Nurse Call Button

This nurse call button is fixed to a wall inside Queen Victoria Sanitorium on Kings Tableland, 4 kilometres south of the Great Western Highway at Wentworth Falls. The paint around the fixture has lifted and curled. The wall behind it is decaying. The button itself remains in place, still mounted, still pointed at the room, connected to nothing. The sanitorium opened on 18 February 1903, formally inaugurated by the State Governor on a site of approximately 500 acres purchased from businessman George Eccles Kelso King for GBP 1,250. The complex was designed by architect George Sydney Jones in the Edwardian pavilion-plan tradition, with open-air chalets, unheated patient rooms, and wards where nurses conducted rounds in rubber boots during wet weather. The design philosophy was deliberate: fresh mountain air at roughly 867 metres elevation on Kings Tableland was considered central to treatment. Twelve open-air chalets, assessed in heritage review as "extremely rare" survivors of their type, were built to maximise patient exposure to that air. The facility served male tuberculosis patients from 1903 under its first medical director, Dr Malcolm McIntyre Sinclair. In 1958, after 55 years as a chest hospital, it converted to care for the aged and chronically ill. Management transferred to Wentworth Area Health Service in 1988. The site closed in May 1999 after 96 continuous years of operation. The nurse call button in this photograph belongs to that later era of the building's life, hardware installed to connect patients in the wards to the staff who cared for them. After closure, the site was sold, proposed for redevelopment as a retirement village, passed through multiple owners, and was relisted for auction in 2012. No redevelopment has proceeded. Asbestos contamination has been documented throughout the complex. The button remains on the wall where it was last used, in a building that has not been used since.