Portable Record Player

An open portable record player, its ribbed metal turntable coated in dust and grit. The fabric-covered case shows wear and a peeling patch. The control knob and speaker grille sit alongside. The lid is raised. The object is complete and identifiable, silent in the frame. This photograph was made in 2022 in the Deua River Valley, NSW, and belongs to the Woolla series. Woolla is a pair of slab huts on a bend of the Deua River south of Braidwood. The huts were built by hand from timber split on the property, with newsprint pasted behind the wallpaper to seal the cracks. The kitchen sits in the first hut; sleeping quarters across three rooms occupy the second. Both huts stand under a single large tree, separate from the residence of the people who now hold the property. 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. Three generations of the Davis family lived at Woolla continuously from that year. Neta died at Woolla in 1990. Vern Davis, born at Woolla in 1928, was moved to a nursing home in Braidwood that same year after a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. He died in Braidwood Hospital in 2004, the last member of the Davis family, ending a continuous ownership that had run from 1910. The property came through the 2019 to 2020 Black Summer bushfires intact. The people who hold it now are keeping it from falling down, not restoring it to any former state. Emergency remediation has been done. The contents remain as they were.