Kenmore Asylum

Kenmore Asylum is the local name for the Kenmore Hospital Precinct outside Goulburn, in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales: nineteen ward buildings, an administration block, a farm, sports fields and a pauper cemetery, designed by the colony's first Government Architect, Walter Liberty Vernon, and opened to its first patients in January 1895. The State Heritage Register, which listed it on 1 April 2005, calls the early buildings perhaps the finest corporate architectural expression of the Edwardian Free style in Australia. Its violent history is documented rather than rumoured: a suicide reported by the Sydney Morning Herald in January 1902, a patient killed by another in 1908, twenty-one deaths in the influenza epidemic of 1919, and the shooting of charge nurse Elizabeth Eva Naughton on 16 December 1922, whose memorial font carries her name and the date. Psychiatric care still runs on part of the grounds. The Vernon buildings do not: sold out of government hands in 2003, they stand fenced, vandalised and fire-damaged in private ownership, and that emptiness is what made the place famous.

The government bought the ground twice. At an auction on 29 October 1879 the District Surveyor Edward Twynam, who lived at nearby Riversdale, bought lots 32 and 33 of the subdivided Kenmore Estate on behalf of the government for use as a lunatic asylum; the purchase was the first major act of Frederick Norton Manning, newly appointed as the colony's Inspector-General of the Insane. Eleven years later the same government bought a second property for the same purpose. The State Heritage Register entry records the episode in the flat voice of an administrative file: "A curious piece of departmental bunglings is revealed by transactions in connection with Kenmore and Rossiville estates. Rossiville was purchased by the Government in 1890 (for 15,158 pounds) for the building of a lunatic asylum, it having forgotten that it owned Kenmore since 1879." The Public Works Committee had spent 1890 weighing the two sites; on 5 June that year the Goulburn Evening Penny Post reported that "THE Public Works Committee on Tuesday further considered the proposal to erect a hospital for the insane on the Kenmore Estate, near Goulburn." Goulburn City Council was still pressing for Kenmore in 1892, and in 1895 Parliament asked why two lots of land had been bought for one asylum. A design competition for the abandoned Rossiville scheme was won by the architect John Sulman; the commission went to the second prize winner, Walter Liberty Vernon, the colony's first Government Architect. Building at Kenmore began in 1894 under two contracts: 12,760 pounds 6s 5d to the Sydney builder John Baldwin, and 923 pounds 9s to the Goulburn builder J. C. O'Brien. O'Brien's included a small brick "special ward" costing 423 pounds 9s, and the heritage file explains why an institution stocked with calm cases needed one: "Although the first patients would be chosen for their quiet and industrious natures, it was necessary to provide separate accommodation for any patients who became violent or uncontrollable." The Penny Post went out to look in October 1896 and opened its report: "A VERY important Government institution is being steadily established at Kenmore, situated some three miles to the north-east of Goulburn." The first patients arrived in January 1895 — the Goulburn historian Leone Morgan puts it as "It was not until January, 1895 that the first patients started to trickle in" — and by 30 May 1901 the same paper could write that "The above institution is now complete as far as the contract work is concerned." Nineteen ward buildings, an administration block, staff cottages, a farm, sports fields and a pauper cemetery stood on the site, in orange-red brick fired on the ground with sandstone dressings and Welsh slate roofs. "It wasn't just a hospital, it was a village and for quite a time, self-supporting," Morgan said. What happened inside survives in fragments of public record. On 17 January 1902 the Sydney Morning Herald reported from Goulburn that "This morning Henry George Bailey, aged 41 years a patient in the Kenmore Hospital for the Insane, committed suicide by hanging himself from a window shutter by tearing a piece off a thick canvas". Thirteen months later the same paper carried a second inquest: "An inmate of Kenmore Hospital for the Iasane was found dead in his room on Saturday. He was lying face downwards with his face in an indiarubber vessel." In August 1908 the Penny Post covered the death of John Cubitt, struck by another patient — "On Friday morning John Cubitt, a patient in Kenmore Hospital, died, and a coronial. inquiry was held in the afternoon into the cause of the death." A fire broke out "at 2 o'clock on Friday morning in the drying room" in July 1912; and a patient recorded as James John Charies Claxton was "found hanged to a tree" in July 1917. For the pneumonic influenza epidemic of August 1919 the figure in circulation, given by the Nine Network's 2014 account of the hospital, is twenty-one patients dead, nineteen men and two women. The worst day was Saturday 16 December 1922. Richard Galbraith Sindell, 24, a returned soldier shot through the jaw in the First World War and committed after it, came back to Kenmore on leave from another hospital with a revolver he had bought, looking for the medical superintendent, Dr Charles Moffitt. He fired at Moffitt on a verandah and chased him through the grounds, ran into a group of nurses, and shot charge nurse Elizabeth Eva Naughton twice in the chest; the hospital manager took the hospital revolver from the office safe and brought Sindell down with a shot through the hand. A wing of the hospital was named after Naughton, and a marble holy water font was placed in the chapel of a Goulburn orphanage — St Joseph's in Christopher Knaus's report, St John's in the Nine feature — inscribed "Pray for the soul of Elizabeth Eva Naughton, charge nurse who was killed at Kenmore Hospital, 16th December 1922. RIP." The font was found behind bushes in a Canberra alleyway in May 2012, after an anonymous call to police; it weighed 160 kilograms and took three officers to lift into a van. Fifteen months after the shooting, on 23 March 1924, a war memorial listing sixty-eight members of staff who served in the two world wars was dedicated at Kenmore by General McNicholl, so spelled in the Goulburn Post caption; it was moved to its present position opposite the administration building in 1980. In March 1941 the New South Wales government offered the hospital to the army, "an offer the army promptly accepted"; Kenmore became the 114th Australian General Hospital, treating service personnel and prisoners of war, and its own patients went to institutions in Sydney. Morgan calls the transfer "the largest evacuation of people until the aftermath of Cyclone Tracey (Darwin 1974)". The army left at the end of January 1946 and the Department of Health resumed control a week later; by 1949 the wards were overcrowded again, and at the peak in the 1960s more than 1,400 patients lived on the site. David Graham, who started at Kenmore at seventeen in 1964, worked in ward one among ninety-three men, several of them displaced by the Second World War. One of them, he told the reporter John Thistleton in 2025, could name every surgical instrument on the tray because as a boy his job had been to clean up "after the Nazis' experimental techniques to sterilise females in the concentration camps". Welfare payments from the early 1970s, and the deinstitutionalisation policy that followed, emptied the wards. The hospital museum closed to the public in March 2011 and its contents were dispersed; the National Museum of Australia, the Powerhouse Museum and the National Film and Sound Archive took the pick of the collection, and the last exhibit, a timeline of the hospital, was handed to Goulburn Mulwaree Council in February 2013. "It took two years to dismantle the contents of the Kenmore Museum," Morgan said. The precinct itself was sold in 2003 and resold in 2010, was entered on the State Heritage Register on 1 April 2005 as item 01728, and passed in 2015 to the investment company Australia China International, which renamed it Kenmore Gardens the following year.

