The Unmarked Fields of Sydenham Cemetery
In Sydenham Cemetery in Christchurch, there is a section of ground where the grass grows over graves that have no stones. There are no names. Some have numbers. Most have nothing. According to research presented to the Royal Commission, up to 1,000 former patients of Sunnyside Hospital are buried here, many of them placed in paupers' graves — taken from the hospital in a sheet, not a coffin, and disposed of without ceremony. So far, 765 have been identified from records spanning 1896 to 1934. The records after 1934 have not yet been fully transcribed.
Ann Rattray was one of them. She was incarcerated at Sunnyside for forty years. She died there alone at the age of eighty. There is no record in her file of her ever having been visited by her husband or her two surviving children. Whatever they knew of what had happened to her, they did not come.
Genealogist and historian Anna Purgar, who helped uncover the Sydenham burials, described the scale of what she found with plain precision: "I think they deserve some dignity. They lived a life."
This is the real legacy of Christchurch's abandoned psychiatric institutions — not the picturesque decay of crumbling Gothic masonry or the visual drama of a rainforest reclaiming a West Coast ruin. It is the knowledge that the system did not merely confine people. It erased them: from their families, from the official record, and, finally, from the ground itself.
Sunnyside Hospital: The Cathedral Built to Contain
Benjamin Mountfort's Palace for the Insane
Sunnyside Hospital opened in 1863 on the eastern fringe of Christchurch, designed by Benjamin Mountfort — the pre-eminent Gothic Revival architect of colonial New Zealand, the man who built the Canterbury Museum and the Provincial Council Buildings. His commission for Sunnyside was not a utilitarian brief. The main administration block rose in dark basalt and cream Oamaru limestone, with a clock tower, steep gables, and lancet windows. It looked like a university. It looked like a cathedral.
This was deliberate. Victorian psychiatric theory held that architecture had healing power — that beauty and order, imposed on the disordered mind, might restore it. The same ideology produced Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, the vast Kirkbride institutions of the United States, and dozens of similar complexes across the British Empire. The Sunnyside administration block projected authority, benevolence, and permanence. It was designed to last a thousand years.
It lasted 136. The hospital closed in 1999. The land was sold. The suburb of Aidanfield now occupies the site.
What Happened Inside
The architecture projected benevolence. What the Royal Commission documented was different.
Testimony presented to the Inquiry described the morning routine at Sunnyside as witnessed by Dr Olive Webb: approximately seventy men housed in a single villa, processed through basic functions without privacy, without individual attention, without any acknowledgement of personhood. Residents were rarely called by their given names. They were assigned numbers. They were transferred between institutions by the busload, sometimes assigned the same arbitrary birthday on arrival because no one had recorded the real one.
The Commission found evidence of electric shock therapy administered at Sunnyside not as a last-resort medical treatment but as a management tool — a punishment for non-compliance. It found evidence of beatings and sexual assault. It found evidence of experimental drug trials conducted on patients who had not consented, or who were incapable of consenting. A researcher documented by the Commission described the patients he was experimenting on in a meeting with colleagues. He was described as laughing when he said: "It's great because the retards are one step higher than rats."
The Suburb Built on Top
Walk the streets of Aidanfield today and the history has been almost completely erased. Modern brick homes, manicured lawns, quiet cul-de-sacs named after biblical figures and colonial administrators. The geometry of the suburb occupies the precise footprint of the institution. The Mountfort administration block survives, stripped of its sprawling wings, standing isolated at the edge of the housing development — a Gothic sentinel watching over streets that were built to replace the memory of what happened here.
The heritage oaks and elms planted by patients in the 1880s still line some of the roads. Their roots go down into the old asylum soil. They are the only living things that remember.
Templeton Centre: The Colony on the Plains
The Architecture of Eugenics
Leaving Christchurch and driving west across the Canterbury Plains, the landscape flattens and the wind picks up, unchecked by anything. Behind shelter belts of macrocarpa trees, invisible from the road, lies the second institution: the Templeton Centre.
