Ward

A ward at Callan Park sits in one of the central blocks of the Kirkbride complex, the long sandstone room running between two rows of high arched windows. The room is empty. The floor is timber, scuffed and lifted at the joins. The walls are lath-and-plaster, painted in the institutional pale green of the hospital's working years. The ceiling has water marks across the centre. A single iron bed-frame, painted white, sits against one wall; the rest of the furniture has been removed. The windows on both sides admit hard October light. Trees outside cast moving shadows across the floor.

Callan Park's Kirkbride Block was built between 1880 and 1884 to a pavilion plan adapted from the Chartham Down Hospital in Kent. Wards like this one held male and female patients in linked single-storey blocks, with the verandas connecting them designed to give every patient outdoor access to the gardens facing Iron Cove. The hospital ran in this form for over a century. It merged with Broughton Hall to form Rozelle Hospital in 1976, and closed in April 2008 with the last patients transferred to Concord. Sydney College of the Arts had been the Kirkbride's tenant since 1996 and was preparing to leave when Brett photographed the ward in October 2015. The room had been empty long enough to look as it does here.