Recovery Ward

Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 14mm · f/8.0 · 6s · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

The interior of a recovery ward inside Callan Park's historic psychiatric hospital. Decaying walls and a quiet emptiness define the room. Patients once sought solace and healing here. Light filters through tall windows.

Edition

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In situ

Print datasheet

Title: Recovery Ward
Series: Callan Park
Catalogue: CPA-038
Process: Giclée
Captured: 29 October 2015
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified →
Recognised by: National Trust of Australia (NSW), 2016 Heritage Award, Multimedia

Where this was photographed

Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

About this print

A recovery ward at Callan Park. The walls are plastered and painted, the paint peeling across patches of damp. Tall windows along one wall admit daylight across the room. The floor is timber boards, scuffed and stained at the centre of the room. The fittings of the ward have been removed; the proportions of the residential space remain.

Callan Park became the first mental hospital in NSW with special admission wards for curable cases in 1905, under Inspector General Eric Sinclair. These wards were described as the forerunner of voluntary treatment without committal. The hospital was proclaimed as a separate institution on 1 August 1878. It merged with Broughton Hall in 1976 to form Rozelle Hospital and closed on 30 April 2008.

From the field notes

An old recovery ward. Floor littered with dust and leaves that have blown in under doors over the years.

— Brett Patman

The series

Callan Park

2016–2018 · 66 photographs

Callan Park opened in 1885 as the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane, on land at Rozelle in Sydney's Inner West. The Kirkbride Complex was designed by colonial architect James Barnet and superintendent Frederick Norton Manning, intended as a working example of the more progressive psychiatric care principles of the period. The hospital was reorganised through the twentieth century and many of the wards remain. Brett photographed across multiple visits between 2016 and 2018.

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