Backlight

Female Ward 9 occupies one of the ten ward blocks that make up the Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park, on the Iron Cove foreshore at Lilyfield in Sydney's inner west. The complex was built between 1880 and 1885 to a pavilion-type layout: small, linked sandstone buildings arranged around landscaped courtyards rather than massed into a single block. Seventeen freestone structures, thirty buildings in total, connected by a continuous covered veranda. The design was a collaboration between Colonial Architect James Barnet, Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning, and Charles Moore, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, who designed the grounds. Manning had toured England, France, Germany and the United States in 1876, returning with drawings of Chartham Down Hospital in Kent as the planning model. He adapted the design for the New South Wales climate, extending the verandah spaces and orienting the buildings for what Barnet described as winter sun and summer breezes. The Kirkbride Complex was built at a total cost of £235,539. The first ward opened on 1 July 1884. The hospital was proclaimed as a separate institution from Gladesville on 1 August 1878 and was the first in Australia to be designed as a curative and therapeutic environment, with light, air, and landscape considered integral to treatment. By 1930 it held 1,500 patients against a designed capacity of approximately 766. The site merged with Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic to form Rozelle Hospital on 1 September 1976. The last patient services transferred from the Kirkbride Complex in 1994. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the buildings from 1996 until the end of 2019. This photograph, made in 2019, records a window at the far end of Female Ward 9 casting a hard backlight into the empty room. Dust motes hang suspended in the column of light. The walls behind show peeling paint and bare plaster. No furniture remains. The ward is quiet in a way it was not for most of the 140 years before the camera arrived.