Power Point

Inside the abandoned Female Ward 9 & 10 at Callan Park, a cracked power point clings to a crumbling wall. Dust has settled across the discoloured plastic faceplate. The fitting is unremarkable in every respect except for where it is: fixed to the wall of a ward inside one of Australia's most significant heritage hospital complexes, empty now, the plaster failing around it. The Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park was designed by three people working in close collaboration: Colonial Architect James Barnet, who selected the Iron Cove foreshore site for its winter sun and summer breezes; Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning, who returned from a study tour of England, France, Germany and the United States in 1876 with drawings of Chartham Down Hospital in Canterbury as the planning model; and Charles Moore, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, who designed the grounds as a therapeutic landscape in its own right. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880. The first ward opened on 1 July 1884. Total construction cost came to £235,539. The complex was Australia's first purpose-built hospital for moral therapy treatment. The NSW State Heritage Register describes it as "the first to be designed as a curative and therapeutic environment". Its ten ward blocks, five male and five female, were linked by a continuous covered veranda and arranged around landscaped courtyards, with views from some airing courts reaching west to the Blue Mountains. The facility was proclaimed a separate institution from Gladesville on 1 August 1878, and by 1930 held 1,500 patients against a designed capacity of approximately 766. Full hospital closure came on 30 April 2008. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the Kirkbride Complex from 1996 under a 99-year lease, then vacated at the end of 2019, consolidating at the University of Sydney's Camperdown Campus the following year. This photograph was made in 2019, after the wards had been handed back and before any new use had been found for them. The power point records what that interval looks like.