Walk through the front of Sydney Hospital on Macquarie Street, past the bronze boar, and out into the courtyard behind. There you'll find a colourful fountain and, behind it, a Gothic building in sandstone and patterned brick that looks like it belongs in an English cathedral close. That's the Nightingale Wing. Sydney Living Museums' Sydney Open program calls it the oldest building still standing on the hospital campus and the site of the first nursing school in Australia. Up on the first floor, in the rooms where the first Lady Superintendent lived, there's a small museum that a lot of Sydneysiders have never heard of.
The Nightingale Wing and the fountain in the Sydney Hospital courtyard. Photo: Adam.J.W.C., via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).
The Rum Hospital
To understand why nurses were needed so badly, you have to go back to the hospital itself. When Governor Lachlan Macquarie arrived at the start of 1810, Sydney's hospital was a collection of tents and temporary sheds. London wouldn't pay for a new one, so on 6 November 1810 Macquarie signed a contract with three businessmen, Garnham Blaxcell, Alexander Riley and later D'Arcy Wentworth. They would build the hospital in return for convict labour, supplies and the right to import 45,000 gallons of rum, later raised to 60,000. That's how it got the name the Rum Hospital. According to the Historic Houses Trust's study of the Mint site, the contractors didn't do as well out of it as they'd hoped.
The building was poorly built. In 1815 the convict architect Francis Greenway reported that it "must soon fall into ruin". The convict patients moved in during 1816. Over the years the two wings were taken over for other uses. The north wing became the meeting place of the Legislative Council in 1829 and is now part of Parliament House. The south wing became the Sydney branch of the Royal Mint in 1854. The central building stayed a hospital, and from 1848 it was run by the Sydney Infirmary and Dispensary, a charity for the poor.
The old central building of the Rum Hospital, photographed some time between 1865 and 1875, before it was pulled down. Photographer unknown, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
By the 1860s the Infirmary was in a dreadful state. The Australian College of Nursing's history says the newly arrived nurses found it built over open sewer drains with no running water. Patients lay on rotting mattresses, and rats ran over them at night.
Parkes writes to Florence Nightingale
Henry Parkes, then Colonial Secretary, had seen the wards for himself. On 21 July 1866 he wrote to Florence Nightingale asking for four trained nurses for the Sydney Infirmary. In his letter he said he hoped they would set up "a nursery for hospital attendants" that could supply hospitals all over the country. That letter is quoted in a 2025 paper on Parkes and Nightingale nursing published through PubMed Central. Nightingale wrote back by 24 October 1866 and offered six nurses instead of four. The same paper says she wanted to advance nursing and also to repay the colony for the money it had sent her fund in 1856.
Judith Godden, writing in the Dictionary of Sydney, says the request was backed by a detailed memo from the surgeon Alfred Roberts. Lucy Osburn, born in Leeds in 1835, had entered the Nightingale School at St Thomas's Hospital in London as a Lady Probationer in September 1866. She was one of the few lady probationers in training, and she was willing to emigrate for the sake of her health. She was picked to lead the team even though illness made her miss a third of her year's training.
Lucy Osburn, photographed around 1869. Freeman and Prout, State Library of NSW, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Six women off the Dunbar Castle
Osburn and five nurses left England on 2 December 1867 and reached Sydney on 5 March 1868. The PubMed Central paper says they came out on the Dunbar Castle. Museums of History NSW names the five: Mary Barker, Eliza (Elizabeth) Ann Blundell, Bessie (Betsy) Annie Chant, née Barthorpe, Annie Miller and Haldane Colquhoun Turriff. All six were employed by the NSW Government on three-year contracts. The Australian College of Nursing says crowds cheered as they went down Macquarie Street in their white starched caps.
They hardly had time to unpack. A week later, on 12 March 1868, Henry James O'Farrell shot Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, at Clontarf. Osburn supervised the nursing of the prince. The PubMed Central paper names Annie Miller and Haldane Turriff as the two sisters who nursed him back to health, at Government House rather than at the Infirmary. The newspapers loved them for it.
Reform, and the fights that came with it
Osburn got the basics of Nightingale nursing going. Godden writes that she gradually got rid of the male nurses and replaced them with women. She also brought in training both on and off the wards, and put the nursing staff under her own control. She copied the two-tier system used at St Thomas's. Working-class women came in as ordinary probationers, while middle-class "Sister Probationers" trained to become ward sisters, and could aim to become matrons later.
It made her enemies. The surgeon Alfred Roberts, who had helped bring her out, kept getting in her way, and she was attacked in Parliament. A Royal Commission on public charities in 1873 criticised the Infirmary's board for neglect and for meddling in the nurses' work, and praised what Osburn had done. Godden says her achievements were "marred by continual criticism of her autocratic style of management". In 1884, while she was ill and facing public calls to go, she resigned. She went back to England, did district nursing, and died in December 1891. Her death certificate listed the cause as diabetes.
