Wolston Park Hospital.

The facility, originally named the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum, was first established in 1865 on a 120-acre horse stud farm owned by Dr Stephen Simpson. The hospital, consisting of one two story wooden building and four female wards, could accommodate 69 patients, with Dr Kearsey Caanan as the first superintendent. In 1880 the hospital was renamed the Goodna Asylum and in 1884 more buildings were added to the hospital to combat overcrowding.

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Sam Harrison

an old building with rusted metal roof in the middle of a grassy area next to a river

Drone footage taken 22/03/2018. Credit to Jesse Harrison

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Kempton Park Hospital

Mental Institution Psychiatric Hospital

Bedlam Asylum

Criminally Insane Asylum

Pennhurst Asylum

The Asylum

Name Change

The Asylum and its cemeteries The hospital at Wacol has had several name changes over the years including the Goodna Asylum for the Insane, the Brisbane Special Hospital and Wolston Park Hospital. Its first incarnation was as the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum. The Asylum’s first inmates (as they were called back then) were taken by boat to the 450-hectare bushland site, west of Brisbane, in 1865.

an aerial view of a garden with lots of bottles on the ground and trees in the background

Mental asylum mass exhumations and missing remains: the tale of Wolston Park’s lost and forgotten patients. In 1947 a patient of the Brisbane Mental Hospital claimed he’d been forced to dig up the bodies of around 4,000 patients buried in the hospital’s cemetery. What happened to those exhumed remains isn’t clear. This is the story of Wolston Park’s missing bodies.

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Queensland

Louvre

Horses

Wolston Park: ‘Welcome to hell’

Wolston Park Hospital left to rot as former ’patients’ continue fight for justice | The Courier-Mail

an older woman sitting on a couch looking off into the distance

The plucky and “uncontrollable” Barbara – she had made several escape attempts from institutions – was then placed in the notorious psychiatric unit Lowson House, within the grounds of the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital at inner-north Herston. “They locked me up for three months in solitary confinement and fed me drugs,” she says. “They made me out to be this sort of monster.” After that, she was “carted off” to Wolston Park.

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Straight Jacket

Central Nervous System

Hold You

Barbara Smith, who was neither a widgie nor a delinquent, was committed to Wolston Park. “I was in there for three years,” she says. “While in there I lived in a straitjacket. They also injected you with (the drug) paraldehyde (a central nervous system depressant routinely used in mental hospitals around the world up to the 1960s). If you had to have paraldehyde they’d get the male warders over to hold you down while they stuck the paraldehyde in your leg, and when you woke up you had semen

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Garden Arch

Art Stuff

City Photo

Drone footage taken 22/03/2018. Credit to Jesse Harrison

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Cabin

Drone footage taken 22/03/2018. Credit to Jesse Harrison

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On The Edge

The Park

The Edge

Wolston Park: ‘Welcome to hell’

On the edge of a large working Queensland mental health precinct sits a historical stain where little girls were once locked up with criminally insane adults. Picture: Sarah Marshall

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Second Story

Railroad Tracks

The perimeter fence at Wolston Park.

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The Asylum’s first cemetery was in the very flood-prone south west corner of the site (now the Wolston Park Golf Club). Its location on the banks of the Brisbane River was ridiculed by an anonymous contributor to the Queensland Times “The graveyard is on the bank of the river, and the first flood will take all the dead lunatics down to Brisbane.”

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12 January

Monument Valley

WHEN the precinct now known as The Park first opened in 1864 it was called the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum, later named the Goodna Asylum for the Insane, among others. On 12 January, 1864, seven prison warders and 10 police constables escorted 57 male and 12 female lunatics from Brisbane Gaol to Woogaroo, travelling by river on the steamer Settler.

a no trespassing sign on a chain link fence in front of a brick building

During her many years locked up at Wolston Park she witnessed disabled children being bashed and sexually abused by other patients and warders. At 15 she was regularly given ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). She was eventually transferred out of Osler House and into a “semi-locked” ward, which allowed her time to stroll the grounds of the mental institution. On a walk one day she was raped by a Wolston Park gardener and fell pregnant.

Sandra was in Wolston Park for just over a year. “I did wake up once with a guy on top of me,” she says. “They were aborting babies, they were sterilising girls. You never got fed. You never got water. You were in that room so much. Our hair was falling out. We had green teeth. I knew that I would die there. I ran. They were going to kill me.” Sandra managed to successfully escape in 1967, and fled interstate where she tried to start a new life. New Life, Building, Water

New Life

Building

Water

Sandra was in Wolston Park for just over a year. “I did wake up once with a guy on top of me,” she says. “They were aborting babies, they were sterilising girls. You never got fed. You never got water. You were in that room so much. Our hair was falling out. We had green teeth. I knew that I would die there. I ran. They were going to kill me.” Sandra managed to successfully escape in 1967, and fled interstate where she tried to start a new life.