture itself was understood as part of the medicine. The institution operated under several names and several mandates across its 96 years. It began as the Queen Victoria Home for Consumptives, established by a Diamond Jubilee Fund Committee and later brought under the Public Hospitals Act in July 1912. In 1958, with tuberculosis no longer driving patient numbers, the facility converted to a hospital for the aged and chronically ill, and it continued in that role until May 1999. After closure, the buildings were sold but never redeveloped. Asbestos contamination was identified. Perimeter fencing and trespass warnings were installed. The site remains abandoned. The hallway in this photograph, captured in 2015, records the complex in the early years of that abandonment, its walls giving up their history one layer at a time.