Shadows In Reverse

A narrow corridor recedes into near darkness inside one of the Kirkbride wards at Callan Park. Blue-grey walls rise on both sides, their painted surfaces smooth and cold. A heavy steel door blocks the far end. To the left, a second door stands ajar, throwing a hard wedge of daylight across the floor and the opposite wall. The polished surface catches the light in long reflections. The air looks still and close. Nothing in the corridor moves. Whatever happened here, happened before the door was last shut.

Callan Park opened in 1885 as the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane, designed as a working example of the more progressive psychiatric care principles of the period. The Kirkbride Complex by colonial architect James Barnet and superintendent Frederick Norton Manning organised the wards along long corridors, with patient rooms opening to either side. Many of the original sandstone and rendered brick wards remain intact and largely unused, the building stock too significant to demolish and too compromised to easily reuse. The complex sits on the NSW State Heritage Register at #00818. Sydney College of the Arts vacated its part of the grounds in 2019. The corridors that ran the hospital are still here, locked behind doors that mostly stay closed.