Blind

A Venetian blind hangs askew in a window of the novitiate building at Lewisham Hospital, its slats bent out of alignment and coated in a uniform layer of dust. No one straightened it when the building was vacated, and no one has straightened it since. It is the kind of detail that accumulates when a place stops being tended to: unremarkable at the time, and then, years later, precisely the thing that records the absence. The novitiate building is the principal subject of the Lost Collective photographic series at this site, its cellular interior shaped around the rhythms of religious life rather than the ward architecture of the hospital proper. It is where women entered the Little Company of Mary and trained as nurses before taking their place in the wider institution. The Little Company of Mary first arrived at Lewisham in 1885, when six sisters came ashore in Sydney with five pounds between them. Within two years they had established a convent on land donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, the Archbishop of Sydney. The Children's Hospital of the Holy Child opened on 9 June 1889, the first hospital the order founded in Australia. Over the following decades the complex grew in stages: a general hospital wing in 1900, a new convent in 1908, a further hospital wing in 1911, and the Byzantine Revival Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary in 1927. From 1912, when male patients were admitted for the first time, the hospital operated as a general institution, treating patients without distinction of creed, race, or background. By 1949, cumulative records showed 140,757 in-patients and 950,691 outpatient attendances since 1890. 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 complex was redeveloped as aged care facilities. The chapel remains an active parish. This photograph was made in 2019.