Kitchen

The kitchen at the Queen Victoria Sanitorium, Wentworth Falls, is a large institutional space now filled with rusting equipment. Paint has peeled from the walls in broad sheets. Floor tiles are broken and displaced. The room is vast in the way that kitchens serving a full hospital campus need to be, and what remains makes clear how seriously the site took the business of feeding its patients and staff. The Queen Victoria Sanitorium opened on 18 February 1903, formally established by the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund Committee on a 500-acre property on Kings Tableland, 4 kilometres south of the Great Western Highway. It was designed by architect George Sydney Jones and built to serve male tuberculosis patients, with the site chosen for its elevation of approximately 867 metres and its clean Blue Mountains air. From the beginning, the complex was intended to be self-sufficient. Farming operations commenced in 1903 and 1904: cattle, pigs, poultry, and a dam on site. The kitchen was not an afterthought; it was central to how the institution functioned. The sanitorium passed from private committee governance to public administration in July 1912, when both Queen Victoria institutions at Wentworth Falls and Thirlmere became hospitals under the Public Hospitals Act. It operated as a TB sanitorium for 55 years. In 1958, its function changed: the chest hospital became a facility for the aged and chronically ill, and it continued in that form until May 1999, when the doors closed after 96 years of continuous operation. After closure, the site was sold in 2000 for $2 million to Longevity Management Systems, with a retirement village proposed that never proceeded. Three separate owners over more than a decade failed to redevelop it. The buildings, including this kitchen, remain standing on the Kings Tableland plateau, deteriorating under asbestos contamination warnings and perimeter fencing. The photograph was made in 2015.