Bathrooms

Within Female Ward 9 and 10 at Callan Park, the bathrooms remain. Paint peels from the walls in long curling strips where tiles have detached and left bare plaster behind. Rust stains run from the fittings down into the basins. The room is narrow, utilitarian, and stripped of anything that was not fixed in place. Callan Park was proclaimed a separate institution from Gladesville on 1 August 1878. The permanent Kirkbride Complex was built between 1880 and 1884, with the first ward opening on 1 July 1884. The complex was designed as a curative and therapeutic environment built on the principles of moral therapy, and it was the first hospital in Australia to be built to that purpose. Ten ward blocks, five for male patients and five for female, were arranged on a main cross axis and linked by a continuous covered veranda. The buildings were designed in freestone sandstone pavilions, two storeys throughout, rising to three at the ends of the pavilions. The designed capacity of the completed buildings was 766 patients. By 1930, the hospital was holding 1,500. The inquiries that followed, in 1923, 1948, and through the 1955 Stoller Report and 1961 Royal Commission, all turned on the consequences of that overcrowding. These rooms absorbed that pressure quietly, floor after floor, ward after ward. The last clinical services were transferred out of the Kirkbride Complex in 1994. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the buildings from 1996 and its Rozelle campus closed at the end of 2019. This photograph was made that same year. What remains now is peeling paint, rusted iron, and the particular silence of a room that once had a great deal of work to do.