Split

A concrete column divides the frame. To its left, a large room opens out, plaster pulling away from the walls in long irregular sheets, windows sealed behind boards. To its right, a doorway leads to a stairwell. Light arrives cold from above and falls across a floor thick with debris. Nothing else remains. The Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park was built between 1880 and 1885 on the foreshore of Iron Cove at Lilyfield. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880; the first stone was laid on 22 April 1880; the first ward opened on 1 July 1884. Total construction cost came to £235,539. The complex was designed as a collaboration between Colonial Architect James Barnet, Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning, and Charles Moore, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, who shaped the grounds and landscape. The design drew on drawings Manning brought back from Chartham Down Hospital in Canterbury, Kent, adapted for the New South Wales climate with extensive verandah spaces. Seventeen freestone blocks arranged in a square across ten acres; thirty buildings with 170 single rooms and 41 dormitories, linked by a continuous covered veranda. The pavilion-type layout was deliberate: small, distributed buildings, light and air reaching every ward, landscaped courtyards between them. The NSW State Heritage Register describes the Kirkbride Complex as having exceptional significance and records Callan Park as the first hospital in Australia to be designed as a curative and therapeutic environment. The hospital was proclaimed a separate institution from Gladesville on 1 August 1878. It became a teaching hospital for the University of Sydney from 1885. By 1930 it held 1,500 patients against a designed capacity of 766. Full hospital closure came on 30 April 2008. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the Kirkbride Complex from 1996 and vacated at the end of 2019. This photograph was made in 2019, as the complex stood empty.