Lantern and Shelf

A recessed shelf set into faded floral wallpaper holds a metal lantern, small jars, a lidded container, a plastic bag, and a matchbox. The lantern's reflector is swung open. The wallpaper is torn in places. Nothing about the arrangement suggests it was staged or sorted. It is simply where these things were put, and where they have stayed.

The two slab huts at Woolla sit on a bend of the Deua River south of Braidwood, beneath one large tree. They were built by hand from timber cut on the property itself, the slabs split and raised by the family. Newsprint was pasted behind the wallpaper to seal the cracks between the slabs. The kitchen occupies the first hut; the sleeping quarters across three rooms are in the second.

Helena Davis, known as Nellie, took up freehold title to the land in 1910. The huts were completed in 1927, and Nellie moved in with her son Everid and her daughter Neta. Neta's son Vern was born at Woolla the following year, in 1928. Three generations lived out most of the twentieth century in these two rooms, without wardrobes, keeping their clothes in suitcases, with calendars pinned to the walls for decoration.

Neta Davis died at Woolla in 1990. Vern, diagnosed with Parkinson's disease that same year, was moved to a nursing home in Braidwood. He died there in 2004, the last Davis family member, ending a continuous ownership that had run from 1910. The property passed to the family who hold it now. They live in a modern house nearby and have done what is needed to keep the huts standing, without restoring them to something they never were.

Photographed at Woolla in 2021.