Depot Roof

Waratah Park occupies 12.6 hectares of bushland at Duffys Forest in NSW, on Crown land adjoining Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north and west. The site was established in 1967 for the production of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, a television series created by Fauna Productions and broadcast nationally by TCN Channel 9 from February 1968. The Ranger Headquarters was constructed that year along with roads, power, water connections, and a helipad. Filming ran until September 1969, covering 91 episodes across three series and a feature film. Waratah Park then opened as a public wildlife park in January 1970, with animals including kangaroos, koalas, dingoes, emus, and wombats on display. It operated under successive managers through to 2006, when the business failed and the site closed to the public. What remains is a collection of structures from different periods of the site's life: the Ranger Headquarters, a service building, an octagonal gatehouse built in the 1970s, an undercover BBQ area, an equipment shed, wildlife enclosures, and the lagoon that was once the original helipad before it was excavated and converted during the tourism years. The corrugated iron roof in this photograph belongs to one of these structures. Photographed in 2017, the metal is heavily rusted, the surface breaking down in the uneven, bloom-by-bloom way that corrugated iron weathers when left to its own. Sunlight works across the surface, picking out the texture of oxidised ridges. Bush vegetation presses in at the edges. The lot was excluded from Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park in the 1880s as Railway Reserve 63; no railway was ever built. The television came, the wildlife park followed, and when both were gone the bush remained, doing what it has always done to iron and timber left unattended. Ownership of the site passed to the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council on 28 August 2014 under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983. Waratah Park was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 27 February 2015.