Room For Life

The novitiate building at the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds sits on West Street in Lewisham, a short walk from the railway line that once carried the Little Company of Mary sisters into the inner west when they first arrived in Sydney in 1885. By the time they opened the hospital's first wing on 9 June 1889, the sisters had built a convent, established a school for the blind, and begun training nurses in a city that had no standardised nursing registration until 1906. This room is part of the novitiate, the building where women entered the order and began their formation as sisters and nurses. The cellular layout of these spaces was designed for individual contemplation alongside communal religious life, distinct from the ward architecture of the hospital proper. The room is small, bare-walled, and floored in materials typical of the late Victorian institutional construction that defines the complex, solid red brick and Sydney sandstone framing a building that grew through seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927. By the time the hospital reached its postwar peak, it was treating more than 3,600 in-patients a year and recording upwards of 88,000 out-patient attendances. The cumulative toll from 1890 to 1948 ran to 140,757 in-patients and 950,691 out-patients. It was a place of considerable scale and significance, run without government aid for much of its early history, on subscriptions, donations, and patient fees. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of continuous operation. The hospital formally closed around 1988. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987 and redeveloped the site for aged care. The novitiate building, photographed here in 2019, now stands mostly quiet. Sunlight still finds the floor each morning. The dust settles where the work once was.