Today, the Abbotsford Convent feels like a utopian village, as children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the practice of ANAM musicians spills out of the windows, and (surely overkill!) the lowing of farm animals drifts in from next door. My own memories of the Convent tend towards the halcyon, comprising visits to the Collingwood Children’s Farm with my sons, for vicarious first sightings of goat and cow and guinea pig, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with the signatures of friends, colleagues and – cringingly – our former selves. (Seraphim woz ere.) But these are brief, touristic impressions. The writer Nam Le was a tenant at the Convent for a decade, and remembers that
"My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the Convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) "Writer's Wing". I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived 7 minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the Sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid 1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there.
After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the Convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies."
Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. After white settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later.
Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the Convent and set about establishing an Industrial School for neglected children, alongside a Reformatory for ‘criminal’ children. These operations expanded to include an orphanage, followed by a Magdalen Asylum for the rehabilitation of ‘fallen women,’ whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to ‘being out at night with boys’ to prostitution. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the Southern Hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne’s finest establishments, such as the Windsor Hotel.
For some women, the Convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to Parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalen Asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet on the second floor...) Inmates were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, ‘bad girls do the best sheets.’
Over the Twentieth Century, the Convent mutated further to incorporate a Youth Training Centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by Latrobe University. A developer’s plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the Convent’s ‘dense repository of heritage,’ while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel’s garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger.
Of course there is no single version of the Convent’s history, but a clamorous polyphony. In this project the young musicians of ANAM seek to give partial voice to this. It is a privilege for them to work with a writer of the stature of Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne, and now sets his sights on the Convent, with a poem ‘that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there.’ Taking this poem as catalyst, our young musicians devise a musical response to the rich, charged history of the Convent, and some of its hauntings.
Words by Anna Goldsworthy.
ANAM AT THE CONVENT: ANNA GOLDSWORTHY and NAM LE
Thursday 21 August 3pm and Friday 22 August 7pm
Anna Goldsworthy director/curator
Nam Le author
ANAM Musicians
Venue Rosina Auditorium, Abbotsford Convent
Tickets Standard $40 | A little more $60 | A little less $20