Slab hut
A slab hut is a kind of dwelling or shed made from slabs of split or sawn timber. It was a common form of construction used by settlers in Australia and New Zealand during their nations' colonial periods.
Huts, humpies and hovels
The Australian settler
From the very beginning of European settlement in Australia, improvised methods of building construction were in use. The First Fleet, arriving in 1788, brought with it few carpenters and a meagre supply of poor-quality tools. Nails and other ironmongery were scarce. The colonists were forced to build shelters using whatever skills they possessed, from whatever natural materials they could find. They tried the traditional British wattle and daub method: posts were set in the ground; thin branches were woven and set between these posts, and clay or mud was plastered over the weave to make a solid wall. Wattle and daub walls were easily destroyed by the drenching rains of Australia's severe summer storms, and for a time, walls of timber slabs took their place. These were soon replaced by brick structures; the Sydney Cove landscape was almost denuded of useful timber.When settlement moved beyond Sydney Cove, an abundance of suitable forest timber became available. Huts and humpies made entirely from timber poles and large sheets of bark were easily erected, but these were often only temporary structures. Local timbers presented a fresh challenge to the European settler. Australian hardwoods were difficult to work, and tools were scarce or inadequate. Australia's colonists were forced to improvise again, and become their own craftsmen.
In time, buildings of timber slabs became a familiar feature of rural Australia. Some were public and long-lasting structures: shops, schools and churches; even substantial homesteads were built of slabs. Others were no more than hovels. As workmanship and tools improved, the slab structure became more permanent and sophisticated, eventually to become an icon of Colonial Australia, as evocative of time and place and humble beginnings as the thatched cottage of an English village or the log cabin of Early America.
The New Zealand settler
New Zealand's European settlers also had to adapt to local circumstances, building with whatever materials were available, and employing tools of poor quality, or even none at all. Settlers tended to use the Maori word whare, instead of 'hut', for a temporary or pioneer dwelling.Ten pounds will go a long way towards putting up a sod hut; a cabin of outside slabs and refuse timber from the sawmills, or a serviceable tent with timber frame and sod chimney, sufficient to protect the inmates from the weather, and afford a temporary home at all events. There is, too, one great advantage the immigrants hampering themselves at first with only slender households, for they may very soon find it to their interest to change their place of abode, in order to secure higher wages or engage in more congenial occupations...
Materials
;In AustraliaThe usual slab hut was built entirely from timber and bark. Australian settlers found that the most fissile timbers were the Eucalypts: blackbutt, bluegum, stringybark, ironbark and turpentine. Some of these species are also termite resistant. The chimney, too, was often made of wood, although sometimes sods were used. The fireplace may have been given a lining of stones, sometimes covered with a plaster of mud or clay.
;In New Zealand
Settlers used a thatch of raupo, toitoi, flax, fern, or totara bark; they erected tents from poles, saplings, canvas, and planks or split slabs; and made tree-fern huts or more permanent dwellings from clay, sods, wattle and daub, or stone.
Walls
A slab hut is actually a 'slab-walled' structure. Its walls were, strictly speaking, built from 'flitches'. Slabs are sawn from a trunk, flitches are split from it. Hut-builders felled selected trees, and sawed the trunks into suitable lengths. They then split these lengths into flitches using a maul and a wedge. Timber was split tangentially, that is, along the grain, instead of by the traditional British radial method, from the core of the trunk out towards the bark. There was neither time nor tools suitable to properly dress timber into planks, nor to season the timber; it was used green.Roofs and ceilings
s would be fixed atop the slab walls, and a pitched roof erected. The dimensions of the hut would be kept small, to avoid the need for roof trusses. Joists were not always laid, and a ceiling was not always included. A Queensland example can be seen . If a ceiling was added, it was chiefly used for storage. Slab dwellings with a second storey were almost unknown.A bark roof was common, and was quickly and easily erected.
... the roof covered with forest box or stringy-bark, which was stripped from the
living trees in sheets of about six feet long and from two to four feet
wide, laid upon rafters composed of small sapling poles just as they came
from being cut in the bush. The sheets of bark, having holes pierced
through each in pairs, were then tied on the rafters with cords twisted
of the inner rind of the kurrajong tree. The whole framing of the roof
was secured as it was needed by wooden pins in order to save the expense
of nails, which were then both too scarce and too dear to be used by the
lower order of settlers.
Indeed, all kinds of ironwork were equally inaccessible, and instead of
hinges to tie doors or window shutters, those appurtenances were all made
to revolve on wooden pivots in holes, bored a short distance into the
corresponding parts of the frames.
Thatching was less common, but cumbungi, and blady grass were used if available. Later, when crops were grown, straw was used. For a more permanent dwelling shingles would be cut. The cabbage tree palm was found most suitable, and later the she-oak. In later years, galvanised iron became a popular roofing material, due to its cheapness and durability. Sometimes this was laid over the original shingles. Mrs Gunn noted that 'Great sheets of bark... were packed a foot deep above the rafters to break the heat reflected from the iron roof, while beneath it the calico ceiling was tacked up.'
;Linings, plasters and claddings
Whether or not a slab hut was lined, inside or out, depended on the economic means, the energy and skill, and the taste of the occupants. Beyond the need for simple weatherproofing lay the desire for some aesthetic satisfaction, the wish to make one's dwelling place pleasing in appearance as well as comfortable to occupy.
