Aradale: inside Australia's largest abandoned asylum

Aradale is the largest abandoned hospital complex in Australia — a whole village of wards, kitchens, workshops and chapels spread across the hills above the town of Ararat in Victoria. For more than a century it was a self-contained world for people with mental illness, and for the staff who cared for them. It closed in 1998, and the scale of what was left behind is hard to take in.

A hospital for a new colony

Aradale opened in 1865 as the Ararat Lunatic Asylum, one of a network of institutions built across colonial Victoria to house people with mental illness, intellectual disability and, often, simply nowhere else to go. It was designed on the ‘pavilion’ plan, with separate blocks linked by covered walkways, so that patients could be grouped by condition and the buildings could breathe.

It was never small. At its peak the complex held more than 900 patients, and over its lifetime it grew to some sixty-three buildings, including its own farm, bakery, laundry, mortuary and church. Aradale was designed to be self-sufficient — a working estate as much as a hospital — and for much of its history it was the largest employer in the district.

Life inside

Like asylums everywhere, Aradale’s history is mixed. It provided shelter and care to people who had no other option, and it also reflected the harsh and often cruel ideas of its age. Treatments changed with the decades, from restraint and isolation to occupational therapy and, eventually, medication. Generations of families in western Victoria had a relative who lived, and died, within its walls.

By the late twentieth century the era of the large institution was ending. Patients were moved into community care, and the great asylums were closed one by one. Aradale took its last patients in 1993 and finally closed in 1998. The buildings were handed over, and much of the site eventually became a campus of Melbourne Polytechnic.

The wards go quiet

Today Aradale is a strange hybrid: part working campus, part empty monument. The main buildings still stand, and guided tours run through the old wards, kitchens and mortuary. The corridors are long, the paint is peeling, and the silence is the loudest thing in the place. It is one of the most complete asylum complexes left anywhere in the world.

Aradale belongs beside Denbigh in Wales and Broomhill in Scotland in this archive — the great institutional buildings of the nineteenth century, built to last, emptied by a change in how society chose to care for the vulnerable, and left standing because nobody could decide what to do with them.

Frequently asked questions

Related places

If this one stayed with you, these entries sit in the same corner of the archive:

• Denbigh: the Welsh asylum left to the elements — United Kingdom
• Broomhill Hospital: a derelict hospital in the Scottish hills — United Kingdom
• Beelitz-Heilstätten: the sanatorium the forest took back — Germany