Top Floor

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D850
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 16mm · f/8.0 · 0.6s · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Sunlight enters through windows on the top floor of the novitiate building. Walls are covered in peeling paint, layers visible where sections have lifted and curled away from the plaster beneath. Debris lies scattered across the floor. The room is stripped bare of furnishings, with no fittings remaining.

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In situ

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Top Floor
Series: Lewisham Hospital
Catalogue: LHO-025
Process: Giclée
Captured: 28 January 2019
Camera: NIKON D850
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 0.6s s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 16 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Lewisham, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Lewisham, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

The top floor of the novitiate building at the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds shows what a century of institutional use leaves behind when the institution finally departs. Paint peels from the walls in long, curling sheets, the layers beneath exposed to the light that now enters unchecked. Debris lies across the floor. There are no furnishings, no fittings, nothing to indicate what particular purpose this room once served within the building's cellular layout, designed for the rhythms of contemplation and communal religious life. The Little Company of Mary, a Catholic nursing order founded by Venerable Mary Potter in Nottingham in 1877, established themselves at Lewisham in 1887 on land donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran. Six sisters had arrived in Sydney two years earlier with five pounds between them. The hospital they opened on 9 June 1889 began as a children's and women's facility; by 1912 it admitted male patients and operated as a full general hospital. The novitiate building was the order's Australian base, the place from which the sisters expanded to North Adelaide, South Africa, Christchurch, Wagga Wagga, and Wellington across the following decades. By 1948, the hospital was treating 3,600 in-patients annually and recording 88,399 out-patient attendances in a single year. Cumulative figures to that point, reported in the Catholic Weekly in 1949, totalled 140,757 in-patients and 950,691 out-patient treatments since 1890. The Australasian Province, headquartered at Lewisham, became the largest province of the Little Company of Mary globally. The order vacated the site in 1986. The Society of St Vincent de Paul took ownership the following year, and the hospital formally closed around 1988. The complex was redeveloped for aged care. The novitiate building, the subject of the Lost Collective photographic series, was photographed in 2019. This photograph records the top floor as it stood that year: sunlight, bare plaster, peeling paint, and the particular stillness of a room that once held a great deal of directed purpose.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

The top floor of the novitiate building at the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds sits empty now, its walls shedding paint in long, slow strips. The Little Company of Mary ran this complex from 1889 until 1986, nearly a century of Catholic institutional life anchored to West Street, Lewisham. The novitiate was where women entered the order and trained as nurses, the base from which the sisters eventually expanded across Australia and into four other countries. By 2019, when this photograph was made, the building had been largely vacated, its cellular rooms given over to silence and slow decay.

Brett Patman

The series

Lewisham Hospital

2019 · 26 photographs

Lewisham Hospital was opened on 9 June 1889 by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, on the site where the Little Company of Mary, the Blue Nuns, had established their Sydney convent in 1887. Originally named the Children's Hospital of the Holy Child, it admitted women and children only until male patients were accepted from 1912. Over the following decades it became one of Sydney's main general hospitals and nurse training schools. It closed in 1988, a century of Catholic healthcare on one block of West Street, Lewisham. The Lost Collective photographs are of the novitiate building, the wing where new entrants to the order were trained, which sits within the broader hospital, convent, and grounds complex. The historic complex is listed as a local heritage item under the Inner West LEP (formerly Marrickville LEP 2011), within the Lewisham North Precinct. The convent chapel, in a revival Byzantine style with a 1927 Möller pipe organ, still stands on the site.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

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