Slab Hut Verandah

The verandah on the front of the Woolla slab hut is the first thing you would have reached after the long ride in from Waddell's on the Araluen-Moruya road. The Deua River Track ran nearly 50 kilometres from the Araluen Creek confluence south to Bendethera and was, according to research by Braidwood and District Historical Society president Peter C. Smith, the only means of access for the Davis family of Woolla until the 1960s. This verandah was at the end of that ride.

The huts at Woolla were completed in 1927, hand-split from timber standing on the property. The walls are slab construction, with newsprint pasted behind the wallpaper to close the gaps. Helena (Nellie) Davis had taken up freehold title to the land in 1910, and when the huts were finished she moved in with her son Everid and daughter Neta. The two huts sit under a single large tree on a bend of the Deua River south of Braidwood: the kitchen in the first, three rooms of sleeping quarters in the second. The configuration is documented in a measured architectural drawing made by Phil Rose in January 2008.

At the gable end of the hut, a galvanised corrugated water tank and an old steel drum stand on mown grass. These are the kinds of objects that accumulate across decades of continuous use and stay put when the use stops. Neta Davis died at Woolla in 1990. Her son Vern, born at the huts in 1928, was diagnosed with Parkinson's the same year and moved to a nursing home in Braidwood. He died there in 2004, the last of the Davis family to hold the property, ending an unbroken ownership that ran from 1910.

The people who hold Woolla now are keeping the huts from falling down. That is a different thing from restoration. Emergency remediation has been done; maintenance continues. The huts survived the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires that swept the NSW south coast. When this photograph was made in 2021, the grass around them was mown, the tank was still standing, and the verandah was still there to reach.