Patch and Peel

The wall in Female Ward 9 at Callan Park has been painted many times. Each coat sits over the last, and now they are all coming apart together, lifting in thin sheets, curling at the edges, pulling plaster away with them as they go. What is left is a cross-section of the building's working life: colour on colour, layer on layer, the record of maintenance carried out and eventually abandoned. Female Ward 9 is one of the ten ward blocks that make up the Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park in Rozelle. Five wards for male patients, five for female, arranged on a main cross axis and linked by a continuous covered veranda. The complex was built between 1880 and 1885 at a total construction cost of £235,539. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880, the first stone laid on 22 April 1880, and the first ward opened on 1 July 1884. Seventeen sandstone pavilions arranged in a square totalling 10 acres, with 30 buildings, 170 single rooms, and 41 dormitories. The design was not incidental. Callan Park was Australia's first purpose-built hospital for moral therapy, a doctrine that held the physical environment itself to be part of the treatment. Light, air, distributed pavilions, landscaped courtyards, views across Iron Cove to the Parramatta River and the Blue Mountains. Colonial Architect James Barnet, Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning, and Charles Moore, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, collaborated on the complex. Manning had toured England, France, Germany, and the United States in 1876, returning with drawings of Chartham Down Hospital in Kent as the planning model, then adapted the design for the New South Wales climate with extensive verandah spaces. The hospital merged with Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic to form Rozelle Hospital on 1 September 1976. The last patient services transferred from the Kirkbride Complex in 1994. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the buildings from 1996 and vacated at the end of 2019. This photograph, made in 2019, records what those walls have become: a slow, material inventory of everything the building has held and outlasted.