Split

The wall is doing what walls do when no one is left to maintain them. Paint applied over decades has split along its own seams, curling back from the plaster in long strips, exposing the layers beneath. Each stratum is a different colour, a different era, a different coat applied by someone whose name is no longer recorded anywhere. The ward is bare now. Light crosses the surface and catches the texture of the damage. The former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds sits on West Street in Lewisham, in Sydney's inner west. The Little Company of Mary, a Catholic nursing order founded in Nottingham in 1877, opened the first wing of the hospital on 9 June 1889 after six sisters arrived in Sydney four years earlier with five pounds between them. The order's patron, Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, blessed seven foundation stones at the site over 22 years. By 1949, the hospital had treated 140,757 in-patients and 950,691 outpatients across its first six decades of operation. The complex grew in stages. A general hospital wing opened in 1900. A new convent followed in 1908. The Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary, a Byzantine Revival structure with a high vaulted ceiling, opened in 1927. The sisters ran a nurse training school from the site, the first of five they would operate across Australia. The Australasian Province, headquartered at Lewisham, became the largest province of the Little Company of Mary in the world. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986 after nearly a century of continuous operation. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987 and the hospital formally closed around 1988. What the photograph recorded in 2019 is a ward wall in the process of returning to its component parts. The paint, the plaster, the years of maintenance and repainting, all of it separating in its own time.