Basement Steps

The photograph looks along a wide lower floor in the novitiate building of the Lewisham Hospital complex at West Street, Lewisham. Carpet worn flat underfoot. Concrete columns at measured intervals. Blue-painted dados running the full length of the wall, interrupted by a heavy panelled door and a row of barred sash windows that open toward the ward. Fluorescent fittings hang dead from the ceiling, their tubes long since cold. The Lewisham Hospital complex grew across seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927. The Little Company of Mary, a Catholic nursing order founded by Venerable Mary Potter in Nottingham in 1877, sent six sisters to Sydney in 1885 with five pounds between them. Within two years they had established a convent at Lewisham on land donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, the Archbishop of Sydney. The first hospital wing opened on 9 June 1889, initially serving women and children. By 1900 a new general hospital wing had been added, designed by Wardell and Denning and built by W.J. Crothers of Lewisham, featuring machine-pressed brick with white stone dressings and extensive verandahs overlooking Petersham Park. Male patients were admitted from 1912, completing the transition to a general hospital. The novitiate building was where women entered the order and trained as nurses. The Little Company of Mary ran the Lewisham complex as the base from which the order expanded across Australia and into four continents, with hospitals subsequently founded in South Africa, New Zealand, and Wagga Wagga, among other locations. Between 1900 and 1985, the order operated five nurse training schools across Australia; Lewisham was the first. By 1948 the hospital was treating 3,600 in-patients annually and recording 88,399 out-patient attendances. 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, and the hospital formally closed around 1988. The novitiate building now stands largely quiet. The blue dados, the barred windows, the worn carpet: 2019 records what remains.