Flower

A single flower grows from a crack in the pavement at Macquarie Boys Technology High School in Rydalmere. Its petals are open. The concrete around it is fractured and worn, the kind of surface that comes from years of foot traffic followed by years of nothing. This photograph was made in 2015, six years after the school closed and three years before a demolition crew reduced the entire campus to cleared land. Macquarie Boys Technology High School occupied a purpose-built campus at the corner of Kissing Point Road and James Ruse Drive in North Parramatta. The school traced its origins to post-primary boys' classes on Macquarie Street, Parramatta, operating as Parramatta Intermediate High School from 1920. The campus at Rydalmere was occupied by the end of 1957, designed and built under the NSW Government Architect's Branch during the tenure of Cobden Parkes. It was a standard postwar government school typology: brick and concrete construction, classroom blocks with covered walkways, playing fields across approximately 10 hectares of western Sydney ground. The name changed to Macquarie Boys Technology High School in 1989, reflecting a shift in curriculum emphasis. By 2007, enrolments had fallen to 220 students. NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca announced the school's closure on 23 August 2007. The last students completed their HSC and the school closed permanently at the end of 2009. The campus then sat. No sale, no reuse, no formal handover. Three fires broke out between 2016 and 2018. All buildings were demolished by November 2018. This photograph belongs to 2015, the middle of that vacancy. The flower in the cracked pavement is not a metaphor anyone planned. It is simply what happens when a 10-hectare campus is maintained but not used, and something finds a way through anyway.