Clean Room

The sterile preparation room at the Lewisham Hospital complex in Lewisham, NSW, is a room built around a single requirement: cleanliness. White tiles on the walls, stainless steel on the work surfaces, every material chosen because it could be scrubbed down and returned to clinical standard. In 2019, dust covered all of it. The hospital that contained this room opened on 9 June 1889, when Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran formally opened the first wing on West Street. The institution was founded and operated by the Little Company of Mary, a Catholic nursing order whose first six sisters arrived in Sydney in 1885 with five pounds between them. From that starting point they built one of Sydney's leading general hospitals and the country's first Little Company of Mary nurse training school. By 1948 the hospital was treating 3,600 in-patients a year and recording 88,399 out-patient attendances. The cumulative total to that point, reported in the Catholic Weekly in 1949, was 140,757 in-patients and 950,691 out-patients treated since 1890. The complex grew across seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927. The 1900 general hospital wing, designed by H.E. Wardell of Wardell and Denning, contained an operating theatre with a tiled floor, glass roof, and marble and nickel furnishings, with sterilised hot and cold water throughout. Sterile preparation was not incidental to the work done here; it was central to it. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of continuous operation. 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 sterile preparation room in this photograph was part of the novitiate building, the principal subject of the Lost Collective series shot across the site in 2019. The stainless steel has not moved. The tiles remain on the walls. The dust has taken the place of everything else.