Dark Room

The dark room at Macquarie Boys Technology High School is a small, specific kind of space. It was built around absence: the absence of daylight, the presence of controlled red light, and the slow chemistry of an image appearing on paper submerged in developer. The chemical stains still marking the benches are not decay in any poetic sense. They are residue. Evidence that the room was used, repeatedly, for exactly the purpose it was designed for. The red safe light still hangs from the ceiling. In a working dark room, that fixture was the boundary between what could be seen and what had to stay dark. Paper could be handled under red light without fogging. Developer trays sat on the benches below it. The process was precise, sequential, chemical. Nothing about it was accidental. Macquarie Boys Technology High School occupied a purpose-built campus on the corner of Kissing Point Road and James Ruse Drive in Rydalmere, roughly 10 hectares of postwar institutional construction that the NSW Government Architect's Branch oversaw during the tenure of Government Architect Cobden Parkes. The school moved to this campus at the end of 1957, evolving from earlier incarnations that began in Parramatta in 1920 as Parramatta Intermediate High School and later took the Macquarie name in 1955. The word "Technology" was added in 1989, reflecting a curriculum shift that brought trade and technical skills into sharper focus. The school closed at the end of 2009, after the NSW Education Minister announced in 2007 that enrolments had fallen to 220 students, with a projection of 180 for the following year. A replacement college was proposed for the site but never eventuated. This photograph was made in 2015, six years into the vacancy. The benches remain. The safe light remains. The stains remain. All of it demolished by the end of 2018.