Her nurses spread the Nightingale system further. Bessie Chant left in 1869 to marry and later became Sister Simpson. She was matron of Gladesville Hospital for the Insane for 26 years. Osburn's first Sister Probationer, a Sister Bland, was matron at Gladesville before her.
Building the Nightingale Wing
The nurses needed somewhere decent to live, and that's where the Nightingale Wing comes in. The architect was Thomas Rowe, and Sydney Open says he designed the sandstone and polychrome brick Gothic Revival building "with Nightingale's input". The sources don't quite agree on the date. Sydney Open's fact panel says built 1868 but its text says opened in 1869. The Dictionary of Sydney and the City of Sydney Archives both say 1869, and the Archives describe it as accommodation for the Nightingale nurses led by Osburn. A floor and a wing to the east were added in 1901, and it was extended again in 1918.
A building specially designed as a home for Nightingale nurses, this early and this far from London, is quite something. You'll sometimes read that it was the first Nightingale nurses' home built outside Britain. I couldn't find that claim in any of the heritage or museum sources I checked, so I'd treat it as a story rather than a fact. What the sources do agree on is that this was where Australian nurse training began.
The Nightingale Wing around 1870, soon after it was finished. Walter Chaffer, State Library of NSW, via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
The Nightingale Wing today. Photo: Orestes654, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).
The rest of the old Rum Hospital didn't last much longer. The City of Sydney Archives say the central wing was pulled down in 1879. Rowe won the competition to design a new hospital, but work stopped for years, and John Kirkpatrick finished it in a revised design. The new building opened in September 1894. In 1881 the Infirmary was renamed Sydney Hospital. That makes the Nightingale Wing older than the main hospital building in front of it.
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Sydney Hospital on Macquarie Street. The Nightingale Wing is in the courtyard behind. Photo: sv1ambo, 2014, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
The Gothic windows and polychrome brick of the Nightingale Wing. Photo: boeckli, 2015, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The Lucy Osburn-Nightingale Foundation Museum
The museum is in Osburn's old rooms on the first floor of the Nightingale Wing. It's run by the Lucy Osburn-Nightingale Foundation, which Godden calls one of the many monuments to Osburn's achievements, and it has an archive as well as the displays. Sydney Open describes the collection as medical equipment, records, instruments and pathology covering the history of nursing and medicine in Australia from 1788. It also has pieces from the original nurses' home, Lucy Osburn's own chair and desk, and the Kanematsu Collection of morbid anatomy specimens, which is still used for teaching.
Before you go, check the opening details, because the sources don't quite match. MED Sydney's venue page says the museum is open every Tuesday from 10am to 3pm, costs $5, and is shown by volunteer guides. Museums and Galleries of NSW lists one-hour tours at $10, with bookings on 02 9382 7427. The Dictionary of Sydney says it opens every Tuesday or by appointment. During Sydney Open it's usually open 10am to 5pm, last entry 4.45pm. Access is by stairs only. I'd ring ahead before you make the trip. Enter from the hospital at 8 Macquarie Street.
The Nightingale Wing from the southwest. Photo: Ymblanter, 2024, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Why it matters
Godden says Osburn "laid the foundations of modern nursing in Australia" and "pioneered the employment of high status professional women in public institutions". When she died, Sydney Hospital barely mentioned it. Nurses never forgot her, though, and her rooms are still there in the courtyard. Next time you're on Macquarie Street, rub the boar's nose for luck and then go through to the courtyard to have a look.
The courtyard fountain in front of the Nightingale Wing. Photo: Adam.J.W.C., 2010, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).
Where this came from
- Judith Godden, "Osburn, Lucy", Dictionary of Sydney.
- Nicole Cama, "The Lucy Osburn-Nightingale Museum", Dictionary of Sydney blog, 2017.
- Sydney Open (Museums of History NSW): Lucy Osburn-Nightingale Museum.
- Museums of History NSW: Nurses guide.
- Australian College of Nursing: Nurse education in Australia, Part 2.
- "Sir Henry Parkes and the Relationships That Enabled Nightingale Nursing to Advance Mental Healthcare in Nineteenth Century Australia", PubMed Central (PMC11751756).
- Australian Dictionary of Biography: Lucy Osburn (search summary; the page blocked direct fetch).
- City of Sydney Archives: Sydney Hospital.
- MED Sydney: Lucy Osburn-Nightingale Museum venue page; Museums and Galleries of NSW: Lucy Osburn-Nightingale Museum.
- Crook, Ellmoos and Murray, Assessment of Historical and Archaeological Resources of the Royal Mint site, Historic Houses Trust, 2003 (via the Wikipedia article on Sydney Hospital).