Storage

Inside Female Wards 9 and 10 of Callan Park's Kirkbride Complex, a storage space holds the accumulated remnants of institutional life. Forgotten objects sit piled under a coat of dust, left where they were last placed and not touched since. The room is crowded and closed in, the kind of space that accumulates quietly over decades while the activity around it gradually winds down. The Kirkbride Complex was built between 1880 and 1885 on the foreshore of Iron Cove at what is now Lilyfield, the result of 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 designed the grounds. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880 and the first ward opened on 1 July 1884. Total construction cost came to £235,539. The design was drawn from Chartham Down Hospital in Kent, which Manning had studied during a 1876 tour of England, France, Germany and the United States. He adapted the model for the New South Wales climate, adding extensive verandah spaces and arranging ten ward blocks across a pavilion-type layout linked by a continuous covered veranda. Five wards for male patients, five for female. Seventeen sandstone blocks in total, arranged around landscaped courtyards and airing courts. Callan Park Hospital for the Insane was proclaimed a separate institution on 1 August 1878. The first female patients arrived on 19 December 1884, transferred from Gladesville. By June 1885, the completed buildings held 110 female and 303 male patients. The hospital merged with the adjacent Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic to form Rozelle Hospital on 1 September 1976. The last patient services left the Kirkbride Complex in 1994. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the buildings under a 99-year lease from 1996, closing its Rozelle campus at the end of 2019. This photograph was made in 2019, in the final year of the school's occupancy, when the wards had long since ceased to function as anything other than a building waiting for whatever came next.