Laundry

The laundry room at Queen Victoria Sanitorium holds a row of industrial washing machines and dryers, their enamel surfaces eaten through with rust, standing on a concrete floor under a layer of settled dust. Light enters through windows filmed with grime, diffusing across the equipment in pale, even tones. Nothing has been cleared out. The machines remain where they were left. Queen Victoria Sanitorium was established on Kings Tableland, a plateau roughly 4 kilometres south of the Great Western Highway at Wentworth Falls, at an elevation of approximately 867 metres. The land was purchased from businessman George Eccles Kelso King for GBP 1,250 following the death of his wife Irene in 1900. The site had been his family's country retreat since around 1890. The sanitorium opened on 18 February 1903, formally established by the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund Committee to treat male tuberculosis patients. Initial accommodation was for 20 patients. The complex was designed by architect George Sydney Jones and laid out as a pavilion-plan campus with open-air chalets, pavilion wards, patient bathrooms, a farm running cattle, pigs, and poultry, and support infrastructure including a dam. The self-sufficient design was deliberate; the institution was intended to operate as a largely closed campus on remote bushland. From 1903, the sanitorium treated tuberculosis patients for 55 years. In 1958, it was converted to a hospital for the aged and chronically ill, and later operated as a nursing home. It ran continuously until May 1999, closing after 96 years of operation. The site was sold in 2000 and changed hands more than once without any redevelopment proceeding. As of the time this photograph was made in 2015, the buildings were abandoned and deteriorating, the laundry among them, its equipment left in place as the structure around it slowly failed.