Torn

The image shows wallpaper coming away from a wall inside the novitiate building at the former Lewisham Hospital, Convent and Grounds in Lewisham, NSW. The paper peels back in overlapping layers, each one a different surface applied at a different point in the building's life. Where the outermost layer has separated, earlier layers are visible underneath. Where those have gone too, bare plaster remains. The deterioration is patient and thorough. The novitiate building was part of a complex that grew in stages between 1889 and 1927 on land at West Street, Lewisham, donated by Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, Archbishop of Sydney. The site was founded and operated by the Little Company of Mary, a Catholic religious order whose six founding sisters arrived in Sydney on 4 November 1885 with five pounds between them. Within four years they had opened the first wing of a hospital. Within six decades, that hospital had treated nearly a million outpatients. The complex the sisters built was never finished in a single phase. Construction ran across seven foundation stones, seven ceremonies, seven separate expansions between 1888 and 1911. The 1900 general hospital wing, designed by H.E. Wardell of Wardell and Denning, introduced machine-pressed brick with white stone dressings, tiled roofs, and extensive verandahs overlooking Petersham Park. The 1908 convent followed, two storeys of brick on stone foundations, built by Wheelwright and Alderson to the same practice's plans. The Chapel of the Maternal Heart of Mary came in 1927, Byzantine Revival in style, its high vaulted ceiling designed to carry sound. 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. Parts of the site remain in active use: the chapel is a functioning parish, and aged care facilities continue to operate on the grounds. The novitiate building, the subject of the Lost Collective photographic series, holds the decay this photograph records. Photographed in 2019, this print captures one wall of that building: the wallpaper pulling free, the layers separating, the plaster coming through. Nothing dramatic. Just time doing what time does.