Where Sunnyside was conceived as an asylum for the mentally ill — a fortress of treatment and containment — Templeton, established in 1929, was built on a different premise. Its population was primarily people with intellectual disabilities, then categorised under the legal and medical label of "feeble-minded." The eugenicist theories of the early twentieth century decreed that these people needed to be removed from the general population and kept in rural isolation. Fresh air and farm work would keep them docile. Their separation from the city would prevent them from reproducing.
Templeton was designed as a simulated village — a fake town built for people not permitted to live in a real one. Scattered villas rather than wards. A school, a chapel, a swimming pool, workshops. From the air, it looked pastoral and progressive. Inside the individual villas, away from central oversight, it was not.
What the Commission Found
Alison Adams gave evidence to the Royal Commission about her sons, Malcolm and Nigel, who were placed in Templeton from their late teens until their late thirties — twenty years, 1977 to 1998. They were on the spectrum, with learning disabilities and pervasive developmental disorders. Alison described the physical, psychological, emotional, and sexual abuse they were subjected to during those two decades. She described her years of attempts to access care for them, to be heard, to make the institution change. She was not heard.
The Commission documented systematic conditions at Templeton that were not the result of individual cruelty but of institutional design. A 1986 report found that residents in Briar Villa received their evening meal at 3:30 in the afternoon. The next meal was breakfast. The wait was seventeen hours. In September of that same year, two nursing tutors formally documented their concerns about staff treatment of residents and filed a report with the Canterbury Hospital Board. Among their findings: "many staff demonstrate lack of respect for the dignity of the people who are placed in their care." Nothing substantively changed.
Residents were rarely called by their given names. They were transferred between institutions in busloads and processed as groups. The Commission heard that some were assigned a single shared birthday on arrival because individual records were incomplete or had never been kept.
The Site Today
Templeton exists in limbo. It was not razed and redeveloped like Sunnyside. It was closed and left. Many of the villas still stand, their windows boarded with plywood, staring across overgrown paddocks. The playground equipment is rusting into the grass. The swimming pool fills each winter with dead leaves and rainwater. The school building still has its sign.
It attracts photographers, urban explorers, and people with a connection to the place — former residents, their families, former staff. The site is technically restricted. The buildings are structurally unsafe. It is, as the original article correctly framed it, a place in limbo: too significant to demolish, too expensive to restore, too uncomfortable to acknowledge properly. The villas that were meant to look domestic and warm now look exactly like what they were: small, isolated spaces where things could happen without witnesses.
Seaview Asylum: The Burning Frontier
The Exile at the Edge of the World
To reach the third institution, you cross the Southern Alps through Arthur's Pass, descend through the Otira Gorge, and arrive on the West Coast — the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the Tasman Sea. North of Hokitika, on a high terrace overlooking the ocean, the ruins of Seaview Asylum are being reclaimed by the rainforest and periodically reduced by fire.
Seaview opened in the 1870s. Its population was the casualties of the West Coast Gold Rush: miners driven mad by mercury poisoning or isolation, chronic alcoholics, drifters who had arrived at the far edge of the world and could go no further. The architecture was timber — rimu and mataī, the native hardwoods of the coast — and the buildings spread across a cliff-top plateau in a complex that at its peak housed over 500 patients and was self-sufficient enough to have its own airstrip and railway siding.
The view from the wards was extraordinary: rolling Tasman surf to the west, the snow-capped peaks of Aoraki/Mount Cook to the east on clear days. The patients could see it through the bars.
The Royal Commission identified at least 83 individuals buried at Hokitika Cemetery without headstones, with their last known address recorded as Seaview Hospital. The actual number is likely higher; the council's records were found to be incomplete, and the Commission noted they "may not accurately reflect what is actually on the ground."
