Train Stop

A concrete platform sits at the edge of the scrub at Waratah Park in Duffys Forest, NSW. The tracks alongside it have gone to rust. Weeds have moved in along the margins. Nothing is coming or going. Waratah Park occupies 12.6 hectares of bushland on Namba Road, adjoining Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north and west. The site was used as a television filming location for Skippy the Bush Kangaroo between 1967 and 1969, with the NSW Government granting permission to occupy approximately 10 hectares of Crown land for that production. The Ranger Headquarters was constructed in 1967 as a purpose-built television set. From January 1970, the site opened to the public as a wildlife park, with animals including kangaroos, koalas, dingoes, emus, and wombats on display across the property. The park changed hands several times across its years of public operation. Management transferred to Waratah Park Pty Ltd in 1976, and the site later operated under the name Waratah Park Earth Sanctuary between 1995 and 2000. The business failed and the park closed in 2006. By 2010, all wildlife had been removed. On 28 August 2014, ownership passed to the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983. The NSW State Heritage Register listing followed on 27 February 2015. The train stop recorded in this 2017 photograph is one of the features present on the site, sitting within a property that accumulated visitor infrastructure across its years of public operation. The research record does not document the stop's origin or purpose in detail. What the photograph shows is straightforward: cracked concrete, rust, encroaching vegetation, and the particular stillness of infrastructure that has not been used in a long time. The bush at Waratah Park has been reclaiming ground since 2006. The platform is part of what it is reclaiming.