Top Floor

The top floor of 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 light entering through a window almost entirely consumed by vines pressing through the frame. Dark blue-green carpet runs the length of the room. A ceiling fan with 4 broad blades hangs from a beam, and fluorescent fittings line the ceiling above redundant switch plates and outlets. Nothing indicates what particular purpose this room once served. 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. Lewisham 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 building was photographed in 2019. This photograph records the top floor as it stood that year: filtered light, peeling paint, a fan still fixed to its beam, and the particular stillness of a room that once held a great deal of directed purpose.