Fire and Entropy
After its closure in the 1990s, Seaview was left to the West Coast's two reliable forces: arson and rainfall. The complex has been hit by multiple fires over the decades, each one reducing another section of the original timber buildings to charred timber and rusted iron. The main administration block is a blackened skeleton. The dormitory wings have been strangled by ferns and supplejack vines growing through the floorboards, wrapping around iron bedframes, pushing through walls. The smell is wet charcoal and forest floor.
Unlike Sunnyside — erased cleanly by development — and Templeton — frozen in administrative limbo — Seaview is being returned to the earth by an entropic process that no one is managing. It is the most viscerally atmospheric of the three sites and also the most dangerous. The remaining structures are structurally compromised. The remote location means visitors are far from help if something gives way.
The Reckoning: What the Royal Commission Found
Whanaketia — Through Pain and Trauma, From Darkness to Light
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, established in 2018 and chaired by Judges Coral Shaw and Sandra Alofivae alongside Sir Anand Satyanand, delivered its final report — titled Whanaketia — to the New Zealand parliament on 24 July 2024. It was the country's largest and most expensive inquiry to date, costing $170 million over five and a half years.
The findings were not a surprise to survivors. They were a confirmation of what survivors had been saying for decades and had been disbelieved about for decades.
Between 1950 and 1999, somewhere between 113,000 and 253,000 children, young people, and adults were abused and neglected in New Zealand's state and faith-based institutions. The report found systemic failures at every level: in policy, in legislation, in professional culture, in oversight, in the response to complaints. It found that government ministers and directors of health were at fault for pursuing institutionalisation long after the World Health Organisation had identified it as contrary to best practice. The estimated total lifetime cost of the abuse to survivors is $172 billion — borne not by the state that created the system, but by the people the system destroyed.
The report made 138 recommendations. It called for public apologies from political, religious, and professional leaders. It recommended an independent advisory group to investigate the unmarked graves. It recommended the establishment of a Ministry for the Care System. It urged law changes, redress processes, and fundamental reform. The systematic stripping of identity that the Commission documented — residents assigned numbers rather than names, transferred in busloads, given shared birthdays — echoes the methods that Karosta Prison and the Soviet military prison system perfected: the deliberate dismantling of personhood as an instrument of control. The New Zealand institutions were not Soviet gulags. They were, by their own lights, hospitals. The outcome for their residents was often indistinguishable.
The New Zealand government is yet to fully implement the recommendations.
The Suburb, the Paddock, the Burning Ruin
What the three sites represent, taken together, is the full range of how a society deals with the architecture of its own cruelty. The same logic that produced Port Arthur — the brutal Tasmanian penal colony that used geography and isolation as instruments of control — produced Sunnyside, Templeton, and Seaview. The methods differed. The principle was identical: remove the unwanted, place them somewhere difficult to reach, and manage them with the minimum of accountability that distance provides. Sunnyside was erasure: the land was too valuable, too central, too uncomfortable. The solution was to raze the history and build new streets on top of it. Templeton is limbo: an unresolved memory that the state cannot quite bring itself to confront, left to decay in the middle of the Canterbury Plains. Seaview is entropy: out of sight, out of mind, allowed to burn and rot at the far end of the country, returning its materials to the earth in a slow, violent process.
All three have unmarked graves associated with them. All three processed people who arrived with names and identities and left — if they left — stripped of both. All three are still waiting for a full accounting.
Ann Rattray is buried in Sydenham Cemetery. Her grave has no stone. The ground above it looks the same as the ground around it. If you do not know to look, you will walk straight past.
Visiting These Sites
Aidanfield / Former Sunnyside Grounds
The suburb of Aidanfield in Christchurch occupies the former hospital grounds. The Mountfort administration block survives and can be viewed from the street. Sydenham Cemetery, where the former patients are buried, is a public cemetery. The unmarked section is in the upper portion of the grounds. There is currently no formal memorial, though the Christchurch City Council is seeking funding to establish one in response to the Royal Commission's recommendations. Visiting both sites together — the suburb built on top of the institution and the cemetery where its patients were buried without names — is the most honest way to understand what Sunnyside actually was.
