Waiting Room

The waiting room at Waratah Park is a spare, functional space: fibro walls, timber floorboards, a cast iron bench bolted against one side, and a blackboard mounted to the left wall. Two small windows look out at bush that has grown thick and unchecked across the grounds. The room is not the famous part of the site. It does not appear in any episode. It is the infrastructure that came after the cameras left. Waratah Park sits on 12.6 hectares of Crown land at Duffys Forest, NSW, adjoining Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north and west. In 1967, Fauna Productions received permission from the NSW Government to occupy approximately 10 hectares of the site for filming Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. The Ranger Headquarters was constructed that year as a purpose-built television set. Production ran until September 1969, completing 91 episodes across three series and a feature film. In December 1969, Warringah Council granted land use access for the site to operate as a public wildlife park. It opened officially in January 1970. Ed Devereaux appeared at the opening in uniform as ranger Matt Hammond. For the next three and a half decades, visitors came to see kangaroos, koalas, dingoes, emus, and wombats on the same ground they had watched on screen. The waiting room was part of that tourism operation: a place to arrive, to queue, to sit before moving through. The business failed and the park closed in 2006. By 2010 all wildlife had been removed. The Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council took ownership of the site 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 (item #01944). Sydney Wildlife now operates a rehabilitation facility on site, entirely donor-funded. This photograph, made in 2017, records the waiting room as it stood: bench, blackboard, floorboards, and the bush pressing at the glass.