Designed by Doreen
Wallpaper Inspired by Lightning Ridge
In 1977, Doreen McGarrigle (née Bellamy) (1938-2022) went to Lightning Ridge with her husband Robert and their two children.
Though the move was temporary, the change didn’t dent Doreen’s enthusiasm. While her husband went to work laying blockwork for the Wallangulla Motel and her children went to school, Doreen wandered the streets, making sketches and taking photographs in the scorching heat that, on some days, reached forty-three degrees Celsius.
In the few months that the family stayed in Lightning Ridge, Doreen filled her sketchbooks with drawings. She drew the hand-painted road sign topped with a single lost shoe, and the windlasses or winches used to haul opal mud by hand from underground mines.
She sketched miners’ shelters that were hand built from local stone and timber, and from foraged or recycled materials such as pressed fuel tins, corrugated iron and sheet metal. She captured their wide awnings designed to keep out the baking heat, the water tanks elevated on crooked timber posts beside them, and the spindly trees clustered near each one.
Among her sketches was a timber building with wide verandahs and a sign which reads ‘Diggers Rest Hotel.’
The Imperial Hotel, built in 1909, was the first accommodation and ‘watering hole’ in Lightning Ridge. However, in 1927, it burned down. Then, it was rebuilt on the same site with a similar on-ground, single-storey style and later renamed the Diggers Rest Hotel. This is the building Doreen sketched during her stay and lucky she did, as the Diggers Rest would also burn down in 2006.
When her husband finished building the Wallangulla Motel, Doreen packed away her sketchbooks and the family moved south. But a few years later, while working at H. R. Walters in Blacktown, near Sydney, NSW, she dusted off her sketches of Lightning Ridge and submitted them as a wallpaper design.
She must have been delighted when her submission was selected. Manufactured in England using a laser-cut design, the wallpaper compiled a number of her sketches and presented them on a nostalgic sepia tone paper.
Thirty years later, Doreen returned to Lightning Ridge and happened upon her wallpaper hanging in Heritage Cottage ─ a building with twin chimneys that she had sketched decades earlier which features in the wallpaper.
Although wallpapers have largely fallen out of fashion and are less common in our homes, Doreen McGarrigle’s sketches remind us of the distinctive architecture of Lightning Ridge.
