Peeling Wallpaper

Inside the slab huts at Woolla, the walls were never just walls. When the two huts were built in 1927 from timber hand-split on the property, the gaps between the slabs were sealed with newsprint before the patterned wallpaper went on. It was a practical solution for an isolated build in the Deua River Valley, well south of Braidwood, where materials arrived by packhorse and nothing was wasted.

This photograph records what happens when that layering starts to come undone. The patterned wallpaper peels back from the surface, and the newsprint beneath it surfaces intact: yellowed, brittle, still carrying its printed text. Livestock sale advertising fills part of the frame. The partial name Frank Ganz is legible in the print. These are not decorative details. They are the building's original insulation, repurposed from whatever reading material was on hand when the huts went up.

A window sits to the right of the wall. The plaster around it is damaged. The interior light is the kind that comes in low and flat through old glass, falling across surfaces that have not been touched in decades.

Helena (Nellie) Davis took up freehold title to Woolla in 1910. The huts were completed in 1927, and Nellie moved in with her son Everid and daughter Neta. Three generations of the Davis family lived in the huts continuously from that point. Neta died at Woolla in 1990. Her son Vern was diagnosed with Parkinson's the same year and moved to a nursing home in Braidwood. He died there in 2004, the last Davis family member connected to the property.

The newsprint in the wall predates all of that. It went in when the huts were built and has not moved since. The 2021 photograph holds the moment before any more of it is gone.