The land at Callan Park has been used for the treatment of mental illness since 1878. That is not a brief history. In 1878, the suburb of Rozelle was farmland on the western edge of Sydney. The buildings that James Barnet designed that year - Victorian sandstone set in grounds that sloped down to Iron Cove - went up in a landscape that bore no resemblance to the dense inner suburb that surrounds the estate today.
The idea behind the site was consistent with asylum design of the period: that space and greenery and productive work were part of the treatment. Patients came here from the city and from regional NSW. Some stayed for years. The campus grew around them - new wards added in different architectural periods, different buildings for different categories of patient, the whole ensemble accumulating over a century as the population grew and the theories of treatment changed.
Deinstitutionalisation began in the 1980s. The wards closed progressively as the patient population was moved to community care settings. Buildings that had been in continuous use since the nineteenth century were locked and left. Some sections were repurposed - Sydney College of the Arts occupied part of the estate from 1996 - but much of the fabric remained as it had been.
What makes Callan Park different from industrial sites is the intimacy of the spaces. These were rooms designed for daily life - sleeping, eating, bathing, the slow passage of days in an institution. The scale is human. The evidence of occupation is different from a factory or a power station: institutional furniture, ward records, the specific quality of light in spaces designed to house people who were not free to leave.
I photographed the site across several visits in 2015. There is a particular quality to October light in the grounds - the old sandstone, the established gardens, the way the Iron Cove foreshore sits below the heritage precinct - that I have not found anywhere else.
