Boarded Up
- Camera
- NIKON D850
- Lens
- 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
- Settings
- 14mm · f/8.0 · 1.3s · ISO 100
- Paper
- Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Provenance
Light filters through a gap in the heavy boards covering a window within Female Ward 9 & 10. The room remains dim, echoing its past as a place of confinement.
Open edition
Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.
Limited edition
A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.
Ships within 10 business days · signed & numbered
In situ
Print datasheet
- Title
- Boarded Up
- Series
- Female Ward 9 and 10
- Catalogue
- FWA-011
- Process
- Giclée
- Captured
- 1 March 2019
- Paper
- Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
- Paper size
- 290 × 200 mm
- Location
- Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia
Where this was photographed
Rozelle, New South Wales, Australia
Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap
From the field notes
A large room stripped bare. Pale yellow paint peels from every surface, curling away from plaster walls in thick flakes. The ceiling sags where sections have collapsed entirely, exposing the timber lath beneath. Plywood boards cover two windows and the central doorway. One window remains uncovered, letting hard daylight fall across a small desk pushed against the wall. A single chair sits in the far corner. The floor is a carpet of fallen plaster and debris.
— Brett Patman
The series
Female Ward 9 and 10
Female Wards 9 and 10 sit within the Kirkbride Complex at Callan Park in Lilyfield, on the Parramatta River. The Kirkbride was designed in 1877 by Colonial Architect James Barnet in collaboration with Frederick Norton Manning, the NSW Inspector of the Insane, applying the American physician Dr Thomas Kirkbride's principles of moral therapy. Charles Moore, Director of the Sydney Botanic Gardens, designed the surrounding landscape. The complex - twenty-some sandstone neo-classical buildings with timber floors, slate roofs and copper downpipes, mostly quarried on site - was completed in 1885 and arranged symmetrically: five female wards at one end, five male wards at the other, separated by administrative buildings in the centre. The first female patients arrived from Gladesville Hospital on 19 December 1884 - twelve women in the first transfer. By June 1885 the asylum held 110 women and 303 men. Through the early 20th century many of the women confined here were not suffering from severe mental illness but conditions like postnatal depression, grief, anxiety, or social nonconformity that the medicine of the time pathologised. Callan Park closed in 2008. The Kirkbride Conservation Area is on the NSW State Heritage Register (#00818, gazetted 2 April 1999), protected under the Callan Park (Special Provisions) Act 2002. The 2020 Kirkbride CMP, prepared by GML Heritage and Tanner & Associates for Property NSW, is the gold-standard reference. The wards remain largely intact today.
How big is each print
Print sizes.
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