A critical reading of the Abbotsford Convent complex: Confronting sites of trauma,social memory,lived experience,and institutions of state “care”

Abstract

The article utilises an auto-ethnographic approach to examine the former Abbotsford Convent and Sacred Heart Complex, which incorporated the Magdalene Asylum, a reformatory for young offenders and the Industrial School for neglected children, in inner-suburban Melbourne, Australia, from the auto-ethnographic standpoint of the lead author, a former ward of the State of Victoria. The “repurposing” of the Convent complex in recent years to accommodate an arts precinct, restaurants and scenic tourism is discussed in light of the site’s history of the imprisonment, enslavement, and abuse of generations of women and girls deemed by the Church to have “fallen.” The case of the lead author’s mother is recounted, given evidence she was a laundry inmate as a teenager and suffered the forced adoption of her newborn baby. The article critiques the Abbotsford site’s adherence to the establishment-oriented sanitisation of history that heritage scholars dub Authorised Heritage Discourse, a “managed” narrative which contributes to the commodification, obfuscation, and distortion of lived experience and social memory connected to the site’s dark past. Further, in highlighting significant omissions and silences within the criminological field, we appeal for renewed engagement and critical research informed by care leaver activism, advocacy and lived experience that brings to public awareness the systemic harms and violence associated with state care institutions.

Introduction

Over the past three decades, revelations have emerged about the heinous practices of the Church-run institutions in Ireland known as “Magdalene Asylums”, or more colloquially, “Magdalene Laundries”. It is not widely known that a number of Magdalene Laundries were established in 19th-century Australia and operated into the late 20th century, and that their regimes of operation and treatment of the girls and young women confined within them largely echoed the Irish prototypes (ABC Radio National, 2023; Franklin, 2013). ¹

Multiple official inquiries in Australia, including the 2003 “Forgotten Australians” Senate inquiry (Senate Community Affairs References Committee (hereafter SCARC), 2004), and especially the 2012 Senate Inquiry into Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices (SCARC, 2012; see also Legal and Social Issues Committee, 2021), have revealed an astonishing array of crimes perpetrated within the Magdalene Laundries against women and children, including slavery, forced adoption, physical and psychological torture, sexual abuse, and deprivation of liberty. The Laundries comprised a relatively small proportion of the total number of Australian welfare institutions, but over time they housed many thousands of young females. They therefore have disproportionate significance in the history of Australia’s 20th-century “care” organisations – prominent islands in the archipelago of carceral institutions that spanned the continent (Find and Connect, 2025; Wilson et al., 2025), their crimes and abuses enabled – encouraged – by government statutes and carried out with zeal by personnel supposedly committed to embodying Christian charity. ² Many of these abuses constitute specifically “gendered” crimes, in that they were committed against young women and girls for the “sin” of being sexually active “out of wedlock” (their pregnancies being proof of that) – something for which no boys or young men were ever imprisoned.

Despite the prodigious scope and severity of these mass violations of young citizens’ rights in Magdalene laundries and other state and religious institutions of “care,” academics, especially criminologists, have been both slow to take a substantive interest in, and lacking in their understanding of, the impact of those abuses on the lives of the victim/survivors (See Black and Ring, 2023; Wilson et al., 2025). It has largely been left to those with lived experience to bring to public attention the sites’ “difficult histories” and to agitate, not just for inquiries, but for a measure of compensation in the form of apologies from governments, and a degree of recompense in the form of monetary redress (Wilson et al., 2025). Former wards of the State, former inmates of the “care” institutions that recent judicial scrutiny has so comprehensively discredited, and women who in their youth had the misfortune to fall pregnant in the teeming moralism of 20th-century Australia, have spent decades seeking a voice, and meaningful acknowledgement of their experiences. ³ This has led to a gradual recognition of the need for research into the sites in question to be done in consultation and collaboration with those whose personal narratives include experience of the “care” system (Wilson et al., 2025).

Pursuant to this need, in this article we employ an auto-ethnographic methodology to examine Australia’s last remaining intact Magdalene Laundry site, in the Melbourne suburb of Abbotsford, and glean insights into the disparity between the questionable repurposing of the site as a tourist and entertainment venue, and the sensibilities of former inmates, whose experiences of appallingly punitive confinement and abuse have been elucidated in personal submissions to inquiries (e.g. SCARC, 2005, Submissions 166, 146, 316, 410, 528), and studies such as Murray’s (2020) oral history project. The auto-ethnographic approach is led and undertaken by Jacqueline Wilson, who experienced repeated temporary institutional care as a child and was made a ward of the State of Victoria as an adolescent in the 1980s. Her personal recollections appear as extended, previously unpublished, indented passages. These are interspersed throughout with the collaborative analysis and commentary that forms the basis of this contribution.

The article contributes to the ongoing project of compiling a comprehensive carceral geography of Australia, taking in “care” institutions and decommissioned and repurposed prisons, that formed the basis of an expanding colonial endeavour seeking to contain a growing underclass of citizens. (For examples of this pioneering work see, Wilson et al., 2017; Wilson, 2008). Moreover, we highlight the connections, disjunctures or rupture points between care-leaver activism and lived experience, heritage discourse and memorialisation through the case study of the redeveloped Abbotsford Convent. Our unorthodox approach centres the lived experience of the lead author while analysing the ways that the site has been memorialised and redeveloped with limited regard for such experiences. We note that to date there is a dearth of criminological literature dedicated to understanding these early institutions of “care” as carceral and violent institutions. We contend that fostering of public knowledge and respect for how such experiences of institutionalisation and State care continue to reverberate intergenerationally are vital if we are to prevent future harm and violence.

