Cell Doors

Female Ward 9 and 10 occupied one of the ten ward blocks that make up the Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park in Rozelle. The corridor holds its original steel cell doors, still closed. Rust has spread across the metal in long stains. Paint has peeled away in sections, exposing the layers underneath: colours applied one over another through decades of maintenance rounds, each coat a record of a different era of the building's use. The Kirkbride Complex was built between 1880 and 1885 by the NSW Colonial Government. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880, the first stone laid on 22 April 1880, and the first ward opened on 1 July 1884. Total construction cost came to £235,539. 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 and landscape. Manning had toured England, France, Germany and the United States in 1876, returning with drawings of Chartham Down Hospital in Canterbury as the planning model. He adapted that design for the New South Wales climate, adding extensive verandah spaces to the pavilion layout. The hospital was proclaimed as Callan Park Hospital for the Insane on 1 August 1878. It was Australia's first purpose-built hospital for moral therapy treatment: the idea that the built environment itself, its light, its scale, its landscape, was the treatment. The complex was designed for approximately 766 patients across 30 buildings. By 1930, it held 1,500. The building was proclaimed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999 as part of SHR 00818, the Callan Park Conservation Area and Buildings. The ward doors photographed in 2018 remain in place, peeling and rusted, inside a complex that has stood largely unchanged since the 1880s.