Two places in Goulburn answer to the name Kenmore, and only one of them is open. Kenmore Hospital Campus, at 209 Taralga Road, is a working service of the Southern NSW Local Health District: three specialised mental health units which the NSW Government service directory describes as offering "mental health rehabilitation, older persons' mental health and dementia support". The same page gives the opening hours as "Open 24 hours - No accident or emergency services are available at Kenmore", marks the service "Referral required", and lists the telephone as (02) 4827 3464. It is a hospital for its patients, and it has nothing to do with the ruins. The heritage precinct is the other place. It stands at 191 Taralga Road, on Lot 5 of DP 1078852, and it is private land held by Kenmore Property Development Pty Ltd, formerly Australia China International, which renamed the site Kenmore Gardens in November 2016. Ward 15, the former female section, burned on the afternoon of 16 October 2021: a two-storey building about thirty metres by fifty, alight when the crews arrived, with damage put at more than 500,000 dollars. Fire and Rescue NSW Superintendent Scott Dodson said afterwards that "The building is severely damaged, probably to the point where it will have to be demolished". Inspections by Heritage NSW found "significant damage" and a "deplorable lack of care" across many of the buildings, and the department ordered the owner to take "immediate and active measures to redress disrepair or risk to a listed place". Entering the grounds is an offence in itself: one of the charges laid over the fire was "entering enclosed lands". The lawful way in is a guided tour arranged with the owner. The Goulburn District Historical and Genealogical Society, trading as History Goulburn, has run them, most recently on record with a talk by Leone Morgan on 11 November 2019 and a tour of the grounds on Saturday 16 November 2019, bookings essential, [email protected] or 0459 528 914. No tour was advertised for 2026 when this file was compiled on 7 September 2026. The paper trail is open to anybody: the State Heritage Register entry, item 01728, gazetted on 1 April 2005 in Gazette 38 at page 1013, is free to read online; Kenmore patient records are held by State Records NSW; and the subdivision application over the precinct, DA/0005/2526, sits on the NSW Planning Portal with its fifteen supporting documents, exhibited from 16 July to 13 August 2025 and withdrawn that September after the Heritage Council of NSW declined to issue its general terms of approval.