A pillow over the face

The Australian film Animal Kingdom (2010), about an underworld family led by an outwardly kindly but ruthless matriarch, opens with a scene in which a teenage boy, Joshua, sits on the couch in his living room watching afternoon television. Beside him is a woman we at first assume to be asleep. We quickly learn, however, that she has taken an overdose of heroin, and that she is his mother. Joshua has called the ambulance, and when the paramedics arrive he calmly stands up to allow them access to their patient, but shows no hint of real concern, nor of any emotion at all, as they work on her. In fact his eyes keep straying to the television programme he has been watching (the game show Deal or No Deal). It is clear that for Joshua, the only aspect that takes the event out of the realm of the ordinary is that this time the outcome has been fatal. And even that fails to evoke a significant show of feelings.

The scene has particular resonance for this article’s lead author, Wilson:

As a young child I became adept at assessing whether my drug-addicted mother had overdosed on her prescription sleeping pills and would therefore need the “ambos” (I had learned how to call the emergency services by the time I was six years old). The opening scene of Animal Kingdom reminds me, to a near-uncanny degree, of an afternoon when I was twelve. Having judged that Mum needed the attention of paramedics, I called them then settled down to watch I Dream of Genie, and when they arrived I simply directed them to her bedroom and continued watching the show. (She survived.) Looking back I am struck by how similar Joshua’s lack of affect resembles my own calm dispassion, and my continued preoccupation with the television, even while my mother was having to be resuscitated in the next room. The life-or-death drama was all so irrevocably routine, so banal.

For Wilson, then, the filmmakers of Animal Kingdom managed to achieve a level of verisimilitude that might have seemed unrealistic, or at least inexplicable, to anyone lacking the lived experience of either a criminalised family or, in her case, a domestic ambience imbued with the legacy of decades-old unresolved trauma, combined with the cultural and emotional aridness of life in public housing. The crisis of an accidental overdose was of a piece with the ongoing procession of mundane crises that arose automatically out of generational poverty, domestic violence, endless doctor-shopping, neighbourhood rancour, and precarious accommodation, with afternoon television as one’s only refuge.

The “trauma” referred to above was that suffered by Wilson’s mother, and it had occurred in her teenage years. By her own account, she fell pregnant in her mid-teens, to a person whose identity may have been known to her parents but which she never divulged to anyone as an adult. What she did recount, in fragmentary yet heartfelt detail over the years, were the consequences of her “condition”:

Mum’s family were Catholics, and her pregnancy, in a 1950s rural Catholic community, was deeply disgraceful. She was sent away to an institution which she never named but which was inhabited and run by nuns, where she did unpaid menial work for several months leading up to the birth. Tied to the bed, she gave birth to a son, and she told us often how desperate she was to see him, to keep him, but the nuns wouldn’t hear of it. She spoke of one of the nurses – a nun, like all the rest – holding a pillow over her face during the birth and afterward so she could never so much as lay eyes on him, and he was immediately taken away, to be adopted. She had absolutely no choice or say in the matter.

Despite never seeing him, she named her son John. Her preference was in no way respected or acknowledged by the nuns, but it was by that name that she always spoke of him to me and my younger siblings. Decades later, whenever she referred to the event, it was with palpable bitterness and anguish that was never assuaged. She suffered, I believe, what a psychiatrist specialising in forced adoption terms “aggravated pathological grief” (Rickarby quoted in Norris, 2024). I was never in any doubt that, no matter what else had subsequently happened to her – including multiple failed marriages and relationships, horrific domestic violence and homelessness – her dependence on prescription drugs and the dissolute life-patterns that went with them had their roots in that profoundly abusive event of her youth.

Nor was she allowed to forget it. It was never spoken of afterward in her family, as if it had never happened. But she was visibly treated as an outsider by her close relatives as I was growing up, and as a child I never knew exactly why.

Wilson’s mother passed away in 2006, as the issue of forced adoptions was barely beginning to be publicly recognised, courtesy of an activist-generated movement, and 7 years before the Australian government extended a formal apology to those who had endured it (Gillard, 2013). Needless to say there was never a hint, during her life, of the monetary compensation currently offered to mothers who were victims/survivors of the practice (Victorian Government, 2024; Jaggers, 2024).

Wilson reports that despite the manifest intensity of her mother’s feelings on the subject, she wondered at times if the story had been embroidered somewhat. Notions of pregnant girls being imprisoned and put to work without pay, and then a nun pressing a pillow against the face of a brand-new young mother (who was literally tied down) seemed rather unlikely. Although Wilson never expressed such doubts to her mother, they lingered for some years, until articles began to appear in the media confirming that these were indeed standard practice at certain Catholic institutions (Age [Melbourne], 2003; Webb, 2018; Wheatley, 2013).

