CALLAN PARK GHOSTS
High up in the Henry Lawson Room one dreary winter’s afternoon in 2015, came a most inspiring declaration from one of my fellow Writing NSW students: ‘This place gives me the creeps,’ she said, rubbing the goosebumps on her arms, no doubt instigated by ghosts. ‘This building used to be an insane asylum.’
After the announcement that we were in a Victorian-era mad house, my imagination quite ran away with me. I already had an interest in Victorian lunacy — I had read Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, Hard Cash — and several recent histories of Bedlam and Broadmoor – and now I had found a real Australian lunatic asylum.
I arrived early for my class the next week and took myself off on a self-guided tour of the park. I wondered who had been there — and I was seized with a longing to write historical fiction set in the grounds.
I searched for a book on the site’s history — but there was nothing. Some articles about the architecture but zero about the patients: nothing that could give me a way in to create an authentic story within the sandstone. So I went to the NSW State Records Authority in Kingswood. To find out about the mad patients at Callan Park.
Before Callan Park was called Callan Park, Garry Owen House (currently Writing NSW) was a private mansion set on a sprawling acreage in quiet Balmain. The house boasted a ballroom (thanks to the two sets of sliding doors sealing the twin front rooms) and a beautiful stained glass cupola above a magnificent floating staircase. All these features, built in the 1840s, are still in existence today.
To cut a long story short, in 1874 the NSW state government snapped it up, keen to use the mansion on site as a holding pen for patients from Gladesville Lunatic Asylum down the road, which was vastly over-populated. And so the first patients arrived and were installed at Garry Owen while they awaited the building and completion of the monolithic Kirkbride Complex next door.
I went obsessively to Kingswood to discover the original Victorian-era patients — I wanted to mine as much detail as possible from the original records to furnish my historical fiction. At first I was selfish. I wanted names, grisly events of torture, people I could stalk through history to flesh-out my own creations. But the more I read about these first patients, the more I sympathised with them.
I realised that they were not all ‘mad’ — some were depressed and living in an age sans anti-depressants; some were epileptic and without help. They started to haunt me: I felt an overwhelming sense that to borrow their stories was stealing a part of them — something against which they could not retaliate, with this wall of decades between us. So I decided to tell their stories — as truth — and not as my own concoction of real and imaginary.
But who were these unfortunate men? The patients of early Callan Park were constantly encouraged to read and write as part of their treatment, making entirely fitting Garry Owen’s current tenants, Writing NSW. A wide variety of books and periodicals abounded in the library and reading room (now the Judith Wright Room). The Medical Superintendents often petitioned the government for more money for literature, and even staff donated books including the engineer who gifted the full works of Charles Dickens.
There were many famous Callan Park patients from the 20th century who were writers: Michael Dransfield the poet, JF Archibald the editor of The Bulletin, and various members of Henry Lawson’s family — writers, too. But there were also some interesting, and far less-famous Victorian-era, writers who made up Callan Park’s first wards.
Frederick Legard was one such. An ‘eccentric’ reverend whose several decades at Callan Park might be characterised as inconsistent, he toggled between obsessively honing his skills as a great classicist and mathematician, and maniacal behaviour where he attacked staff and fellow patients and was secluded for his trouble.
Legard had originally been a clergyman based in a small village in Yorkshire in England. He had a strong line of ‘madness’ running through his family, usually exacerbated by excessive drinking. His parents were gifted musicians and after a brief stint in a private madhouse in England, which disrupted his religious career, he sailed to Australia in the 1850s.
All of Legard’s work — letters and other compositions — has been entirely annihilated, except for one article he had published in The Age in 1858. In it, he suggests a detailed plan for the development of Australia’s railway connections:
Thus, as railways produce union, and union produces strength, so likewise (as Montesquieu has shown), “the natural effect of commerce is to tend to, and consolidate peace;” so that, instead of cutting our enemies[’] throats as in India and the Crimea, and wasting a deal of valuable blood and treasure, we might by these means fulfil a far higher destiny, and promote the ends of prosperity, strength, and peace.
Many of the patients at Callan Park claimed to be writers and poets — sometimes using this as proof of their sanity in petitions for release. James McMahon did just this: he convinced the artisans and workers at Callan Park to sign a sheet citing his status as ‘a poet and an intelligent member of society’ as a key reason for granting him his freedom. But patient Henry Robert Black’s imagination did just the opposite, however: it perpetuated his chronic delusional mania and need for care. Upon his allocated pages in the hospital’s heavy Medical Case Book, with marbled endpapers and leather covers, the doctors describe his condition:
His imagination is of the most inventive kind. He believes that he can make horses out of a piece of skin, gun-barrel out of rainbows and change men into women at pleasure. He is exceedingly absurd in conversation but is always cheery and good-tempered and ready to work, and is at times very useful owing to considerable mechanical genius.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to patient George Morton, whose name was really Arthur O’Connor, but who was forced to keep this quiet since a few years before he had been gaoled for the attempted assassination of Queen Victoria outside her palace in London.
Imbued with a hyperbolic sense of his own literary worth, in 1873 he wrote to Queen Victoria, suggesting himself as the next Poet Laureate:
There is no mind so peculiar, so distinct and so strong in its yearning, as a poet[’]s. It stands alone, and lives in a glorious solitude, apart from the world, and to its music, the sounds of trade, are death. It is a heavenly blossom, that would spring up into glory, in a desert, but which would die despairingly amidst the horrors of the Counting House.
There is one prize towards which I am ever looking – none but a poet can obtain it, and as yet I think, no Irish poet has held it. Passionately Irish myself, this honor I will bring upon Ireland, poor Ireland, if the highest limit of human shining can obtain success. It comes from the throne, and is now held by a writer yet “not one of the grand old masters”. He is not immortal. I beseech Your Majesty to read the accompanying letter. It will shew that if I sinned I suffered also, and deserved more, far more pity than punishment.
About the Writer
Sarah Luke is a teacher and historian based in Sydney. Her history of Callan Park, Callan Park, Hospital for the Insane, was released in July 2018 by Australian Scholarly Publishing. See sarah-luke.com.