Bathtub

Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 14mm · f/8.0 · 1/10 · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Inside a derelict building at Callan Park, an old bathtub shows signs of severe decay. Rust marks the basin, where water once flowed for patients of the former asylum.

Edition

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Print datasheet

Title: Bathtub
Series: Callan Park
Catalogue: CPA-007
Process: Giclée
Captured: 29 October 2015
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified →
Recognised by: National Trust of Australia (NSW), 2016 Heritage Award, Multimedia

Where this was photographed

Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

About this print

The hydrotherapy room at Callan Park has a single communal bathtub at its centre, set into a white-tiled floor. The bath is large, deep enough for full-body immersion, and ringed with low ceramic kerbs. Three high windows on the far wall let in flat daylight. The walls are tiled in white glazed ceramic, the grout darkened by decades of moisture. Brass fittings around the bath are tarnished but still in place. The flooring slopes very slightly toward a central drain. The room is otherwise empty. The acoustics in the room are unusually flat, dampened by the tile.

Hydrotherapy was a standard treatment in nineteenth-century mental health practice, used to calm agitated patients and treat various conditions through immersion in warm or cool water. The bath at Callan Park was used for that purpose from the hospital's opening in 1878 through to well into the twentieth century. As psychiatric medicine moved on from hydrotherapy as a primary treatment, rooms like this one were used less often. After Callan Park closed as a working hospital in 2008, the room was locked. The bath in this photograph is original to the hospital. The plumbing is no longer connected. The room is now locked behind a door that is itself locked behind another.

From the field notes

A white-tiled hydrotherapy room. A large communal bath sits at the centre, its ceramic surface cool under flat light from three high windows. Dark drainage channels run in parallel lines across the terrazzo floor. A porcelain basin hangs from the far wall. Taps and valves remain fixed in place. The grout has yellowed. One window pane is cracked. The air carries the faint mineral smell of old plumbing and damp tile.

— Brett Patman

The series

Callan Park

2016–2018 · 66 photographs

Callan Park opened in 1885 as the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane, on land at Rozelle in Sydney's Inner West. The Kirkbride Complex was designed by colonial architect James Barnet and superintendent Frederick Norton Manning, intended as a working example of the more progressive psychiatric care principles of the period. The hospital was reorganised through the twentieth century and many of the wards remain. Brett photographed across multiple visits between 2016 and 2018.

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