Hollow Room

The room is empty now. A high window cuts a rectangle of light across walls that have been surrendering their surface for years, paint and plaster pulling away in long, curling sheets to expose the structure beneath. The floor is bare. Nothing has been left behind. What remains is the room itself, and the slow, unhurried work of decay. The building this room sits in is the novitiate of the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds, on West Street in Lewisham, NSW. It was here that women entering the Little Company of Mary, the nursing sisterhood known as the Blue Nuns after the colour of their veils, began their formation. The cellular interior layout of the novitiate was designed for a life that moved between individual contemplation and communal religious duty, a rhythm quite different from the hospital wards that occupied other parts of the complex. The Little Company of Mary arrived in Sydney on 4 November 1885, six sisters carrying five pounds between them. Within two years they had established a convent at Lewisham on land donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran. The first wing of the hospital opened on 9 June 1889. Over the following decades the complex grew through seven construction phases, each marked by a foundation stone. The 1900 general hospital wing, designed by architects Wardell and Denning, introduced machine-pressed brick with white stone dressings and an operating theatre fitted with a tiled floor and glass roof. The 1908 convent added two storeys of dormitories and reception rooms. The Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary followed in 1927, a Byzantine Revival structure whose acoustics were generous enough to justify a two-manual Moller pipe organ installed the following year. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of operation. The hospital formally closed around 1988. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987, and the complex was redeveloped for aged care. The chapel remains an active parish. The novitiate building, subject of this series, was photographed in 2019. This room is one of 26 prints drawn from that visit. The high window still admits light. The walls continue their slow work of coming apart.