Brooding Skies timber ceiling The school closed at the

The school closed at the end of 2009 after enrolments fell to 220 students

Peeling paint and cracked tiles mark the room's slow retreat

The rear doors open onto overgrown grounds

Stacks of graph paper rolls sit gathering dust inside West Ryde Pumping Station

A corrugated iron roof spreads across one of the larger structures at Waratah Park

Brooding Skies timber ceiling The school closed at theWeathered timber walls and broken windowpanes mark a farmhouse now open to the sky, its slab construction a record of the hands that built and then left it. Structures like this one were the physical residue of the selector's gamble: 320 acres of Crown land for 1 per acre, three years' residence required, and the Monaro doing its best to collect on the debt. Part of the A Place to Call Home series.