Main Bedroom Cross View

A cross-view of the main bedroom at Woolla takes in the bed against one wall, the suitcases stacked beside it, the patterned wallpaper above the bedhead, and a doorway leading through to the next room of the hut. The bed is timber-framed, the mattress carrying its original woven bedspread. Leather cases and a hatbox are stacked two deep on the floor. The wallpaper has split at the joins where moisture has worked through, but the pattern remains legible across the intact sections. Through the doorway in the wall to the right, the next room of the hut is visible, a smaller space with its own window admitting the country light.

Woolla sits on the Deua River near Braidwood, in southern NSW, and is a pair of hand-built slab huts under one large tree. 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 stayed in continuous occupation until 1990, storing their clothes in suitcases rather than wardrobes for the full 63 years. Vern and Neta were among the last Australians to live a colonial-style rural life through to its actual end. The cross-view shows the structural logic of the hut, where every room opens onto the next. The property is in safe hands under the current owner and came through the 2019 to 2020 Black Summer bushfires intact. Brett photographed the main bedroom at Woolla on 29 December 2021.