Archives

The archives room sits within the novitiate building of the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds. Shelves of patient files and medical records remain where they were left, coated in the dust of decades. Nothing has been sorted or removed. The accumulated paperwork of a hospital that ran for nearly a century lies in place, undisturbed. The Little Company of Mary opened the first wing of the hospital on 9 June 1889, with Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran presiding. The sisters had arrived in Sydney only four years earlier, six of them, with five pounds between them, establishing themselves in the inner suburbs before relocating to land at West Street, Lewisham donated by Cardinal Moran himself. The hospital began as a children's and women's facility, then expanded with a general hospital wing in 1900, a new convent in 1908, and further wings in the years that followed. By 1912, male patients were admitted for the first time. By 1948, the complex was treating 3,600 in-patients and recording 88,399 out-patient attendances in a single year. Cumulative figures reported in 1949 placed the total number of in-patients treated between 1890 and 1948 at 140,757, with 950,691 out-patient attendances across the same period. The hospital operated without government aid for most of its early history, running on subscriptions, donations, patient fees, and fundraising. Cardinal Moran said in 1903 that the hospital served patients without distinction of creed, race, or language. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of continuous operation. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987. The hospital formally closed around 1988. What the 2019 photograph records is what was left behind in the archives: files and records for patients treated across that long span of operation, still on their shelves, still in their folders, covered in dust and going nowhere.