Community Journal
Inside the Old Fire Station
I unlock the same door every morning — heavy, timber, painted the deep red the fire brigade used everywhere in the 1880s. It doesn't feel like the entrance to a wellness studio. It feels like what it is: the door of a building that meant business for a hundred years before anyone lay down inside it.
310 Stanmore Road was built in 1885. The Daily Telegraph called it the oldest continually operating fire station in New South Wales, right up until it closed in 1991. I didn't know any of that the first time I walked through — I was just looking for a room to hold sound healing sessions in. I found out the history afterward, the way you learn a new friend's whole backstory after you've already decided you like them.
What I noticed first was the ceiling height and the way afternoon light comes in low through the old windows. Fire stations were built tall so trucks could fit and hoses could hang to dry. None of that has a job anymore. What's left is a room that holds sound the way a cathedral does — the bowls ring longer in here than almost anywhere else I've worked.
Seventy square metres, heritage-listed, the bones untouched. Mats go down where the trucks used to sit. Shoes come off at the same door where boots used to go on in a hurry.
A private session runs ninety minutes. You lie down, fully clothed, and I play the bowls around you, then rest some on your body so you feel the sound as much as hear it. People mostly come during a hard stretch — a bad month, a bad year, the kind of tired sleep doesn't fix. Almost nobody arrives with much to say. Most people leave a little slower than they came in.
I think about the building's old job sometimes, mid-session, without meaning to. This room used to exist for other people's worst nights. Now it holds one person at a time, lying still, doing nothing more urgent than breathing. I don't have a tidy way to explain that. I just know it feels right.
The door's on Stanmore Road, and it's usually open.