The Greatest View

A curved wall of steel-framed windows wraps almost 180 degrees around a bare concrete floor at Callan Park. Louvre handles jut from the glass at intervals along the arc. Two fluorescent fittings hang dead from the textured ceiling. Daylight comes through the clear panes under a flat grey sky, pooling across the polished surface and casting long column shadows toward the centre of the room. Beyond the glass sit red-roofed houses and bare trees. Several windows are open. Vegetation presses close to the building on the right side. The room holds no furniture, no patient, no staff.

Callan Park Hospital for the Insane was proclaimed as a separate institution on 1 August 1878, on the Iron Cove foreshore in Sydney's Inner West. The Kirkbride Complex was designed by colonial architect James Barnet with superintendent Frederic Norton Manning, applying the moral therapy principles of the period. Charles Moore, Director of the Sydney Botanic Gardens, designed the surrounding landscape. Wide windows and curved sunrooms like this one were not decorative. Light, air, and outlook were treated as part of the treatment. The complex remains on the NSW State Heritage Register at #00818. Many of the wards have been progressively closed since the late twentieth century. Sydney College of the Arts, which occupied part of the grounds, vacated in 2019.