Ink and Comb

On a grimy timber shelf inside one of the Woolla slab huts, a glass ink bottle sits beside a white tablet jar. Both are coated in a fine layer of dust, the ink bottle's metal cap corroded to a dull grey. A green comb and a pink comb rest to the right, carrying the same dust and a tracery of cobwebs. Nothing has been arranged. Nothing has been disturbed. The shelf looks the way it did when someone last set those things down. Woolla sits on a bend of the Deua River in the Deua River Valley, south of Braidwood in NSW. The two slab huts that make up the homestead were built in 1927 from timber hand-split on the property itself, newsprint pasted behind the wallpaper to seal the cracks between the slabs. A kitchen occupies the first hut; the sleeping quarters fill three rooms in the second. Both stand under a single large tree. Helena (Nellie) Davis took up freehold title to the land in 1910. Her son Everid and daughter Neta moved in with her when the huts were completed in 1927. Neta's son Vern was born at Woolla in 1928, and her daughter Myrtle in 1930. Neta died at Woolla in 1990, the same year Vern was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and moved to a nursing home in Braidwood. Vern Davis died in Braidwood in 2004, the last Davis family member, ending a continuous ownership that had run from 1910. The Deua River Track, a bridle and packhorse route nearly 50 kilometres long, was the only means of access to Woolla until the 1960s. Supplies came in by packhorse from Waddell's on the Araluen-Moruya road, every three to four months. The current owners keep Woolla standing without restoring it. Emergency remediation has been done; maintenance continues. The huts came through the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires intact. The ink bottle, the combs, and the shelf they sit on remained exactly where they were.