Callan Park Hospital for the Insane, Sydney, Australia

Site Name: Callan Park Hospital for the Insane, otherwise known as Callan Park Mental Asylum or “The Jewel of the West”.
Site Dates: 1878 - 2008
Site Size: 104.5 acres
In 1876, Garryowen House, also known as Callan Park House, was transformed by a local architect into a branch of the nearby overcrowded Gladesville Hospital.
Over 200 male patients were admitted to Garryowen for “moral therapy treatment” throughout the first two years, but beds were seriously limited.
In 1880, construction began on a much more extensive mental health facility called Callan Park Hospital for the Insane.
Five male and five female wards were built to accommodate approximately 600 patients, and the hospital took in its first patients in October 1884.
Yet constant overcrowding, staffing difficulties, and inadequate funding increasingly made the hospital a place of incarceration and squalor.
In 1923, an official enquiry began into overcrowding but little eventuated. The problem remained and emerged again in 1930 when patient numbers reached 1500.
“The early view was that patients were not really human beings, but wild animals. They used to chain the poor devils up.” Sydney University medical historian Dr Milton Lewis told the Australian Daily Telegraph in 2015.
“These so-called nurses treat patients most cruelly. They are mechanical, inhumane creatures,” one ex-patient wrote in the newspaper Truth on July 29, 1900.
“I once had my hair pulled until my nose bled. I have seen the nurses twist patients’ arms behind their backs until they cried out in pain and bumped their heads against the stone wall.”
In 1961, a Royal Commission investigation into Callan Park Mental Hospital revealed further incidents of patient abuse and neglect.
It was found that elderly patients were being bashed with a leather strap filled with studs, forced into straitjackets for more than five days at a time, and being force-fed pills that gave them serious allergic reactions.
The hospital closed in 2008, and staff and patients were transferred to a mental facility at Concord Hospital, NSW.
Since then, the hospital grounds have gone to ruin.
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Welcome to Abandoned World Photography, a collection of urbex videography and photography that takes you on an incredible journey back centuries through time, exploring the world’s forgotten corners.
I am an Irish female photographer who has travelled far and wide, capturing the beauty and decay of abandoned buildings in Australia, the UK, Spain, Ireland, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. From eerie, forgotten hospitals to derelict factories and ruined castles, I have been passionate about bringing these often-overlooked beauties back to life through my lens for the past 11 years.
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