The Magdalene Laundries of Ireland, run by four religious orders (The Sisters of Mercy, The Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Sisters of Charity, and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd), have become infamous in recent years for the inhumane practices which were standard towards the girls and women confined within them – girls who were deemed delinquent for little or no reason; girls who were orphaned or given up by destitute parents; girls with mental disabilities; girls whom Mother Church judged as “fallen,” having become pregnant out of wedlock (Coen et al., 2023; Justice for Magdalenes Research, n.d; Wheatley, 2013). The rolling scandal of the laundries erupted in Ireland around 2011, beginning with a scathing report from the United Nations Committee Against Torture (Raftery, 2011), which led to the Irish government finally acknowledging responsibility (McDonald, 2013). The Magdalene system in Australia stands as its own case study, of which the Abbotsford Convent (first constructed in 1862) is the prime exemplar. It was the first and largest Roman Catholic complex in Australasia and was originally modelled on the mother house of the Good Shepherd Sisters in Angers, France (Heritage Council Victoria, 2024). The Convent included industrial and reformative schools in addition to the Magdalene Asylum/laundries.

The Australian laundries not only helped defray the institutions’ running costs but made substantial profits for the convents and the Church, but were effectively prisons, using girls and young women as captive, unpaid workers – that is, slaves (Abbotsford Blog, 2013 [2007]; SCARC, 2004; Wheatley, 2013]). ⁴ The Australian laundries were identified in the 2003 to 2004 Senate inquiry into historical abuses of children in institutional care that produced the “Forgotten Australians” report (SCARC, 2004: 112–114, 889); but that inquiry had identified such a wide range of organisations, affecting such an enormous number of people, the role of the laundries had made little impact on the social psyche. There was still scope at that stage for debate as to the degree to which the Australian laundries matched their Irish prototypes’ oppressiveness, and media coverage was sparse (Age [Melbourne], 2003). The notion that forced labour in religious institutions, along with mass forced adoptions, was an Australian issue only began to impinge significantly on the public consciousness with the revelations from Ireland. This in turn produced far more damning media reports in Australia (e.g. Wheatley, 2013), and, spurred by burgeoning activism, an official apology from the Federal government, delivered in 2013 by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard (Gillard, 2013).

Wilson recalls the personal effect of these developments:

It is a strange, almost eerie experience to have what one has received and long regarded as “family stories” echoed, in precisely corresponding detail, in accounts from other women and disseminated via media reports. With the growing numbers of Australian reports, I came to see my mother in a new light. Aside from my half-voiced skepticism about her accounts, their particulars had over the years taken on the kind of banality that oft-recounted tales inevitably do, within a domestic setting. But now I was hearing and reading of women who spoke with immediacy and living anger of shackles, pillows over faces, forced labour, babies snatched away unseen; and, just as in Mum’s stories, in every account the perpetrators were nuns.

It was rather a shock to realize that in all probability my mother had been an inmate of one of Victoria’s Magdalene Laundries. Given that she was living in regional Victoria, it is a reasonable guess that she would have been sent to the Bendigo convent, but that remains no more than a guess, with no prospect of narrowing it down, since the Catholic Family Welfare Bureau, who hold the records of her forced adoption, refuse to allow me to see them or know anything about their contents, beyond affirming that yes, she had a baby boy while under their “care”, and yes, he was adopted out at birth to a “suitable family”.

I am left, therefore, with a spectrum of emotions that have no clear focus. Uncertain as to which institution she endured her travail in, blocked by the willful limbo of an intractable bureaucracy, I must deal with retrospective remorse and outrage on behalf of my mother, and regret that she did not live to see herself vindicated and perhaps even compensated for her loss. These feelings mingle unavoidably with my own residual guilt that I did not fully appreciate the gravity of her story during her lifetime. My only recourse has been to focus my attention on the laundries themselves, and in doing so I came to realize that aside from their connotations of my mother’s experiences, they carry also an association that resonates strongly with me personally. One of their various “benevolent” functions was to house girls who had been declared wards of the State – a status it was my misfortune to endure for several years in my adolescence.

The various Australian convent-laundries have succumbed to time in diverse ways. Of the Sydney site, nothing remains (ABC Radio National, 2023). Likewise the Perth institution has been demolished (Find & Connect, n.d., b). In the Tasmanian capital Hobart, the Saint Canice laundry closed in the 1970s after a devastating boiler explosion (Canberra Times, 1974), and the site is now occupied by a retirement apartment complex (Southern Cross Care (Tasmania), n.d). The site of the Brisbane convent is heritage listed, but large areas have been sold off for commercial redevelopment. The laundry itself, however, uniquely remains in the hands of the original religious order and is still operational; although no longer a carceral institution nor catering for “fallen” women, it retains its “benevolent” purport by providing a sheltered workshop setting for people with intellectual disabilities (Holy Cross Services, 2024).

Of the four Good Shepherd convents within Victoria, three (two in suburban Melbourne and the one in Bendigo) are long gone – the Bendigo site was sold to a private school in 1981 (Find & Connect, n.d., a), one of the Melbourne sites was demolished in 1986 (CLAN, 2024), and the other is now an apartment block (personal observation). The only convent-laundry-reformatory complex whose built fabric and grounds are essentially intact in their entirety is in the inner-city suburb of Abbotsford, comprising 11 buildings and extensive cultivated gardens encompassing an area of 6.5 hectares (16 acres) within a semi-circular bend of the Yarra River, 4 km from the CBD (City of Yarra, 2023; Heritage Council Victoria, 2024).

