Nurses Kitchen

The nurses kitchen inside the former Lewisham Hospital complex is a small, worn space. Paint has separated from the walls in long strips, revealing the colours applied in earlier decades underneath. A rusted sink sits beneath a grimy window, the glass still present but dulled. Broken cupboards stand partly open. Debris has settled across the floor. The light that comes through the window is fading and flat, enough to show the room clearly, not enough to warm it. The building this kitchen sits within was part of a complex that grew incrementally over seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927. The Little Company of Mary, a Catholic nursing order, opened the first wing of the hospital on 9 June 1889, after six sisters had arrived in Sydney in 1885 carrying five pounds between them. Within four years of that arrival they had established a convent at Lewisham on land donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, and within four more years they had a hospital running. From that first wing, the complex expanded steadily. A general hospital wing followed in 1900, designed by architects Wardell and Denning, built of machine-pressed brick with white stone dressings and extensive verandahs overlooking Petersham Park. A two-storey convent opened in 1908. The Byzantine Revival Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary was completed in 1927. Through each phase, the Lewisham complex also served as the base from which the Little Company of Mary's nurse training school operated, the first such school the order established in Australia. The sisters ran the complex for nearly a century. They vacated in 1986. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership the following year, and the hospital formally closed around 1988. The site was redeveloped as aged care facilities. The chapel remains an active parish. The nurses kitchen, photographed in 2019, records what that long occupation left behind: a working room, stripped back to its materials, its layers of paint telling the decades in sequence.