Enclave

This photograph records a corner of the novitiate building at the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds on West Street, Lewisham. Sunlight reaches into the room from outside the frame, falling across walls where paint and plaster have separated and peeled back in layers over decades of disuse. The damage is not uniform. Some sections have shed their surface coatings entirely, exposing raw material beneath; others still carry remnants of painted finish that curl away from the wall in broad sheets. The room is otherwise stripped bare. The building that contains this space grew from a decision made in Rome in 1884. Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran met Venerable Mary Potter, founder of the Little Company of Mary, and invited her sisters to Australia. Six sisters arrived in Sydney on 4 November 1885 with five pounds between them. Within two years they had established a convent at Lewisham on land donated by Cardinal Moran. The first wing of the hospital opened on 9 June 1889, initially serving women and children only. Male patients were admitted from 1912, completing the transformation into a general hospital. The complex grew in stages across seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927, each marked by a foundation stone. Cardinal Moran laid the seventh, for a new hospital wing, in May 1911, three months before his death. By 1948 the hospital was treating 3,600 in-patients annually and recording more than 88,000 out-patient attendances. The novitiate building, the principal subject of the Lost Collective photographic series, is where women entered the order and trained as nurses, the starting point of an institution that expanded from this site across Australia and into four continents. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987 and the hospital formally closed around 1988. What this photograph captures in 2019 is what that long withdrawal left behind: a corner, sunlight, and walls giving way by degrees.