Prison tourism

Once described as the largest charitable institution in the Southern Hemisphere (Kells, 2020), the Abbotsford Convent was acquired by the Victorian Government in 1974 (Australian Government, 2023), survived a major redevelopment proposal in the 1990s through to the early 2000s (Abbotsford Convent Foundation hereafter (ACF), 2024a; Kells, 2020), and is now a multi-purpose cultural, artistic and entertainment site, protected by national heritage listing and open to tourists, of whom approximately 1 million visit each year (ACF, 2024b). In the spring of 2024, Wilson became one of that multitude.

Although I had come to suspect that my mother had been in one of the laundries, I had little incentive to actually visit one until, ten years after Julia Gillard’s apology, the issue of forced adoptions re-surfaced with the Victorian Government’s announcement of a redress scheme (Victorian Government, 2024). Shortly after the scheme was launched in February 2024, Lily Arthur, a former inmate of the Brisbane Magdalene Laundry (for whom the Victorian scheme does not apply) launched an action with the United Nations on the grounds that her incarceration and forced adoption of her baby in 1967 had been both a criminal act and a violation of her human rights (Arthur, 2025; Norris, 2024).

With the media coverage of the redress scheme and Arthur’s activism in mind, and in hopes of glimpsing or inferring something of my mother’s story, I visited the Abbotsford Convent on a mild sunny day in late October, conditions that afforded maximum opportunity to apprehend and appreciate the site’s aesthetic attributes. Of these there is an abundance – architectural edifices of undeniable grandeur and obvious historical import (Figure 1), set in an irregular sprawl among gardens and ornate courtyards and shaded by numerous trees, some of imposing dimensions and lineage, with at least one – a gigantic oak known as the Separation Tree, having a place on the National Trust registry (ACF, 2024c; Sambul and Hopkins, 2023). It is notable that this heritage marker was planted not to memorialise the traumatic institutional history, but to commemorate the jurisdictional separation between Victoria from New South Wales so that Victoria could become a colony in its own right.

One is free to wander the grounds, and on the day I visited, the onsite licensed restaurant was well patronised but the walks that wend among the buildings were only sparsely populated. I made my way down scenic paths and through verdant groves adjacent to the main convent buildings that I knew were not enjoyed by, nor even accessible to, the laundry inmates (expository signage onsite speaks of the radical sequestration of the different “classes” of residents). I was following a map that showed the laundry buildings to be off to one side, physically removed from the convent itself and its picturesque surrounds. The walkways were now empty of visitors apart from me, and the buildings lacked the grandly ornate quality that features in the site’s publicity photographs. I was now in the compound known as “Sacred Heart”, which housed the involuntary detainees such as State wards and other female inmates who were, in the euphemistic terms of one of the expository signs there, “required to be confined” (Figure 2).

As noted above, the complex in its day was multi-functional, serving at various times as a reformatory, an industrial school, a boarding school, and a chapel (Figure 1), as well as the laundries. It is notable that one has to seek out the laundries, and that once found, they are singularly devoid of any but the most meagre explanatory signage. Their huge interior spaces, which once housed a plethora of troughs, trestle-tables, mangles, presses, washing machines and all the other equipment of a giant commercial laundry, along with the crowd of captive young women needed to operate them, are now empty. The drab olive green paint is peeling off the walls to reveal smooth, bare concrete. No trace of structural decoration or ornamentation is visible, nor likely ever was (Figure 3). The interiors are so ruthlessly utilitarian, so devoid of relief for the eye and mind, I was reminded of former prisons I researched some years ago (Wilson, 2008).

I contemplate the laundry and imagine my mother, as a teenager, labouring within this place or one like it. The image is almost too awful to countenance. Of course, I have no firm proof that she was in one of the laundries – only the circumstantial evidence of her account and how it squared with what we came to learn about them. But in the end it doesn’t matter. Something of the sort happened to her, and here the connection is palpable, subjectively real.

I imagine, too, the many State wards who served indeterminate sentences here, imprisoned for years without having committed any offence, punished for growing up poor, or neglected, or having no parents at all. I became a State ward in the early 1980s, a few years after Abbotsford Convent ceased operations, and I just managed to avoid institutionalisation (enduring State-imposed homelessness instead), but having experienced repeated temporary institutional care as a young child I find it frighteningly easy to empathise with the girls who spent their adolescence between these walls. At the same time, I could not escape a sense of a marked lack of empathy in the prevailing ambience.

Figure 1.

Good Shepherd Chapel.

Figure 2.

Sacred Heart Courtyard.

Figure 3.

Laundry Interior.

