Art Storage

The shelves are still organised. That is the thing that holds the eye. Whoever stacked the art supplies in this room at Macquarie Boys' Technology High School did not expect to be the last one to touch them. The materials are sorted, the projects stowed, the room left the way you leave a room when you plan to come back. The school closed at the end of 2009. NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca had announced the closure two years earlier, in August 2007, citing enrolments of 220 students and a projection of 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, and then the campus on the corner of Kissing Point Road and James Ruse Drive went quiet. The buildings had been constructed in the late 1950s, a purpose-built postwar government school campus covering approximately 10 hectares in North Parramatta. Brick and concrete in the standard typology of NSW Government school construction from that era. The school had operated under a series of names since its origins in Parramatta in the early twentieth century, becoming Macquarie Boys' High School in 1955 and adding "Technology" to its name in 1989 to reflect a shift in curriculum emphasis. After closure, the site sat in bureaucratic limbo for nearly a decade. A proposed replacement college did not proceed. Three separate fires damaged buildings across the vacancy period. By the time demolition was approved in 2018, the campus had sustained years of vandalism, arson, and weather exposure. This photograph was made in 2015, six years into that vacancy. The storage room had not been reached by fire or significant intrusion. The dust had settled evenly. The shelves held what the last art class left behind: supplies that outlasted the school, sitting in the same order they were placed, waiting in a building that was already gone.