Filing Cabinets

The filing cabinets are still closed. That is the first thing the photograph registers: not ransacked, not emptied in a hurry, just left. Grey metal drawers in a derelict room at Macquarie Boys' Technology High School in Rydalmere, photographed in 2015 with six years of vacancy already settled into the surfaces as dust. The school operated from 1958 on a purpose-built campus of roughly 10 hectares at the corner of Kissing Point Road and James Ruse Drive in North Parramatta. The campus was built to the standard postwar NSW Government school typology: brick and concrete construction, single- and double-storey classroom blocks, covered walkways, an assembly hall. In 1989 the word "Technology" was added to the school's name, reflecting a shift in curriculum emphasis. The closure came in stages. In August 2007, NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca announced the school would shut, citing an enrolment of 220 students and a projected fall to 180 for the following year. Years 7 to 10 were discontinued at the start of 2008. The remaining Year 11 and 12 students stayed on to complete their HSC. The school closed permanently at the end of 2009. Plans for a replacement college on the site did not proceed. By 2015, when this photograph was made, the campus had been sitting idle for six years. Three fires struck the buildings between 2016 and 2018. The main hall was gutted in July 2016. A second fire in May 2017 destroyed another building. All structures on the site were demolished by November 2018. The filing cabinets in this frame did not survive demolition either. They are gone now, along with everything else. The photograph is what remains: grey metal, settled dust, a room that kept its records long after there was any reason to.