Cell Walls

The walls of Female Ward 9 and 10 inside Callan Park's Kirkbride Complex carry the accumulated evidence of decades of maintenance and slow deterioration. Paint has separated from the plaster beneath in wide sections, curling back at the edges or lifting in sheets. Where the plaster is exposed, its texture is coarse and uneven, the surface marked by the passage of time in a building that has not been used as a ward since the last patient services were transferred from the Kirkbride Complex in 1994. The Kirkbride Complex was designed by Colonial Architect James Barnet in collaboration with Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning and Charles Moore, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, who designed the grounds. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880, the first stone laid on 22 April 1880, and the first ward opened on 1 July 1884. The total construction cost was £235,539. The buildings were modelled on Chartham Down Hospital in Canterbury, Kent, drawings of which Manning brought back from a study tour of England, France, Germany and the United States in 1876. The design was adapted for the New South Wales climate with extensive verandah spaces, and arranged in a pavilion layout across ten ward blocks, five for male patients and five for female, linked by a continuous covered veranda. The complex was built around the principles of moral therapy, an approach that understood the built environment and its landscaped surrounds as a form of treatment. The New South Wales State Heritage Register describes it as the first facility in Australia to be designed as a curative and therapeutic environment. By 1930 the hospital held 1,500 patients against a designed capacity of between 600 and 766. A sequence of public inquiries followed, in 1923, 1948, 1955, and 1961. Full hospital closure came on 30 April 2008. This photograph from 2019 records what remains in these ward walls: paint film over plaster, separating slowly from the surface it was applied to protect.