Sydney Hospital was in Macquarie Street on the site of the old Rum Hospital. That notorious structure, built by convicts to house convicts, had been constructed on a grand scale but with a breathtaking disregard for workmanship. It had suffered repeated outbreaks of typhoid, and on hot summer days the smell from the drains was so foul it disrupted parliament next door. As the century drew to a close the old hospital had finally been pulled down and this new building constructed, this time of solid no-nonsense colonial sandstone with a handful of turrets, elevated colonnades and cast-iron lace balustrades thrown in to add a dash of whimsical high Victorian romanticism. The members of the two legislative chambers could breathe easily once more.

In Macquarie Street the working day was ending, the road and walkways congested with merchants and shop workers and clerks and lawyers heading to the quay and the tram stops, and it was under the cover of these crowds and the fading daylight that Alasdair Dunlevy ascended the two flights of steps and entered the hospital through its green double doors.

Here, on the other side of the doors, was a foyer beneath a distant and lofty ceiling, a floor tiled ambitiously in marble, and walls richly panelled in dark cedar. A staircase of the same timber, wide and resplendent, rose to a half-landing that was walled entirely by stained glass, before dividing in two. The effect was half English manor house, half gentlemen’s club and the occasional nurses, stiffly dressed and with covered heads, who silently crossed and recrossed the space were as spectral nuns in a medieval convent, so that Alasdair stood for a moment, confused by the silence, by the calm, by the improbable scale of it all. Here to his left was a boardroom, its door ajar, showing tall, arched windows that gazed with a certain sedate benevolence at the mercantile bustle of Macquarie Street below, and nestled discreetly beside the doorway was a modest reception desk.

A clerk stood behind the little reception desk, waiting, and Alasdair, who made speeches in the Assembly chamber and routinely addressed a hundred or more men at Federation meetings, could feel the young man’s gaze upon him and was disconcerted. He had hoped to find his own way—to request assistance was, at this moment, abhorrent to him—but the impossibility of this was apparent. The corridors to left and right told him nothing, they might lead anywhere.

At last the clerk could wait no longer. ‘May I assist you, sir?’ He sounded a little impatient. This gentleman plainly needed assistance yet refused to ask for it, and clearly this irritated the young man, who appeared to have no other function than to assist those who did not know their way.