Emerald City

A doorway opens into a small annexe room inside the novitiate building of the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds on West Street, Lewisham. Vine growth presses against a barred window, reaching the glass from outside. Paint has lifted from the ceiling and fallen away, leaving the surface ragged and bare in patches. Below the window, an abandoned cabinet sits against the wall beneath a tap that has been disconnected at the fitting, the pipe ending where the supply once ran. The Lewisham Hospital complex grew incrementally from a single wing opened in 1889 by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, the third Archbishop of Sydney. The institution was established and run by the Little Company of Mary, a Catholic nursing order founded in Nottingham, England, in 1877. Six sisters arrived in Sydney in November 1885 with five pounds between them. Within two years they had established a convent at Lewisham on land donated by Cardinal Moran, and within four they had opened the first wing of the hospital. Over the following decades the complex expanded through seven construction phases, adding a general hospital wing in 1900, a new convent in 1908, a further wing in 1911, and the Byzantine Revival Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary in 1927. At its height, the Australasian Province headquartered at Lewisham became the largest province of the Little Company of Mary globally. The hospital treated nearly a million outpatients between 1890 and 1948, and the novitiate building was where women entered the order and trained as nurses before being sent to hospitals across Australia and beyond. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of operation. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987 and the hospital formally closed around 1988. The novitiate building, photographed here in 2019, records what that departure left behind: a room that once had running water, a purpose, and people moving through its doorway every day.