Cultivating a therapeutic landscape
Tracing the evolution of the Parramatta Female Factory to a hospital
Images in Museums of History NSW’s collections help tell the story of the former Parramatta Female Factory site as it shifted from a custodial to a therapeutic landscape in the late 19th century.
The site of the Parramatta Female Factory, located on the upper reaches of the Parramatta River on Dharug Country, is part of a complicated heritage precinct. The Barramadagal of the Dharug Nation cared for this place for millennia, and Dharug people maintain their connections to Country, particularly to the Parramatta River to the west of the site.
After colonisation, North Parramatta became a landscape of welfare and control. This began with the Female Factory (taking its name from the use of convict women’s labour in the manufacture of textiles), which was followed by mental health and child welfare institutions.
The Female Factory, completed in 1821, served several purposes. It separated convict women and their children from colonial society in a secure walled compound where they could live, work or give birth. Convicts could be sent out of the Factory to live and work in private homes or businesses, while women with infant children or who were unable to work remained in the institution. Many women were sentenced by magistrates to spend time in the Factory as punishment and were accommodated in a separate ‘third-class’ dormitory and yard.
By 1848, convicts were no longer being sent to NSW and the Factory had closed. However, some convicts remained on the site as the institution transitioned into an asylum housing convicts and then free women, men and children experiencing mental illness. Known initially as the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum, and then the Hospital for the Insane, the institution is now the Cumberland Hospital and has provided mental health services for over 170 years.
A precinct layered in history
Today, the Parramatta Female Factory and Institutions Precinct is listed on the national heritage register. As well as the Female Factory and the hospital, the precinct includes the adjacent site that held the Roman Catholic Orphan School (from 1844), Parramatta Girls Industrial School (from 1887; known as the Parramatta Girls Home), the Kamballa & Taldree Children’s Shelter (from 1974) and the Norma Parker Detention Centre for Women (from 1980). As a whole, the precinct represents more than 200 years of institutional history that impacted thousands of people, particularly women and children, and people experiencing mental illness.
Rare and significant structures remain from the Female Factory era, including the third-class penitentiary, later modified into dormitories and day rooms for the hospital, and tall walls that once enclosed a yard containing a three-storey range of solitary cells. Among the oldest convict-era structures still standing on the site are the former convict hospital and matron’s quarters. However, most of the convict buildings were demolished to make way for new hospital wards and landscaped gardens after the asylum became the Hospital for the Insane in 1878. As a result, today this part of the precinct looks and feels like a late-19th-century hospital.
These changes to the buildings and landscape also signalled a significant shift in the experience of patients. Images in the Caroline Simpson Collection and the State Archives Collection, both held by Museums of History NSW, capture aspects of the site’s evolution that reveal changing attitudes towards the relationship between architecture, landscape and therapy.
A therapeutic landscape
During the 19th century in England and America, there was a shift in the ways that institutions housing people experiencing mental illness operated as they moved from a custodial approach to a therapeutic approach. These changes also influenced medical attitudes and approaches to mental illness in Australia. Physicians looked for new ways to treat people, but with no drugs or surgery, the environment provided by asylums and hospitals became the main therapeutic means of recovery.
In a therapeutic landscape, the architecture, gardens and scenery were designed to provide secluded spaces for patients. Purpose-built asylums were typically located in quiet areas on elevated grounds with views of the surrounding countryside. Gardens offered spaces where patients could walk and exercise, and often contained enclosures for ‘social’ animals, such as birds, for the entertainment of patients. The gardens supplied occupation for patients, with some maintaining the grounds as part of their therapy. Patients also provided necessary labour for farms within the grounds.
Out of step
When the Female Factory closed in 1848, the existing buildings and yards were used to hold convict invalids and ‘lunatics’; a general lunatic asylum was also established on the site in 1850. By 1856, the two institutions had merged. The buildings and yards designed for the accommodation and punishment of convict women remained in use but became increasingly out of step with the needs of patients and staff.
The former main Female Factory dormitory was considered outdated with poor light and ventilation. The old solitary-cell block that housed women and children in the asylum was worse still, its small dark prison cells with high windows repeatedly criticised as inadequate. The high walls enclosing airing yards separated and contained patients effectively, but restricted access and views to the surrounding landscape, which were considered important for patient recovery.
The building is one that in the olden time was used as a receptacle for refractory female prisoners, and it is absolutely cruel that these women, whose only crime is misfortune, should be obliged to stifle within these pent-up walls.
‘Lunatic Asylum Parramatta’, Sydney Mail, 26 February 1870
Images from the Government Printing Office taken around 1880 show the old Female Factory buildings still in use. While patients were active within the landscape, they are mostly absent from published photographs. Uniformed attendants and nurses populate the scenes. Other people, possibly patients, can sometimes be seen at the edges, sitting on a bench or leaning against a post.
Looking west towards the river, the image above – taken around 1880 – shows the site in transition. The substantial Female Factory buildings (including the main dormitory and solitary-cell block) remain in use by the hospital, with new asylum buildings, including a three-storey criminal ward and long ‘spinal range’, to the right. This photograph might have been taken as part of plans to substantially rebuild the site by demolishing the former convict dormitory and cell block to make way for additional new hospital buildings.
- The three-storey Female Factory solitary-cell block (1839)
- The main Female Factory dormitory (1821) with domed cupola
- The three-storey Criminal Ward (1861) for the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum
- Male wards 2 and 3 (c1876), known as the ‘spinal range’ as it sits along the ‘spine’ of the site
This image of the former main Female Factory dormitory, now housing male patients, was probably taken shortly before it was demolished around 1885 after the asylum became the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane. Hospital staff can be seen standing for the photographer just to the left of the door.
