Hospital Ward

The ward is empty now, its beds long gone. Peeling paint covers the walls in layers, faded colour holding on in patches before giving way to bare substrate beneath. Dust moves slowly through the light. There is nothing left to suggest the room was ever in use, except the room itself. The Queen Victoria Sanitorium opened on 18 February 1903, formally inaugurated by the State Governor on a 500-acre site on Kings Tableland, 4 kilometres south of the Great Western Highway. The institution was established by the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund Committee, which had formed in 1897 following an announcement by Lady Hampden to create a facility for tuberculosis patients. The site was purchased from Sir George Eccles Kelso King, who had built a country retreat on the plateau around 1890 and sold the property to the Fund Committee for GBP 1,250 after the death of his wife Irene. Architect George Sydney Jones designed the complex between 1902 and 1921, producing a purpose-built Edwardian pavilion-plan sanatorium whose open-sided ward construction was deliberate. The prevailing treatment for tuberculosis at the time centred on exposure to fresh air, and the buildings were designed to deliver exactly that. Twelve open-air chalets sat alongside pavilion wards where nurses wore rubber boots to complete rounds in wet weather. The site operated as a self-sufficient campus, with farming operations supplying cattle, pigs, and poultry to patients and staff. The sanitorium admitted male tuberculosis patients from 1903 until 1958, when its function shifted to care of the aged and chronically ill. It continued operating under that purpose until May 1999, closing after 96 years of continuous use. Since closure, three separate owners have failed to redevelop the 372-hectare site. The buildings remain, listed under Blue Mountains Local Environmental Plan 2015 as heritage item WF025. This photograph, made in 2015, records what remains of one ward: peeling surfaces, faded colour, and the particular stillness of a room that once held rows of beds.