Old Refrigerator

Against a wall of patterned wallpaper at Woolla stands an old enamel refrigerator, its chrome latch and door handle still intact, rust streaking heavily across the upper edges. Cardboard boxes and a handsaw sit on the floor beside it. Dust covers everything. Nothing has been moved or arranged. Woolla sits on the Deua River in the Deua River Valley, NSW, two hand-split slab huts under a single large tree. Helena (Nellie) Davis took up freehold title to the land in 1910. The huts were completed in 1927, when Nellie moved in with her son Everid and daughter Neta. Neta's son Vern was born at Woolla in 1928, and her daughter Myrtle in 1930. The construction used timber cut from the property itself, with newsprint pasted behind the wallpaper to seal the cracks between slabs. The Davis family's connection to Woolla ran continuously from that 1910 title to the death of Vern Davis in Braidwood in 2004. Neta died at Woolla in 1990; the same year Vern was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and moved to a nursing home in Braidwood. The property passed out of Davis family hands when Vern died. What remained inside the huts stayed where it was. The refrigerator in this 2022 photograph is one of those objects. The patterned wallpaper behind it is original to the interior. The handsaw on the floor beside the boxes was a working tool before it was left there. The Deua River Track, the bridle and packhorse route that was the only means of access to Woolla until the 1960s, runs through country that still looks much as it did when Nellie Davis first arrived. The huts survived the 2019 to 2020 Black Summer bushfires. The wallpaper is still on the wall.