Kirkbride Ward

The ward sign reads Female Ward 9 and 10. Paint hangs from the walls in broad, curling sheets, each layer a different shade beneath the last, pale greens and creams exposed where the topcoat has let go. Sunlight cuts across the room at a low angle, picking up the dust that floats in the air without moving anywhere in particular. The floor is bare. Nothing has been left behind. The Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park was built between 1880 and 1885 on a 100-acre waterfront site at Lilyfield, on the foreshore of Iron Cove. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880; the first stone was laid on 22 April 1880. 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 and returned with drawings of Chartham Down Hospital in Canterbury, Kent, as the planning model. The result was ten ward blocks arranged in a pavilion layout, five for male patients and five for female, linked by a continuous covered veranda and set around landscaped courtyards. Seventeen freestone blocks in total, totalling 10 acres of built fabric, with 170 single rooms and 41 dormitories. Total construction cost came to £235,539. The first female patients transferred into the Kirkbride wards on 19 December 1884. Twelve came from Gladesville. The ward photographed here, Female Ward 9 and 10, formed part of that original female pavilion arrangement. By 30 April 2008 the hospital had closed entirely, with remaining staff and patients transferred to Concord Hospital. Sydney College of the Arts had occupied the Kirkbride Complex from 1996 under a 99-year lease, but vacated at the end of 2019 and consolidated at the University of Sydney's Camperdown Campus in 2020. The three NSW State Heritage Register listings covering the site, including SHR 00818 for the Callan Park Conservation Area and Buildings, were gazetted on 2 April 1999. What the photograph records is the ward as it stood in 2018: empty, quiet, the paint working its way off the walls without any particular urgency.