Saucepan and Lid

The two slab huts at Woolla sit on a bend of the Deua River south of Braidwood, under a single large tree. They were built in 1927 from timber hand-split on the property itself. The construction method left gaps between the slabs, and newsprint was pasted behind the wallpaper to close them. That paper is still there, yellowed and peeling, in the photograph. Helena (Nellie) Davis had taken up freehold title to the land in 1910. When the huts were completed seventeen years later, she moved in with her son Everid and her daughter Neta. Neta's son Vern was born at Woolla in 1928; her daughter Myrtle followed in 1930. The family lived here, without wardrobes and without easy road access, for three generations. The Deua River Track, a bridle and packhorse route running nearly 50 kilometres along the valley, was the only means of access to the property until the 1960s. Nellie died in 1977. Everid, who had left for Sydney years before, died in the mid-1980s. Neta died at Woolla in 1990. Vern was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease the same year and moved to a nursing home in Braidwood. He died there in 2004, the last of the Davis family at Woolla, ending a continuous ownership that had held since 1910. Myrtle, who had gone to run a cattle property of her own, died in Braidwood in 2015. What the photograph records is a kitchen surface inside one of the huts: an aluminium saucepan with a domed lid, coated in dust, sitting on worn timber. Behind it, torn strips of newspaper hang away from the bare slab wall. The objects are not arranged. They are where they were left. The current owners, who live in a modern house on the same property, have done emergency remediation work to keep the huts standing, not to restore them to any former state. Woolla came through the 2019 to 2020 Black Summer bushfires intact. The saucepan is still there.