Urbex - Aradale Mental Asylum

Date: 20/09/2008
Location: Aradale Mental Asylum
Where: Ararat, Victoria

We took a lovely trip out to Aradale Mental Asylum .. or Hospital. or Psychiatric ward. Or whatever you want to call it. It was fascinating on so many levels. I felt excited at the “beauty” of the place… and needed to keep reminding myself of what what it really was - a sobering realisation in its own right.

Often there’s a sense of eeriness in the places we visit. They can be creepy, unsettling and still, and yet Aradale felt nothing like this at all. In a way, it’s slightly disappointing after a 2 hour drive following weeks, months of anticipation. Perhaps because it closed in 1993, and is currently being used by NMIT to grow wine. As a result, it doesn’t feel as old as many places we visit, and indeed, with regular security it’s well looked after.

There’s plenty of background in the wikipedia entry, but the general jist is this:
- Construction began in 1860
- Built as a “town within a town” i.e. many facilities aimed toward self-sufficiency
- Up to 500 staff and 63 buildings
- Closed around the same time all the other places like this closed around Victoria

We found plenty of life there - some areas are wildly overgrown, yet others are quite neat. The kitchen area is still quite well stocked with machinery, gigantic pressure cookers and some seriously huge cutting blocks, yet the storerooms have vines, perhaps set to dry by NMIT.. or maybe it’s the ghosts, hiding the plants from the workers?

Being in regional Victoria, there’s plenty of bird life around, and despite the occasional rotting, unidentifiable animal, we found plenty of indicators suggesting of a thriving possum colony. The only time it really did get creepy was at night - we stuck around for some seriously cool long exposures, and that’s when all the tap-tap-tapping started. With only a little imagination, it’s no wonder it’s a hotspot for ghost hunters.

Speaking of ghosts, Aradale sports its own morgue. The small two-room building doesn’t have the chilling atmosphere of a concentration camp by any means, but the way it’s tucked on the other side of a hill, behind some trees, away from other buildings .. well, it reminds you of what could have happened. The thought that goes into the interior of a morgues architectural design is also pretty…er.. unique.

We heard an interesting story - a local gang of kids had an initiation for their newest member. His task? Spend the night in the morgue. So they locked him into those slabs made out of steel, the refrigerated ones with the headboard ‘n all, and left him there. That was around 6pm, and security found him, pretty stressed out about 13 hours later. He was handed over to police, and i thought of the irony if he got locked up for a few days for breaking and entering/trespassing - it probably wouldn’t have been as bad.

Aradale also captures the light very interestingly - some areas have large windows, with billowing curtains which make for stunning Victorian-era girl-looking-out-of-window style shots. There’s some areas with dusty, small windows which cast eerie light beams (okay, perhaps there are some eerie areas). Generally, there’s little in the way of broken glass and virtually no graffiti - a blessing if you ask me. Being on top of a hill, Aradale captures some amazing morning and evening light - and you could easily visit some areas twice in a day, just to see the difference.

But anyway, enough jabbering - here’s a bunch of images, only one has any adjustment or cropping - all the others are straight out of the camera. They were all shot with my trusty Canon 400D, a Tokina 12-24 f4, often a 430EX flash for fill, and the occasional 550EX flash triggered with an ST-E2. Pretty much everything is shot at f16 or thereabouts.