Old Farmhouse

The farmhouse at Woolla stands on a bend of the Deua River in the valley south of Braidwood, behind a large spreading tree that holds its autumn colour well into the cooler months. The photograph shows the exterior as it has settled over nearly a century: corrugated iron roofing gone deep with rust, a tall metal chimney flue rising above the roofline, round galvanised water tanks flanking the structure, and a wire fence across the foreground. Forested hills press in behind. The building is timber and iron, hand-split slab construction, the timber cut from what was standing on the property at the time. Helena (Nellie) Davis took up freehold title to the land in 1910. The huts were not completed until 1927, when Nellie moved in with her son Everid and her daughter Neta. Neta's son Vern was born here the following year, in 1928, and her daughter Myrtle two years after that. The property remained in continuous Davis family ownership from 1910 until Vern died in Braidwood Hospital in 2004, the last of the family to hold it. Woolla passed through the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires intact. The owners who hold it now live in a modern house on the same property and have carried out emergency remediation work on the huts. The structure is kept, not restored. The photograph records what the farmhouse looks like when you arrive at it today: the same rusting iron, the same chimney, the same tree, the same hills. The wire fence is still in the foreground. Nothing has been put back the way it was. Nothing needed to be.