Templeton
The former Templeton Centre site near Christchurch is technically restricted. The remaining villa buildings are structurally unsafe and entry is not advisable. The perimeter can be walked, and the scale of the complex is visible from the surrounding roads through gaps in the macrocarpa shelter belts. For those with a connection to the site — former residents, their families — advocacy groups operating in Canterbury can provide information on access for specific purposes.
Seaview, Hokitika
Seaview is on a cliff terrace north of Hokitika on the West Coast. The site is in an advanced state of decay. Some access is possible but the remaining structures are genuinely dangerous. The West Coast's weather adds additional hazard — the site can become fog-bound and isolated quickly. The Hokitika Museum holds historical records and photographs of the asylum and provides context that the ruins themselves can no longer supply.
FAQ: Christchurch's Abandoned Asylums
What was Sunnyside Hospital and when did it close?
Sunnyside Hospital was New Zealand's primary psychiatric institution for the Canterbury region, operating from 1863 to 1999 — 136 years. At its peak it housed hundreds of patients at a time. Designed by Gothic Revival architect Benjamin Mountfort, it was situated on the eastern fringe of Christchurch. After closure, the land was sold for residential development and is now the suburb of Aidanfield.
What did the Royal Commission find about these institutions?
The Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, which reported in July 2024, found that between 113,000 and 253,000 people were abused in New Zealand state and faith-based institutions between 1950 and 1999. Specific findings relating to Sunnyside and Templeton included electric shock therapy used as punishment, physical and sexual abuse, experimental drug trials without consent, systematic stripping of patients' identities and dignity, and the burial of up to 1,000 Sunnyside patients in unmarked paupers' graves at Sydenham Cemetery in Christchurch.
Are there really unmarked graves at Sunnyside?
Yes. Research presented to the Royal Commission identified up to 1,000 former Sunnyside patients buried in unmarked graves at Sydenham Cemetery in Christchurch, with 765 confirmed through records spanning 1896 to 1934. Similar findings were made at Seaview Hospital in Hokitika, where at least 83 individuals without headstones were identified at Hokitika Cemetery with their last known address recorded as the hospital. The Royal Commission recommended the government fund an independent advisory group to investigate these sites. The Christchurch City Council is currently seeking funding to establish a memorial.
What is the current status of Templeton Centre?
Templeton Centre near Christchurch closed in 1998. The site remains largely intact but derelict — many of the original villa buildings are still standing, boarded up and structurally unsafe. The land has not been redeveloped and sits in administrative limbo. It is technically restricted.
What is the ethical approach to visiting these sites?
These are sites of documented abuse and death, not attractions. Sunnyside's successor suburb and Sydenham Cemetery can be visited as acts of witness and acknowledgement. If you visit the cemetery, the unmarked section deserves the same quiet respect accorded to any war memorial. At Templeton, the buildings are unsafe and entry is not recommended. At Seaview, the ruins are genuine — fire-damaged, forest-strangled, and dangerous. The most meaningful engagement with any of these sites is through the testimony of survivors, which is publicly available through the Royal Commission's published records at abuseincare.org.nz.
Sources
- Whanaketia — Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, Final Report (July 2024)
- Abuse in Care Royal Commission — Chapter 4: Abuse and neglect in particular care settings, including testimony from Dr Olive Webb, Alison Adams, and Ms KH
- RNZ — Abuse in care: Mission to identify thousands of unmarked graves possibly holding victims (July 2024)
- Stuff.co.nz — Genealogist offers help to memorialise former psychiatric patients buried in unmarked graves
- Star News / Christchurch — Bid to find family members of Sunnyside patients buried in unmarked graves (2026)
- The Spinoff — Righting the wrongs of the past: The abuse in care inquiry's key recommendations (July 2024)
- NZ Herald — Abuse in care: Thousands of people are lying in unmarked graves after dying in state care (July 2024)
- Te Ara — The Encyclopedia of New Zealand: Mental health services
- Hokitika Museum — Local history of Seaview Hospital
