Upstairs Cells

The room is upstairs in Female Ward 9 and 10, one of five female ward blocks in the Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park in Rozelle, New South Wales. Paint has pulled away from the walls in wide, curling sheets. The plaster beneath is grey and crumbling at the edges. A high window sits above the line of sight, the kind of window that lets light in without letting much of the outside world through. The room is bare. Whatever was here is long gone. The Kirkbride Complex was built between 1880 and 1884 to a design developed by Colonial Architect James Barnet and Inspector General of the Insane Frederic Norton Manning. Manning had toured England, France, Germany and the United States in 1876, returning with drawings of Chartham Down Hospital in Canterbury, Kent, which became the planning model for Callan Park. The design was adapted for the New South Wales climate, with extensive verandah spaces connecting the pavilions. Ground was broken on 11 February 1880. The first ward opened on 1 July 1884. Total construction cost was £235,539. The hospital was Australia's first purpose-built institution for moral therapy, a treatment philosophy that held landscape, light, air, and distributed pavilion buildings to be therapeutic in themselves, not merely incidental to the work of the wards. The New South Wales State Heritage Register describes it as "the first to be designed as a curative and therapeutic environment". The complex was designed for 766 patients across ten ward blocks, five male and five female, plus official buildings, all linked by what one institutional history calls a "remarkable continuous covered veranda". The facility merged with the adjoining Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic to form Rozelle Hospital on 1 September 1976. The last patient services were transferred from the Kirkbride Complex in 1994. Sydney College of the Arts occupied the buildings under a 99-year lease from 1996, vacating at the end of 2019. This photograph was made in 2019, the year the campus closed. The cell records what the building had become by then: a high window, bare walls, and the slow work of time on sandstone and plaster.