Sydney MMXXIV – Erased, Demolished, Gone, Obliterated, Decimated and if Lucky, Merely Transformed Beyond Recognition

 

Magdalene Laundries: Convents of the Not-So-Good Shepherds

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From the 1880s to the 1970s the Catholic Church in Australia through its various religious orders ran a series of female-only laundries on its premises, catering for what was euphemistically and melodramatically called in days-gone-by, “fallen women”, who once admitted came to known as “Magdalenes”. The Australian operations were based on earlier ones in Ireland and England and elsewhere in Europe—largely but not exclusively confined to the Catholic faith—which went under the handle “Magdalene laundries”. 

The Magdalene laundries in Australia, in particular those of the Convent of the Good(sic) Shepherd and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, have been outed for the harshness of their historic treatment of vulnerable young women seeking refuge in their religious asylums. These women were primarily stigmatised as prostitutes and some were definitely sex workers or had a reputation for promiscuity, but others were straight-out, innocent victims of sexual abuse and rape. The inmates were intended to observe a penitent lifestyle while resident in the monasteries, but the Church didn’t miss the opportunity to put them to very profitable commercial use. Typically, at the Convent of the Good Shepherd at Ashfield in suburban Sydney, inmates were forced to slave away at 16-hour shifts in the laundry (4:00am–8:00pm) without any wages. Exploiting the free source of labour benefitted the church institution by allowing it to undercut the prices of its laundry business competitors. The nuns’ disciplining of the resident women and girls included making them work in silence or near silence. Any children borne by the inmates during their time there were immediately taken away from the mothers without a skerrick of compassion and despatched for adoption. Former Magdalenes have spoken of being addressed in the laundry workplace only as numbers, not by their names, further evidence of the dehumanising treatment.

In Melbourne, there were several such Magdalene laundries in the day, the largest of which was the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Abbotsford, where over 1,000 Magdalene women and children were living behind its wall on a large, 17-acre site. At Abbotsford and at the Sisters’ Tempe (NSW) laundry, the Church’s clear disregard for the inmates’ developmental prospects was demonstrated by an absence of books and the asylum’s abject failure to provide the inmates with any educational nourishment whatsoever (‘Shadow of the Past: The Dark History of Abbotsford Convent’, Bevlea Ross, Bevlea Ross Photography, 16-July-2023, www.bevleaross.com.au).

European films and docos of the last two decades have highlighted the plight of the Magdalene women. In Eire where the last Magdalene facility didn’t close until 1996 and the treatment dished out was more severe than in Australia, an Irish taoseich (prime minster) was forced reluctantly to issue a formal state apology to the surviving inmates and provide financial compensation§. The Catholic Church for its part remains rigidly unrepentant for any wrongs against the women, bunkered down in denial and doggedly refusing to contribute financially to the compensation, to its great shame. Some apologists for the Magdalene laundries have tried to fend off the criticisms as being simply the product of vengeful Protestant propaganda. But as an article in the Journal of Australian Catholic Historical Society noted, the consistency of the accounts from ex-inmates points clearly to the perpetration of “a high level of gratuitous positive cruelty and emotional deprivation” against the Magdalene women in their highly vulnerable and powerless state (‘Convent Slave Laundries? Magdalene Asylums in Australia’, James Franklin, JACHS (34: 2013), www.web.maths.unsw.edu.au).

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§ the system in Ireland worked on the basis of close government and church collusion, the former procured the Magdalene slave-workers for the latter