That lack of empathy may be discerned in the signage that greets the visitor on entering the Sacred Heart compound. Panels comprising several blocks of close-spaced text, some accompanied by black-and-white photographs of unsmiling girls in bulky starched uniforms accompanied by po-faced nuns, purport to acknowledge the darker side of the site’s history; it is clear, however, that such acknowledgement amounts to an arms-length pseudo-empathy, evincing minimal insight into the lived experiences of the girls in the photographs and their myriad peers. Euphemism abounds, such as the explanation that the Sacred Heart building was built “around a secured courtyard, required for the involuntary nature of the residency.” Nowhere is it explicitly acknowledged, in plain language, that the compound was a carceral site. The reader is lulled with apparently innocuous usages such as repeatedly stating that the girls “resided” at Sacred Heart – not strictly untrue, but equivalent to saying that inmates of a high-security prison “reside” there. Nor is the term “high-security” an exaggeration; one text panel describes, with undisguised pride, the recently restored gates that helped keep the girls confined:

One of the compound’s most striking and symbolic features is the Sacred Heart gates. Women and girls were not permitted to leave Sacred Heart . . . Wards of the state were also required to be confined, and at three metres high, the physically imposing Sacred Heart gates were a key feature of the lives of the women and girls who resided in Sacred Heart. (ACF, n.d, text panel)

To describe 3 m-high gates in such terms demonstrates literally no insight into how such edifices would have been perceived by those “required to be confined.”

The texts also deflect the issue of indentured labour by informing the reader that “the sisters [i.e. nuns] worked alongside the women and girls,” eliding the obvious fact that the nuns were (a) there by choice; (b) laboured in expectation of heavenly reward; and (c) returned at day’s end to their own rooms with no fear of assault or punishment for trivial infractions. There is, needless to say, no mention whatever of the brutal and torturous maltreatment that was meted out to the girls by those same nuns (ABC Radio Melbourne, 2021; Age [Melbourne], 2003; Webb, 2018; Wheatley, 2013) – and the ubiquitous practice of forced adoption is also conspicuously absent from the texts.

The text panels are at pains to downplay the Convent’s moral responsibility for what took place there, with repeated references to the variety of “girls and women who were placed in care” [emphasis added] within the institution. Such uncritical use of the word “care” signifies a radical lack of understanding of how the word is perceived by those who have experienced what passed for “care” in such places (Wilson, 2014). But the clearest and most blatant example of avoidance of responsibility is contained in the following passage, which attempts to submerge the Convent and its actions in the crowd, while seeming to acknowledge the victim/survivors:

Income to run the largely self-sufficient site was generated by unpaid labour in the Laundry, and in the Sacred Heart sewing, packing and sheet rooms, and from selling lace which was made onsite. This model of institutionalised care was practised throughout Australia, and during the 20th century, more than half-a-million children, including 50,000 Indigenous children, grew up “out of home” in more than 800 institutions nationally, often in harsh and oppressive conditions. (ACF, n.d, text panel)

Here the text pretends that the laundry was a subsistence undertaking, when in fact it made profits that financed other “charitable ventures” (ACF, 2024d); it skates past the term “unpaid labour” as though that implied subsistence status excuses the use of slave labour; and, most egregious of all – little short of mendacious, in fact – it asserts that “this model” was ubiquitous among “care” institutions across Australia, which is not even close to true. Although forced labour among wards of the State did occur in a some institutions, especially among rural establishments that housed orphans or First Nations children (SCARC, 2004: 36, 39, 60–61, 111–114, 161), nowhere else in Australia among so-called “care” institutions was mass indentured labour exploited on an industrial scale to operate major commercial enterprises, except in the other Magdalene Laundries. ⁵

Authorised heritage discourse

Far from honestly and compassionately confronting the site’s dark past, such euphemisation and obfuscation do nothing more than uphold what Smith (2006) terms the “Authorised Heritage Discourse” (AHD) that reflects and safeguards the safe and uncontroversial, mainstream or Establishment view of the site and effectively blocks clear-eyed examination of the real-world human experience of the practices that constituted its moralistic raison-d’etre. It must be noted that the site’s custodian body – the Abbotsford Convent Foundation – is a secular organisation appointed by the State government, with no connection to the Catholic Church. Their purpose in such sanitising, therefore, is not specifically to defend Mother Church or the religious personnel who ran the convent, but rather to preserve a narrative congruent with the AHD, and in the process ensure the site’s attractiveness to those desiring a “community arts space,” and to tourists.

Such “official” narratives tend to be closely aligned with the “social memory” of the site involved, and hence define the site’s place and role in the historical awareness of the community. As Darian-Smith (2019: 380) puts it,

Communities are the keepers and generators of knowledge about the tangible aspects of heritage sites (the historic buildings and landscapes, archives, records and objects) and, even more directly, the associated intangible heritage (the memories, cultural significance and lived experiences).

Yet in the case of Abbotsford Convent this apparent truism merits scrutiny, given the yawning disparity between the community sensibility – the social memory – of the convent and the memories and lived experiences of those who “resided” and toiled there unwillingly (the problems associated with social memory and carceral heritage sites are examined in Wilson, 2008). Further, it should be noted that the founding of the Abbotsford Convent in the mid-19th century itself constituted a radical “repurposing,” for the land was originally occupied by First Nations people of the Wurundjeri community, who in the process were dispossessed of a sacred site; hence the AHD must be regarded as intrinsically colonialist in its unremitting focus on the site as no more than an historic feature of urban Melbourne (Freedman et al., 2023).

