Scratch

The wall of Female Ward 9 inside Callan Park's Kirkbride Complex carries a single deep scratch through its peeling paint. No furniture remains. No fittings. Just layered paint pulling away from the surface, and this one mark left by someone who was here. The Kirkbride Complex was built between 1880 and 1885 to a pavilion design developed by Colonial Architect James Barnet and Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning, with the grounds laid out by Charles Moore, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880. The first ward opened on 1 July 1884. The first female patients arrived on 19 December 1884, transferred from Gladesville. Total construction cost was £235,539. The design was deliberate and considered. Callan Park 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." Seventeen freestone blocks arranged in a square across 10 acres, linked by a continuous covered veranda, with landscaped courtyards and airing courts designed to serve as part of the treatment itself. By 1930, the hospital held 1,500 patients against a designed capacity of 766. The building was still in use as part of Rozelle Hospital when the facility merged with Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic on 1 September 1976. Full closure came on 30 April 2008. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the Kirkbride Complex from 1996 under a 99-year lease. Its Rozelle campus closed at the end of 2019. The buildings have been vacant since. This photograph was made in 2019, in the final year the complex held any regular use. The scratch was already there. It may have been there for decades. There is no way to know who made it, or when, or what it meant to the person who did.