Battens might be nailed over the gaps between slabs, or the entire exterior might be clad with weatherboards. The exterior might then be painted, using mixes of materials as diverse as skim milk, quick-lime, lampblack and cement or plastered over entirely. All these measures were less to do with appearance than with preservation of the fabric of the building.
The split timbers are put in quite rough, and chipped all over with the axe to insure adhesion of the coat of plaster. This plaster is composed of alluvial soil, mixed with a portion of cow-dung to prevent it from cracking, and with chopped grass to enable it to adhere, the coat being put on with a light spade and smoothed over with a plasterer's trowel. It is run over occasionally afterwards with the trowel to fill in the cracks; and on being quite dry, whitewashed with lime, plaster of Paris, or apple-tree ashes and sour milk, the latter forming a tolerable substitute for lime as whitewash.
The interior might have a coating of plaster made from a variety of available ingredients: mud, clay, cow-dung. The inside face of the slabs might be whitewashed, or have newspaper pasted over them. More elaborate linings might cover the ceiling, and include sailcloth, hessian, calico, osnaburg, even wallpaper, cretonne or chintz. Mrs Aeneas Gunn describes making 'a huge mosquito-netted dining room, big enough to enclose the table and chairs, so as to ensure our meals in comfort... we hoped to find a paradise at mealtimes in comparison with the purgatory of the last few months.'
Floors
Floors might consist of the original ground upon which the hut was erected, but various mixtures of sand, clay, cow-dung, and similar materials were laid to make a firmer, more level, or harder-wearing indoor surface. Termite mounds, crushed and watered, had many of the properties of poured concrete when used as flooring material. Termites mix their saliva, faeces and other substances to bind soil particles and form their mound: this type of flooring was known as 'ant bed'. All of these substances or mixes required regular maintenance, either by watering them to re-solidify the materials, or by spreading a new layer of mixture on top.Timber slabs might also be laid directly on the earth to form a floor. More sophisticated and permanent dwellings had properly sawn floorboards nailed onto bearers.
Design and construction
The basic slab hut derived its plan from the vernacular English crofter's hut, a simple rectangular walled shelter with one door, and perhaps holes to allow air to enter. The interior spaces might later be partitioned off. To this design Australian settlers often added a verandah.Most slab-hut construction techniques could be described as bush carpentry. Few early settlers could afford the time, or possessed the capital, to build any dwelling more impressive than a slab hut: they had first to clear their land and get a crop planted or pasture fenced. In later years, according to the terms of their purchase, selectors had to erect and occupy a dwelling on their land as soon as possible. On the goldfields, or timber-getting, only a temporary dwelling, produced quickly from available materials, was thought necessary.
Since a majority of early settlers had formerly been manual labourers, they brought with them a sound practical ability and aptitude for 'making do'; other settlers observed or helped those more skilled and copied their techniques. The average settler could thus erect a basic hut in two or three weeks, adding to or modifying it later.
The two preferred methods of slab hut construction differed chiefly in the placement of the wall slabs: vertically or horizontally.
;Vertical slab wall
Alexander Harris described the vertical method of slab hut construction:
The first step of its erection was digging post-holes,
of about two feet deep... in which were placed posts ten feet high,
squared on the four sides with the axe... Along the
ground between these... were laid ground-plates and wall-plates... having a groove of
about an inch and a half wide and two inches deep mortised into the flat
sides their whole length. Into these grooves were fitted the two ends of
the eight-feet slabs we had split with the maul and wedges... The flooringboards... were six inches wide and one thick; timber being used so green, and the heat being so great, boards
of any greater width turn up at the edges, so as in time to look like a row
of spouts. The rooms were all joisted at top, and on the joists was spread
a floor of bark, so as to form, over the whole top of the house, the
settler's usual first rude granary. Squares of a couple of feet..
were left open in the wall in various places for windows... The chimneys were large,
like those of old farm-houses, and, for security, had a little wall of rough
stone and mortar run up inside about three feet; and in the middle of the
fire-place was a large flag-stone, of a sort capable of resisting the fire,
which constituted the hearth and baking-place.
Surgeon Peter Cunningham, advising potential settlers, described a similar method, and added:
... by this means a wooden house may be put up without having more than a dozen nails in its composition. I have known the frame of a house of this description, twenty-four feet long by twelve broad, with a back-skilling, or lean-to, of the same length seven feet wide attached to it, put up for the small sum of eight pounds, exclusive of plastering. The house was thatched, had a chimney, and was divided into four compartments; and with the additional plastering, whitewashing, and fitting of doors and windows, I do not think exceeded twenty pounds... A veranda tends materially to the coolness of the habitation, by sheltering the walls from the sun...
If only a top plate was used, the top of each slab was pushed up into the groove. The bottom of the slab was merely set into a trench. When a wall bottom plate was used, it was also mortised. Each slab was slid in at one end of these plates; on the bottom plate, an extra piece was cut out at one end of the groove to widen it and allow each slab to be fitted in: this piece was replaced after the last slab was inserted. Another method was to make a much deeper mortise in the top plate. In this case, each slab was lifted up into the deep top groove and then dropped into the bottom one. A third method was to nail planks either side of the wall plates to form a channel to hold the slabs, instead of mortising. This was a much quicker method of construction, but it required the use of sawn and dressed timber, and nails. Slabs were sometimes chamfered at one or both ends to fit into the mortises. Each method took more time and labour, and used more material, but produced a progressively more sophisticated and permanent structure.