Wheat

In the foreground, 3 bundles of dried wheat stalks hang in a narrow band of sunlight inside a room at Macquarie Boys Technology High School in Rydalmere, NSW, the light sharpening their texture against the dark interior beyond. A red door frame and a pale vertical element recede out of focus behind them, suggesting a preparation or storage room. The wheat sits incongruously against the institutional setting, in a campus that had been closed and vacant for six years. The school's history on this site began when it relocated to the corner of Kissing Point Road and Rydalmere Avenue in the late 1950s, following decades operating under earlier names in Parramatta. By 1989 the word "Technology" had been added to the school's name to reflect a curriculum shift. The buildings themselves were standard postwar government school construction: brick and concrete, multiple classroom blocks, covered walkways, an assembly hall. The kind of campus replicated across western Sydney during the postwar education expansion. Enrolments declined sharply in the 2000s. By 2007, the school carried 220 students, with projections pointing lower. NSW Education Minister John Della Bosca announced the closure in August 2007. The final cohort of Year 11 and 12 students completed their HSC, and the school closed permanently at the end of 2009. The site then entered a long administrative limbo. Plans for a replacement tertiary institution did not proceed. No heritage listing existed to constrain what happened to the buildings. Three separate fires broke out between 2016 and 2018. Full demolition of all structures was approved in late April 2018 and completed by November of that year. This photograph was made in 2015, before the fires, before the demolition, while the buildings still stood and the grounds had simply been left. The wheat in the frame was not grown here. Someone hung it and it stayed, in a building that had not seen a student in six years.