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 (or 'dab') 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 (house), 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 [to] 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 Australia The 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 Rafters 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 here. 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 [was] 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 (rushes), 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.'
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