Eve Lamb
Salvage yard operator Karl Haass of Glenluce has been in the business of dismantling old houses for 40 years.
But Karl does not use a wrecking ball.
Instead he painstakingly dismantles yesteryear abodes and salvages the resulting beautiful, precious and often rare materials and fixtures, ensuring they do not go to waste but can instead go on to find new lives.
In dismantling a 1930s Lyttleton Street cottage in Castlemaine in recent days, to make way for a new build, Karl was amazed and delighted when he found a very early photo of a mystery lady in lace, long-lost behind a wall in the kitchen.
“In over 40 years of doing this sort of work, finding this photo was unusual,” says Karl who has dismantled more than 4000 houses over the years, carefully salvaging their materials for reuse.
He believes the photo dates from the 1850s.
“It had been hidden for ages in that building and the lady in the photo looks to be dressed in expensive lace. She looks like she was someone of means,” he says.
On the back of the old sepia photo is handwriting, some of which can be made out to include a reference to the date of January, 1850, along with two names including Charlotte James and James L…… (whose full surname is partly unclear).
“I often find things like coins and old bottles but to find this was incredible. I thought this is very special,” Karl says.
Karl is one of very few people anywhere in Australia who dismantle and salvage old houses in the careful manner that he does, and suffice to say he recovered many valuable materials from the Lyttleton Street cottage.
Beautiful old western red cedar, baltic pine, Victorian ash and jaarah were among the timbers he salvaged, along with fixtures ranging from an attractive bay feature window to an early handmade stained glass lamp cover and even a vintage battery pack that had been attached under the house to run a yesteryear Post Master General telephone landline.
All will now end up at Karl’s fascinating salvage yard situated just out of Glenluce.
“I started restoring horse-drawn vehicles when I was 11 in the 1970s,” the unique salvage yard operator says.
“The lady gave us this job (in Lyttleton Street) on the basis that I’m salvaging it.
“In Australia we’re still throwing away far too much. You’ve got to be more in touch with the value of things.
“We’re in a McDonald’s age of building plastic-spastic.”
Karl says he would love to see if anyone out there might be able to solve the mystery of the 1800s photographed lady’s identity, and how her photo came to be hidden behind the mantlepiece of the Castlemaine cottage, which now no longer exists.
“Someone in Castlemaine would know about it,” he says.