The AHD’s tendency to erase traditional memories of First Nations’ custody of the land, and hence negate the cultural significance of Country for them, is bolstered by the cultural and visual weight of the site’s built fabric. This factor, the architectural aesthetic, is especially relevant to the Abbotsford site. Most of the major buildings, and all of those with an explicitly religious function, were built in the “Mediaeval” style standard for churches and so on in the 19th century (Department of Climate Change Energy the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), 2017). Such structures have a strong and specific attraction for visitors. To the modern viewer, the typical Mediaeval structure – be it church or castle – bespeaks a romantic combination of grandeur and power, a kind of monumentally graceful yet adamant authority that in the historical period in which the buildings were constructed was very real, and which had very real consequences for the subjects of that authority.

This visual connotation of power was commonly exploited in the 19th century in the design of another type of institution: the standard form of the castle was routinely appropriated in the neo-Gothic design of prisons. In the early 2000s, in the course of researching such historical prisons that had become tourist attractions, Wilson noted a marked correlation between the aesthetic and the powerful in visitors’ perceptions of the sites’ structures:

A favourable aesthetic disposition toward the “romantic” edifice itself may in fact promote a tendency in the visitor to underestimate the deleterious effect it had as a living environment for its inmates, and hence to contribute to the exclusion of their narratives. I came to suspect, on conversing with some tourists, that a subtle aspect of this psychological process involved a tendency for site visitors in effect to identify with the Establishment, both through their favourable attitude to the building’s visual “beauty,” and a concomitant impulse to identify with the power element implied in the historical form of the castle. (Wilson, 2008: 46)

Nor should one underestimate the capacity of this aesthetic to deflect the mind from the essential purpose of the structure, even in the case of someone unlikely to succumb to such effect. Cultural sociologist Toby Miller, no ally of the Establishment, recounts a salutary moment while passing the former Fremantle Prison:

Walking nearby with a friend, I said how beautiful the prison’s stonework looked. She averted her eyes and moved away, soon angry and tearful. Her brother had just been released. She had been a regular visitor during his prison term. The stonework did not look beautiful to her. (Miller, 1998: 232, emphasis sic)

It is likely that the “beautiful stonework” of the Abbotsford Convent is similarly lost on those former wards of the State whose time in Sacred Heart is commemorated by the onsite memorial that was unveiled in 2018, due to the activism of the Alliance for Forgotten Australians (AFA; Webb, 2018). The memorial, a squat steel cylinder half a metre high, is installed in a garden bed at the rear of the Sacred Heart Chapel, which stands well away from the compound that bears its name, in which the girls memorialised were held. As the accompanying signage explains, it is designed to embody, via an inventive interior, something of the complex skein of emotions and diverse life-narratives of the former residents represented. As a material acknowledgement, although of modest dimensions it does have some potency and its accompanying text panel does it justice in conveying the purport and hidden complexities of its design. But once again, one has to know it exists, and even then it takes some finding, as it appears on none of the guide maps (the maps in fact give no indication of any aspect of the site’s darker history), and no mention is made of it in the signage we have already discussed, which is situated some hundreds of metres away on the other side of the site.

The AFA Memorial’s unsung presence onsite is a prime example of contested narratives, which are a perennial component of sites embodying “difficult histories.” All too often the narrative that prevails in such contests is the one most actively sponsored or supported by agents having a stake in presenting a sanitised, or socially comfortable, version of the site – especially if there are commercial factors such as tourism. It is arguable, in fact, that the essence of Authorised Heritage Discourse is unacknowledged, or under-acknowledged, contested narratives. For this reason, the integrity of a site’s representation depends on the fullest possible consultation with all the communities having a stake in the site’s history, not just “the community.”

Remembering trauma

In 2017 the DCCEEW, a federal department that oversees the National Heritage List, released its report on the Abbotsford Convent complex – a well-informed survey history of the site, outlining its origins within the welfare paradigm of the mid-19th century, the evolution of that paradigm into the 20th century, and the Convent’s concomitant adaptations. The report acknowledges the site’s dark past, while remaining an exemplar of the AHD:

The impact on large numbers of people who were admitted to benevolent institutions continues today. As a result Abbotsford Convent is a valuable physical record which can explain the personal histories of individuals and is also a valuable record for on-going generations who are seeking to understand the past which has impacted on their family. In particular Abbotsford Convent is able to inform the stories and experiences of women and children. (DCCEEW, 2017)

This passage evinces an apparent understanding of the site’s significance for former inmates and their kin, and is of a piece with the report’s overall grasp of the site’s historical role in the context of Australian welfare and race-relations practices; but it evokes an immediate question: how can the Convent “explain” the experiences of individuals? How can a complex of admittedly impressive but innately mute built structures articulate anyone’s “personal histories”?