The photograph was taken within a secure courtyard inside the main gates. The building on the right, which still stands today, was the former hospital where many convict women had given birth during the Female Factory era. The building on the left, also remaining today, had been used for administration and included offices and accommodation for the Female Factory matron.
In the 1880s, the former convict hospital and matron’s quarters accommodated hospital staff. The addition of verandahs, small gardens and white picket fences added a domestic feel to the yard, contrasting starkly with the barred windows on the former Female Factory main dormitory.
Cultivating recovery
The administration of asylums in NSW was reformed from 1876 when the government established a Department of Lunacy and appointed medical doctor Frederick Norton Manning as Inspector General of the Insane. Following Manning’s appointment, the Parramatta Lunatic Asylum was renamed the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane, with a corresponding change in approach. Rather than simply holding and containing patients, the institution’s focus now shifted further towards treatment and recovery. Its expansion continued under Manning’s oversight. Sprawling single-storey purpose-built ‘weatherboard divisions’ (as shown on the right of the image below) already under construction on the northern part of the site were completed and used as wards.
The expansion of the hospital on land to the north of the original Female Factory site enabled the construction of a therapeutic landscape. In this image, uniformed attendants stand outside the cricket pavilion, and a person – possibly a patient – is seated on the verandah of the weatherboard dormitory to the right. The dormitory was replaced later with a brick building, but the pavilion on the left remains today next to the oval in the hospital grounds. The neat gardens, well tended by patients, provided occupation as well as interest with gravel or asphalt paths, ornamental fountains and animal enclosures. The structure with a small triangular roof in the middle of the photograph is an aviary.
All such animals and birds as can be kept at small expense and little trouble, and serve in any way to amuse and interest the patients should undoubtedly be kept in asylums; and in New South Wales, kangaroo, wallaby, and numerous kinds of birds, may be added to, or substituted for, those which are to be found in most European and American asylums.
From the mid-1880s most of the old Female Factory buildings were demolished and new sandstone buildings were progressively established around the footprint of the former Female Factory yards. These new buildings, with their large airy day rooms, shared dormitories and purpose-built individual cells, were more suitable for the treatment of patients. In 1885, the substantial new sandstone Male Ward 1 for quiet and convalescent patients was finished. This modern hospital building became the new centrepiece of the institution, identified today by its clocktower (which still holds the original mechanism of the Female Factory clock).
The orientation of the new Male Ward 1 was dramatically different from that of the old Female Factory buildings. As shown in the image above, it faced west towards the river. The high Female Factory walls on the river side had now been replaced with sunken walls called ha-has. While difficult to make out in the photo, a deep ditch is set before a 3-metre wall that sits into the ground. This disguises the wall so the courtyard is safely contained but doesn’t feel enclosed. The ha-ha also allowed for wide views out across the landscape, considered a key part of the quiet and secluded environment created for people recovering from mental illness.
In this case, the yard opened to the view across the Parramatta River in the foreground to the hospital farm to the west. The hexagonal iron roofs of the aviaries can be seen in this photo, but the gardens are not yet established. The weir under construction would create an ornamental lake in front of the ward. The area between the yard and river was later terraced and landscaped with picturesque gardens with substantial trees, including a striking pair of Bunya pines still standing on the site today.
If the court[yard] is on a rapid slope, the upper part of it will command a view over the lower wall, but even when the ground has only a gentle slope, or is altogether flat, by setting the lower and outer side walls in a ha-ha, a view of the surrounding country may be obtained.
By the early 20th century, the main axis of the site looked and felt very different. In the image above, the roof of the former Female Factory hospital building is just in shot on the right and the former matron’s quarters is on the left. There are gardens where the imposing Female Factory dormitory once stood, and Male Ward 1 has been completed with a new tower housing the old Female Factory clock.
The landscaping changed multiple times, with most of the work undertaken by patients. Although patients were contained in secure yards, shared dormitories and individual cells, the site was not meant to look or feel like a prison.
The buildings in this photograph still stand today.
The 20th-century grounds
Later images in the MHNSW collections are helping us to better understand the development of the hospital grounds over the 20th century. On the western side of the river, Wistaria Gardens – established in 1906 and one of Sydney’s most intact surviving Edwardian gardens – surrounded the medical superintendent’s residence, Glengarriff House, built that same year. The gardens are renowned for their long wisteria-covered arbours and showy displays of annuals, which were maintained by patients as part of their treatment and recovery. Each ward on the grounds had its own yard with ornamental gardens. This was the outcome of patient labour – the lush gardens and grounds that made up a therapeutic landscape designed for their recovery and occupation.
Landscaped settings were a key component of many hospitals treating people experiencing mental illness; in Sydney, these included Callan Park in Rozelle, and Gladesville Hospital. The ongoing adaptation of the grounds at Parramatta provides a unique insight into the relationship between landscapes and the many institutions that have occupied the site.
The image above shows the Parramatta River and the terraced gardens of what was then known as the Parramatta Mental Hospital, shown around 1950. It was taken from the western side of the river, looking back at the hospital. The iron roof of the former third-class penitentiary on the far left is the only convict-era building visible from this perspective.
This photograph, taken around 1950, shows the medical superintendent’s residence, Glengarriff House, and Wistaria Gardens, which patients established and maintained.
The wisteria-covered arbours and ornamental flowerbeds that were maintained by patients in Wistaria Gardens can be seen in this image, dated around 1950.
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Dr Carlin de Montfort
Curator
Carlin de Montfort has worked with convict sites, house museums and the tens of thousands of objects in their collections. With a background in Australian social and cultural history, Carlin enjoys finding new connections between people places objects and history.
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