Webinar: Callan Park and Broughton Hall: A Historic Hospital and Parkland in Transition

Join us for a webinar – Callan Park and Broughton Hall: A Historic Hospital and Parkland in Transition – presented by Roslyn Burge.

When: Wednesday 23 February, 7pm AEDT (Sign on commences from 6:45pm and the presentation begins at 7:00pm).
Where: Digital Webinar via Zoom
Cost: $10 members; $15 non-members; students $5.
Book: at Trybooking.

For further details, contactaghssydney@gmail.com.

Callan Park is a large, historically significant former psychiatric hospital with north-facing harbour frontage onto Iron Cove in Sydney. The first patients were transferred there in 1876 and by 1885 the collection of beautiful sandstone buildings forming the asylum were constructed.  Broughton Hall next door was lent to the government for a wartime hospital and functioned independently until 1976 when it was amalgamated with Callan Park and the resulting 62 hectare site renamed Rozelle Hospital.

The history of Callan Park is vexed and political.  As attitudes towards asylum care shifted internationally and a growing exploration of community care developed in the 1970s, the NSW government began to actively reassess the value of Callan Park and its role in psychiatric care.  By the time Callan Park closed its doors in 2008 countless newspaper columns, community marches, rallies and petitions, government plans and consultants reports had amplified its political profile.

Callan Park continues to be vulnerable.  The Greater Sydney Parklands Trust Bill is one of a cornucopia of current proposed developments and changes. Roslyn Burge will present a webinar outlining briefly the history of Callan Park and some of the community battles and contemporary proposals of its parklands which shape it today and in its future.

Roslyn Burge is a Sydney-based public historian; her work includes commissioned histories, exhibitions and oral history projects which include those she has initiated in her community – Goat Island communities during the 1940s; Mondo & More – the 20thC Greening of Leichhardt and the Rozelle Hospital Oral History Project.  She is a member of National Trust (NSW) Landscape Conservation Committee and Friends of Callan Park.  Her publications include Hiking for Health; No Peacetime Cinderellas: 60 years of the women of the War Widows’ Guild of Australia in NSW, Callan Park: Compassion and Conflict in the Asylum and Broughton Hall: Brought to Life.