Light at the End of the Tunnel

The corridor runs the length of Female Ward 9, dark at the near end and opening to full daylight at the far doorway. Plaster has separated from the walls in long curling sheets, exposing the substrate beneath. The floor carries the accumulated debris of years without maintenance: fallen material, dust, the general drift of a building left to its own devices. The light at the end of the passage is not theatrical. It is simply there, steady and indifferent. Female Ward 9 was one of five female ward blocks in the Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park, the sandstone pavilion hospital built by the NSW Colonial Government between 1880 and 1885. The design came from drawings that Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning brought back from Chartham Down Hospital in Canterbury, Kent, following his 1876 study tour of England, France, Germany and the United States. Colonial Architect James Barnet and Charles Moore, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, completed the design team. Moore was responsible for the grounds and landscape, which were planned as a therapeutic space in their own right. The Kirkbride Complex arranged ten ward blocks, five for male patients and five for female, around landscaped courtyards linked by a continuous covered veranda. Seventeen sandstone blocks, totalling 10 acres of the site. Construction cost £235,539. The first ward opened on 1 July 1884; the first female patients arrived on 19 December 1884, transferred from Gladesville. By 1885 the completed buildings held 110 female and 303 male patients. The hospital was proclaimed a separate institution on 1 August 1878 and operated under successive names until it merged with the adjoining Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic to form Rozelle Hospital on 1 September 1976. The last patient services left the Kirkbride Complex in 1994. The full hospital closed on 30 April 2008. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the Kirkbride Complex from 1996 until the end of 2019. The buildings have stood largely empty since. The corridor in this photograph, captured in 2018, records the ward as it was found: walls failing, floor accumulating, daylight unchanged at the far end.