The notion of the structures per se “informing” us of anything so urgently personal, while well-meaning, is precisely the kind of detached and bloodless conceptualisation that fuels commentary such as we have seen in the on-site signage; and it results, too, in an equally detached mode of interpretation from the academic quarter. As the Sacred Heart Compound signage demonstrates, the tendency to under-acknowledge inconvenient or distasteful countering narratives can lead apparently sympathetic and even-handed scholars and commentators into realms of what amount to dismissal. In speaking of the same text panels we found so markedly wanting above, Darian-Smith expresses no reservations as to their capacity “to present the traumatic history of [the] buildings, their functions and inmates,” concluding, in diametric opposition to our judgement, that “These do not shy away from the difficult history of the site” (Darian-Smith, 2019: 389). Such unwitting distancing from the inmates’ experiences is also evident in her choice of supporting quotations. Thus her use of a summary from a Catholic history journal, which speaks of “a pattern of verbal abuse, shaming, lack of love and extremely hard work” (Franklin, 2013, quoted in Darian-Smith, 2019: 389), while studiously omitting mention of beatings, solitary confinement, or the extreme physical and emotional abuses associated with forced adoptions. ⁶ She also chooses to quote a local historian who describes the Convent complex as “perform[ing] a function perched intriguingly between imprisonment and refuge” (Otto, 2009: 185, cited in Darian-Smith, 2019: 384). The tongue-in-cheek tone of this characterisation (consistent, it should be noted, with the general tone of Otto’s book) on its face signifies a markedly insouciant conception of the experience of incarceration. It is also consistent with another perennial aspect of AHD intent on deflecting from dark or difficult narratives: the need not just to euphemise but, wherever possible, to entertain.

This imperative is especially visible in representations of carceral sites. It is not only through the “romantic” connotations of Mediaeval-style buildings that visitors are lured and wooed; a tone of levity, of jocular anecdote or even risible theatre, is common in the presentation of prisons, asylums, and so on (Wilson, 2003, 2008). Abbotsford Convent does not resort to such flippancy; the prevailing tone is more one of tranquillity, consistent with the religious origins and bucolic setting of the site. The main form of entertainment as such is in the form of musical concerts and festivals; these and the casually cheerful atmosphere around and within the cafes and restaurants complement such gravitas, serving further to distance the tourist sensibility from the site’s dark past. But given that it was the location of one of the most heinous and prolonged mass crimes against women and girls in our history, the persistent failure of some academic historians and, more especially, criminologists to peel back the façade and actually confront the site’s “dark history” raises questions about their understanding of the enormities involved.

One possible avenue of activism that has the potential to raise awareness of the Convent’s dark history, and in the process provide a narrative counter to the AHD, would be to have the site included on the international register of “Sites of Conscience” (International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, 2025). This global movement aims to confront the narrowness and euphemisation prevalent in the way contested histories and traumatic social memory associated with decommissioned penal and “care” sites of incarceration are represented through official accounts, tours, museums, and memorials (Lloyd and Steele, 2022: 144–160). Sites of Conscience identifies the repurposing of closed institutions as an opportunity for communities to engage openly with the “multiplicity of subjugated experiences, knowledges, and narratives of place and event” associated with these sites (Lloyd and Steele, 2022: 144). This process of collective memory-building yields profound impetus for anti-oppression and social-change work, and creates opportunities for redress and reparation while also informing the future eradication of violence, abuse, and injustice (Lloyd and Steele, 2022: 144). As Sites of Conscience advocates have argued, grappling head-on with difficult pasts and listening to the reverberating lived experiences arising from Establishment-generated violence and trauma, no matter how difficult this may prove, provide emancipatory possibilities for overcoming trauma and building futures free of violence and oppression (Carlton, 2024; Guenther, 2022). This is a profoundly collective process that involves holding space with communities who continue to navigate and survive the effects of institutional violence and abuse.

Whatever might become of a campaign to have Abbotsford Convent included among the world’s Sites of Conscience, it is apparent that the Sacred Heart Compound and Laundries were an example of what Goffman (1961) famously termed “total institutions.” Two core aspects of total institutions are that they are forcibly enclosed, that is, no voluntary departure is permitted; and they constitute self-contained worlds in which accountability is effectively non-existent. The Convent’s role in particular, along with similar “care” institutions, was premised upon the belief that forcible removal from society and institutionalisation of First Nations children, vagrant women or young single mothers, those with mental health concerns, child migrants and children deemed criminal provided beneficial “treatment” and reformation (Franklin, 2013: 78). A further feature of the total institution, involving processes of what Goffman (1961) terms “mortification,” were also exemplified in the Convent, whereby women were stripped of their identity by being allocated saints’ names to replace their own. Thus they became defined by the regime as determined by the Order.

Coupled with this is the Convent’s explicit links, throughout most of the 20th century, to the juvenile criminal, legal, and punishment system – both as a reformatory for offending girls and as a carceral institution for State wards. It is these factors that tend to bear on the mind of anyone with lived experience of such places, and it is therefore no great conceptual leap, as one strolls the picturesque grounds at Abbotsford, to bridge the apparent disparity between the tranquil visual beauty of the Convent and the towering and profoundly confronting basalt walls that once bounded Melbourne’s notorious maximum-security prison complex, Pentridge. The key linking aspect is that both sites have undergone radical repurposing processes that have almost totally submerged their original functions and respective histories (Carlton, 2024; Wilson, 2005, 2008).

H.M. Prison Pentridge, located 8 km north-west of the Convent, was decommissioned in 1997, and as part of a State government push to monetise tangible assets was sold two years later to a consortium of real estate developers (Pentridge Coburg, n.d). As a result, the infamous basalt walls (which generated the prison’s ironic nickname “bluestone college” and have been preserved under a heritage order) now form the perimeter of a 6.8-hectare (16.8 acres) residential estate and commercial hub comprising a hotel, dining, shopping and entertainment investments, and a few original buildings still standing but gutted and transformed into tourist attractions (Carlton, 2024; Mann, 2017). The result has been the partial preservation and repurposing of the shell of the prison and a collection of basalt facades and structures that privilege and immortalise the convict stockade era of the mid-19th century, while effectively burying the site’s darker-than-dark history encompassing the whole of the 20th century.

