Sonnys' Bedroom

The Ranger Headquarters at Waratah Park stands on 12.6 hectares of Crown land at Duffys Forest, NSW, adjoining Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north and west. The building was constructed in 1967 as a purpose-built television set for Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, produced by Fauna Productions in association with TCN Channel 9. Timber-framed, with a verandah, it was never a functional ranger station. It was a stage, built to look like one. Filming ran from May 1967 through to September 1969, producing 91 episodes across three series and a feature film. The series premiered in Australia on TCN Channel 9 on 5 February 1968 and was ultimately broadcast across 128 countries, dubbed into 25 languages. Garry Pankhurst played Sonny Hammond, the younger son whose bedroom this was. The park opened to the public in January 1970, with visitors able to view the interior TV set inside the Ranger Headquarters. It continued operating as a wildlife park and tourism venue until the business failed in 2006. By the time of the NSW State Heritage Register listing on 27 February 2015, the building was described as sound but somewhat run-down. This photograph was made in 2017. A dusty white refrigerator with exposed condenser coils stands against the left wall, with a small sink cabinet, a table with tapered metal legs and a looped power cord still in place on the floorboards, and dark green curtains hanging across the window. Dust has settled across every surface in the uninterrupted way that takes years to accumulate. The Skippy TV set was conserved by International Conservation Services in 2014 and stored off-site. This room was not part of that effort. It remains as the park left it, inside a building that was always more fiction than fact, now holding the quiet evidence of both.