Basement

A single beam of light drops into the basement of the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds on West Street, Lewisham. The concrete floor carries the texture of decades. Paint has lifted from the walls in long, curling strips, exposing the layers beneath. Dust motes drift through the beam. The room is still. The building above this basement was the product of one of the more improbable founding stories in Sydney's institutional history. Six sisters of the Little Company of Mary stepped off the SS Liguria in Sydney on 4 November 1885, carrying five pounds between them. Within two years they had established a convent at Lewisham on land donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran. Within four years they had opened the first wing of the Children's Hospital of the Holy Child, on 9 June 1889, with Moran presiding at the ceremony. What followed was nearly a century of incremental construction and uninterrupted operation. The complex grew across seven building phases between 1889 and 1927, each marked by a foundation stone. The original women's and children's hospital became a general hospital by 1912, when male patients were admitted for the first time. The architects Wardell and Denning designed the 1900 general hospital wing and the 1908 convent, both in solid brick construction with stone foundations. The Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary, in Byzantine Revival style with a high vaulted ceiling, was opened in 1927. The novitiate building, the principal subject of the Lost Collective photographic series, was the formation centre for women entering the Little Company of Mary. The hospital they served had, by 1948, grown to treat 3,600 in-patients and record 88,399 out-patient attendances in a single year. By that measure, the basement of this building sat beneath one of Sydney's more consequential institutions. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership the following year. Hospital operations formally ceased around 1988. The basement, concrete floor intact, paint still peeling, holds the record of all of it.