In contrast to the openly capitalistic approach in the example of Pentridge, the community-activist campaign to “save” the Abbotsford Convent from commercial redevelopment in the late 1990s resulted in the establishment, in 2004, of the community-run ACF and the preservation and repurposing of the buildings to create a complex of arts, community and commercial spaces. This campaign has been lauded for its “grass roots,” community-based approach, seen as alternative and benignly respectful of the social memories of the institution. We wonder, however, whether the Convent’s hub of hipster cafes and boutique arts spaces is so different to the distasteful theme park that Pentridge has become. Plaques and information boards notwithstanding, like all too many projects concerned with the preservation of colonial-era carceral built structures in Australia, the emphasis is on the conservation of the built fabric as commodified heritage at the expense of the lived-experience narratives of those with arguably the most palpable personal stake in the site.

Sound artist and blogger Bridget Chappell (herself a voice of lived experience of incarceration) refers to the reimagining of such institutional and carceral spaces into arts spaces as “trauma-informed capitalism,” questioning whether such conversions have any hope of achieving justice for those who continue to experience the effects of their institutionalisation (Chappel, 2024). She is critical of the rising obsession with preserving and reinvigorating colonial heritage in the form of decommissioned penal spaces and closed institutions, which she argues have “become the mask of choice for ageing carceral infrastructure.” By her lights, developments at the Convent may be understood as an expression of the “gaol-art industrial complex” arising from “the art sector’s insatiable need for space in which to make and experience work . . . Old detention centres deemed too historical to knock down but nonetheless awkward to repurpose (architecturally and spiritually) find a friend in the self-consciously liberal world of contemporary art” (Chappel, 2024).

Conclusion

If we seem to have wandered somewhat from the quasi-fictional world of Animal Kingdom, we would argue that the distance is not so great. One cannot say, of course, just how many former State wards or Care-leavers could relate to the scene described on a personal level similar to that of Wilson. The film obviously has little to do with the Abbotsford Convent (but perhaps something to do with Pentridge), but the common denominator of repressed trauma acted out in self-destructive practices and their fallout for immediate family and subsequent generations is all too recognisable to many of those with lived experience, whether direct or vicarious, of carceral institutions (Wilson and Carlton, 2022). And recognisable, too, is the film’s reflection of the blurred boundaries of experience and regimented governance/surveillance between systems of State welfare, “care” and the prison system.

The 2020 celebratory reopening and launch of the refurbished, restored Magdalene Laundries provides a good example of the prioritisation of bricks and mortar over people’s experiences and trauma. Not one speaker on the day spoke directly to the lived experience of the laundries (personal observation). The focus was on the refurbishment technicalities, difficulties and process and the wins associated with the beginnings of a community arts hub.

The conversion of the Abbotsford Convent into a community arts precinct raises compelling questions about the ethics of transformation of sites of suffering and wholesale oppression, and what should be prioritised in the process of establishing the role of those sites in the social memory. While providing creative artists with spaces and opportunities in a locale such as the Convent complex may well be deemed by some as laudable, it should not happen in ways that obscure and silence the experiences of State wards and unwed mothers held there – imprisoned – over the 100-year period in which the complex was operational as Magdalene Laundries and an Industrial School. The trauma embodied within the concrete quadrangle of institutions on site remains palpable. It is vitally important to understand that these are living memories and that Care-leavers are still seeking restitution. Nor is it appropriate that the commodification of the site for entertainment be allowed to dilute and negate the seriousness that should accompany people’s image of the site and its history.

The developments discussed above are reflective of a global phenomenon of late-stage capitalism whereby carceral tourism presents just another opportunity to marketise and capitalise on public fascination and titillation with the violence endemic in total institutions (Carlton, 2024; Wilson, 2008; Wilson et al., 2017), or, where that violence presents images too inconvenient for the social memory, to sidestep them by monetising safe alternatives. These institutions were not refuges or places of care, they were total institutions defined by social exclusion, civil death, barred windows, inmate segregation, strict regimes of hard work and silence where intransigence or irreverence was met with brutal punishment (Franklin, 2013; SCARC, 2004).

The genealogical intersections between social welfare, criminal justice and punishment systems, and how they managed women deemed to be vagrant, in ill-health or failing to conform to hetero-patriarchal gender norms in settler-colonial Australia, comprise an area needing far greater attention with reference to the lived experiences of women Care-leavers. Moreover, there needs to be an explicit focus on how these systems managed Aboriginal women and children over more than 100 years of settler colonial dispossession and violence in Victoria.

Not only is greater academic and community awareness and engagement needed; it is vital that we discuss the importance of academic research that is conducted with vulnerable communities, survivors and activists in relation to carceral settings. The failure of academics to look past the AHD or its equivalent, depending on the site, means that we understand very little about what an inmate, a State ward, a prisoner, a slave, was in 20th-century Australian Magdalene laundries.