Foyer Archway

The foyer archway sits inside the novitiate building of the former Lewisham Hospital complex on West Street, Lewisham. Its moulded plasterwork is built up with successive layers of paint, each one lifting from the one beneath, the edges curling back to show the history of the room in cross-section. Where the plaster has broken away entirely, brick is visible. Debris from the falling surface covers the floor, and shadows stretch across it from a light source beyond the frame. The complex on West Street was built in stages across four decades. The first hospital wing opened on 9 June 1889, operated by the Little Company of Mary, a Catholic nursing order founded in Nottingham in 1877 by Venerable Mary Potter. Six sisters had arrived in Sydney on 4 November 1885 with five pounds between them. Within four years they had opened a hospital. By 1903 there were no vacant beds, and the annual meeting drew more than 800 people. Architects Wardell and Denning designed the 1900 general hospital wing and the 1908 convent. The complex grew to include a blind institute, multiple hospital wings, and the Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary, a Byzantine Revival structure opened in September 1927. Building materials across the site are broadly described as solid red brick and Sydney sandstone, consistent with what the peeling mouldings of this archway reveal underneath. The novitiate building is the principal subject of the Lost Collective photographic series shot here in 2019. It is the building where women entered the order and trained as nurses, the origin point of an institution that eventually became the largest province of the Little Company of Mary in the world. 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. The hospital formally closed around 1988. The novitiate building fell quiet. The foyer archway, once a threshold crossed by generations of sisters, now holds its paint in pieces.