Listen...

Goodna Mental Hospital, Australia's largest and oldest mental asylum, has housed 50,000 people over its lifetime. I came across this link to a series of programs ABC Radio National are running on its history. This is the first of three and makes for chilling listening:

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/07/aim_20100717.mp3

In the quilt, Reconfiguring the Wall, research material (maps, street plans, newspaper articles, photographs) have been printed onto fragments of cloth previously dyed with plant material from the Callan Park site.
In additional there are items (such as old napkins) purchased from the Rozelle market nearby which have then been embroidered with images/words relating to the project.

By utilizing this process of piecing together cloth (inherent to the patchwork quilt technique), Emma allows the multiple voices, and the stories they tell of the site, to be heard. The dominant narrative, that contained in the official records of the colony, are placed alongside the hidden narratives. As such they combine to tell a multiplicity of tales, contradictory at times, a truth which shifts and transforms in the telling.

In her novel set in Callan Park (and written in verse) Dorothy Porter describes one of the wards:

Windows

Ward sixteen is so dingy-dark

I could be underwater

the usual pyjama'd

shadows muttering

as they pace 

the lino floor

one stops briefly

to sniff me out

for fags

I shake my head

'Where's the money?'

he demands from cracked lips

'where's the 'money?

others rock

soundlessly

on rancid beds

(from: what a piece of work, Picador, 1999, 14)

Images: details of the 'reverse' side of the quilt, Reconfiguring the Wall by Emma Rowden