The Way Out

Light enters from one end of the corridor and travels the length of it, falling across bare floorboards and walls where the paint has given up its grip. The doorways lining the passage stand open and empty. Nothing has been left behind. The corridor belongs to the novitiate building at Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds, a complex of red brick and Sydney sandstone on West Street in Lewisham that grew incrementally across seven construction phases between 1889 and 1927. The Little Company of Mary, a Catholic nursing order founded in Nottingham in 1877 by Venerable Mary Potter, sent six sisters to Sydney in November 1885. They arrived with five pounds. Within two years they had established a convent at Lewisham on land donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, the Archbishop of Sydney. Within four, they had opened the first wing of what began as the Children's Hospital of the Holy Child, on 9 June 1889. Male patients were admitted from 1912, and the institution became a general hospital in all but name. By 1949, the hospital had treated 140,757 in-patients and 950,691 out-patients since 1890. The novitiate building was the residential and training core of the order's Australian operations. It was the building through which women entered the Little Company of Mary, trained as nurses, and from which they were sent to hospitals across Australia and beyond. The Australasian Province, headquartered at Lewisham, became the largest province of the order in the world. The Little Company of Mary vacated the site in 1986. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership in 1987. Hospital operations ceased around 1988. The site was redeveloped as aged care facilities, and the Mary Potter Wing now houses St Patrick's Institute of Education. This photograph, made in 2019, records what the novitiate building's corridor looked like in the years after. Paint peeling. Doorways open. Light doing what light does when there is no one left to notice it.