In November, the NSW Writers' Centre invited me to talk at an event called Talking Writing: Callan Park Stories. The brief was to reflect on what the Callan Park gallery had done to Lost Collective. This post is what I said, plus what I didn't have time to say. I ran twenty minutes over.
Want to own a print from this series? The Callan Park collection is available as limited edition fine art photography prints, each personally signed and never reproduced once sold out.
The gallery that changed everything
Before Lost Collective existed as a project, I photographed abandoned buildings without much thought for the words around them. There were no historical write-ups, captions, or even gallery titles. Just images uploaded to my personal Facebook page.
That changed with Callan Park.
I've lived in Sydney's Inner West most of my life. The Kirkbride Complex on the Iron Cove foreshore has always pulled at me: the long sandstone wards designed by Colonial Architect James Barnet with Inspector General Frederick Norton Manning, built 1880 to 1884 on a pavilion-style plan that took its name from an American psychiatrist's idea of light, air, and curated landscape as a form of treatment. The hospital ran in one form or another for 130 years. It closed in April 2008.
I'd walked my dog through the grounds for years, looking through broken windows and wondering what was behind them. Callan Park was the first place I ever asked permission to photograph. When I published the gallery on Facebook in late 2015, I had no idea what would happen next.
A long week of messages
Callan Park carries weight for a lot of people. The gallery's reach went well past the photography community. Nurses, former patients, family members, historians, paranormal investigators, urban explorers, locals who'd walked past the building for decades.
Some of the stories were heavy. Abuse, neglect, relatives institutionalised for decades and never seen again. Others were the opposite: compassionate staff, peaceful gardens, the dignity of rehabilitation done properly.
"My great-great-uncle was a patient at Callan Park. He returned from World War I a 'mental case' and lived there for 40 years until he died. His family never saw him again."
"I was a patient at Rozelle in 2006. Best place ever. The staff helped me become who I am today."
Reading those side by side told me my photography alone wasn't enough. If I was going to keep doing this, I had to do more than upload pictures. The buildings carried other people's lives. I had a responsibility to account for that.
What it changed about Lost Collective
One recurring criticism of my work is that abandoned hospitals can look eerie. Sometimes the comparison is to horror films. I don't try for that effect. It's just what I see when I'm photographing the space. But I understand why it bothers people who have a personal connection to a building, particularly a building like this.
The Callan Park gallery taught me that context matters. I've rewritten the introduction to that collection several times since 2015, trying to get the history right and the framing honest. If I was going to document places like this, I had to research, listen, and let the building's actual past have more weight than the mood I'd shot it in.
That's how the project became what it is now.
Ghost stories and what they replace
Alongside the personal recollections, there was the other reliable strand of reaction. The ghost-spotting.
"Can anyone else see the face in the window?"
"There's a man standing between the two black marks on the wall."
I was getting late-night private messages from people convinced they could see spirits in my photographs. I appreciate that everyone brings their own way of looking at things. But reducing a site like Callan Park to a haunted-hospital story flattens the actual record. There are people whose lived experience of these walls is well-documented in NSW State Archives. Treating the building as a ghost set piece does them no service.
Getting the history right is hard
Piecing together what a particular room actually was, when it was built, who used it, is much harder than it looks. Some rooms I photographed I can't relocate on a floor plan. Information is scattered across heritage registers, conservation plans, hospital records, family memory. Reaching out through social media is hit-or-miss. But when it works, a single sentence can rewrite a frame.
"This part was the dining room for aged care. It was lovely. The residents and staff both loved it."
That comment came in on a photograph I'd previously associated with isolation and decay. The dining room. The place where people who had been there a long time ate together.
Moving forward
Reading through hundreds of comments on the Callan Park gallery was difficult work. Heartbreaking in places, hopeful in others. All of it reinforced why Lost Collective matters to me, and why the project changed shape after this gallery. The buildings hold records. So do the people who lived and worked in them.
If you have a relative who spent time at Callan Park, Rozelle Hospital, or Broughton Hall, NSW State Archives holds patient records that can be accessed by family. The building's history is in the registers. The lives are in the files.
Both deserve to be on record.
