Nurses Lunch Room

The nurses' lunch room in the novitiate building at Lewisham Hospital holds its original built-in cabinetry, painted sky blue, one cupboard door standing open over shelves that have been empty for years. Vinyl floor tiles buckle at the edges where adhesive has given way. Paint on the far wall has lifted and peeled away in wide, curling sheets. It is a small, functional room, and what it shows is function suspended rather than destroyed. The Lewisham Hospital complex on West Street grew across seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927, each marked by a foundation stone blessed by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran or Archbishop Michael Kelly. The first wing opened on 9 June 1889 as the Children's Hospital of the Holy Child, serving women and children only. Male patients were admitted for the first time in 1912, when the hospital became a general facility. By 1948 it was treating 3,600 in-patients annually and recording 88,399 out-patient attendances. The order that built and ran the complex, the Little Company of Mary, had arrived in Sydney on 4 November 1885 with six sisters and five pounds. Within two years they had a convent at Lewisham. Within four, a hospital. The novitiate building, where this lunch room sits, was the place where women entered the order and trained as nurses. It was the organisational centre of what became the largest province of the Little Company of Mary worldwide. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of operation. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership the following year; the hospital formally closed around 1988. This photograph was made in 2019. The sky-blue paint, the open cupboard, the lifting floor tiles record a room that served the women who ran one of Sydney's leading general hospitals for close to 100 years.