Bathroom Corridor

The corridor passes through the novitiate building of the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds on West Street, Lewisham. Paint has separated from the walls in long, curling sheets, layer beneath layer, colours accumulated across different decades of occupation. The floor tiles are faded, their surfaces worn by foot traffic and dulled by years of standing water and cleaning products. Light comes from one end of the passage, crossing the stained plaster at a low angle. The novitiate building was the part of the complex where women entered the Little Company of Mary and trained as nurses. The broader Lewisham Hospital complex grew incrementally from 1889, when the first wing opened on 9 June, through seven distinct construction phases over nearly four decades. The order that built it arrived in Sydney in 1885 with six sisters and five pounds. Within four years they had opened a hospital. Within a century, the Australasian Province headquartered at Lewisham had become the largest province of the Little Company of Mary in the world. The complex the sisters built was substantial. The 1900 general hospital wing, designed by H.E. Wardell of Wardell and Denning and built by W.J. Crothers of Lewisham, featured machine-pressed brick with white stone dressings, tiled roofs, and extensive verandahs overlooking Petersham Park. The 1908 convent, also by Wardell and Denning and built this time by Wheelwright and Alderson, was a two-storey brick structure with basement and attics, containing dormitories and single bedrooms positioned centrally between the general and private hospital wings. The Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary followed in 1927, a Byzantine Revival structure with a vaulted ceiling and generous acoustics. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986. The hospital formally closed around 1988. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987 and redeveloped the site as aged care facilities. The novitiate building remained. This photograph, made in 2019, records the corridor as it stood then: surfaces intact but disintegrating, the building still upright, its materials slowly returning to their component parts.