Mary

A name is written on the wall. Just that: Mary, in the middle of a surface that has been peeling and crumbling for years, paint pulling back from plaster in slow, irregular sheets to reveal earlier layers underneath. No context, no explanation. Just the name, sitting in the quiet of the novitiate building at the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds. The novitiate is the part of the complex where women entered the Little Company of Mary and trained as nurses. That process began at Lewisham in 1889, when six sisters who had arrived from England four years earlier with five pounds between them opened the first wing of what was then called the Children's Hospital of the Holy Child. The order, founded by Venerable Mary Potter in Nottingham in 1877, had been invited to Australia by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, who donated the Lewisham land and opened the hospital on 9 June 1889. From that beginning, the complex grew across seven construction phases over nearly four decades, the last being the Byzantine Revival Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary, opened in 1927. The Australasian Province headquartered at Lewisham became the largest province of the Little Company of Mary globally. By 1948, the hospital was treating 3,600 in-patients a year and recording 88,399 out-patient attendances. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986, and the hospital formally closed around 1988. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987 and redeveloped the site as an aged care facility. The novitiate building, listed as part of a local heritage item under the Marrickville LEP, was photographed in 2019 as part of a series of 26 prints. The name on the wall does not come with a story attached. It does not need one. In a building that trained generations of nursing sisters and sent them across Australia and into four continents, the name Mary could belong to almost anyone.