Wheat

By 2015, wild wheat had taken hold across the grounds of Macquarie Boys Technology High School in Rydalmere, NSW. The photograph shows golden stalks growing dense and unharvested against the postwar brick buildings of a campus that had been closed and vacant for six years. What were once maintained school grounds had returned, steadily and without ceremony, to something closer to paddock. 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 is not planted or tended. It arrived on its own, and in 2015 it was already well established, pressing against brick walls that had not seen a student in six years.