Back Room Entry

A doorway opens off the main hall at Woolla into one of the back rooms, the corrugated iron roof sitting low over walls lined with hessian darkened by age and damp. The floorboards are bare and dusted with fallen plaster. Through the doorway, a mattress rests on a simple timber bed frame, and a calendar hangs on the right-hand wall with its page turned to January. The room beyond is unlit. Daylight reaches in only through the open doorway and the thin gaps in the wall boards. The calendar is one of many Vern Davis hung across the inside of the house in the years before he left.

Woolla sits on the Deua River near Braidwood, in southern NSW. Helena (Nellie) Davis took up the freehold in 1910, and the original huts were completed in 1927, when she moved in with her son Everid and daughter Neta. The Davis family lived here in continuous occupation until 1990, the year Vern was moved to a nursing home in Braidwood after the onset of Parkinson's disease. The calendars he hung have stayed where they are. Vern and Neta were among the last Australians to live a colonial-style rural life through to its actual end. The property is in safe hands under the current owner and came through the 2019 to 2020 Black Summer bushfires intact. Brett photographed Woolla on 29 December 2021.