Rear Room

The rear room at Woolla is a small utility space off the back of the hut, with a fixed timber bench along one wall and hooks set into the slab walls at head height. The bench carries the residue of working items: a small enamel basin, a length of rope, a tin can holding bent nails, and a hand-cranked grinder bolted to one end. The hooks above carry a few old coats and a hessian sack. The floor is bare timber boards, scuffed to bare wood at the most-walked positions. The ceiling is the same corrugated iron as the rest of the hut, with rough-hewn beams crossing below. The rear door opens onto the home paddock.

Woolla sits on the Deua River near Braidwood, in southern NSW. 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 lived here in continuous occupation until 1990. This back room held the work of daily life on a remote property: butchering, mending, preserving, and the small handcraft tasks that kept the house running across the decades. Vern and Neta were among the last Australians to live a colonial-style rural life through to its actual end. The property is in safe hands under the current owner and came through the 2019 to 2020 Black Summer bushfires intact. Brett photographed the rear room at Woolla on 29 December 2021.