The Dead House: Adelaide’s Quiet Reminder of a Forgotten Past

In the peaceful grounds of Adelaide’s Botanic Gardens, tucked between lush greenery and curated beauty, stands a modest red-brick building that once held a much darker purpose.

Known as The Dead House, this former morgue is one of the last physical remnants of the long-gone Adelaide Lunatic Asylum – a place that tells a forgotten chapter of South Australia’s colonial history.

South Australia, established as a convict-free colony in 1836, intended to attract “worthy” settlers through land sales. Yet the planners failed to prevent the arrival of people considered “unfit,” such as the elderly or disabled. With no private madhouses as in England, the colony was forced to create its own public institutions. The Adelaide Lunatic Asylum and later the Parkside Asylum (now Glenside) were direct responses to this challenge.

Opened in 1852 on North Terrace, the Adelaide Lunatic Asylum was South Australia’s first purpose-built institution for those deemed ‘insane’, including people with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, epilepsy, and even the destitute poor. Built to house 60 patients, the asylum quickly became overcrowded, with many forced into the Adelaide Gaol or private facilities when space ran out.

The original Adelaide Asylum reflected old-world thinking: a linear layout with gender-separated wards, locked rooms for “refractory” and “wet” patients, and limited outdoor space.

By the 1880s, a morgue – what we now call The Dead House – was constructed. With a slate floor sloped for drainage, it was used for autopsies and the storage of deceased patients.

In 1870, a new asylum at Parkside opened, but Adelaide Asylum still overflowed until its final closure in 1902. The building briefly became an infectious diseases ward before its demolition in 1938. The Dead House survived and, since being heritage-listed in 1986, has served variously as a garden shed and an art space.

It’s a quiet irony that a place built to house the mentally ill now sits in the middle of one of the state’s most beautiful gardens – a place of healing, joy, and contemplation. As modern visitors stroll through, unaware of what once stood here, The Dead House quietly reminds us of how society once treated mental illness. But just outside its walls, nature tells another story: blooming quince trees, resilient winter aloes, and a garden that has grown into something far more compassionate.

By day, the Botanic Gardens are serene. But as the sun sets, a stillness creeps in. The Dead House becomes more than just an old building – it becomes a symbol of memory, loss, and renewal.

Life, as always, finds a way to bloom again.