Toilet

Female Ward 9 sits within the Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park in Rozelle, one of five female pavilions arranged across a main cross axis of sandstone buildings linked by a continuous covered veranda. The complex was built from 1880 to 1885, with ground broken on 11 February 1880 and the first stone laid on 22 April 1880. Total construction cost came to £235,539. Seventeen freestone blocks were arranged across 10 acres, comprising 30 buildings with 170 single rooms and 41 dormitories. The Kirkbride Complex was 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 and landscape. Manning had toured England, France, Germany, and the United States in 1876, returning with drawings of Chartham Down Hospital in Canterbury, Kent, as the planning model. The design was adapted for the New South Wales climate, with extensive verandah spaces added throughout. The NSW State Heritage Register describes the complex as having "exceptional significance" and confirms it as "the first to be designed as a curative and therapeutic environment." The institution operated as the Callan Park Hospital for the Insane from 1 August 1878, when it was proclaimed a separate institution from Gladesville. It was renamed Callan Park Mental Hospital and later Callan Park Hospital before merging with Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic to form Rozelle Hospital on 1 September 1976. Full hospital closure came on 30 April 2008. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the Kirkbride Complex from 1996 under a 99-year lease, vacating at the end of 2019. This bathroom in Female Ward 9, photographed in 2019, records what that long history left behind. The stained porcelain, bare walls, and stripped surfaces are the residue of a ward that once housed patients in a building designed, in theory, to heal them.