‘It was indeed the Convent of the Good Shepherd, the Sacred Heart Class was where we kids worked our butts off to feed the nuns and the orphans (the orphans I don’t mind helping to feed …… ) and St Euphrasia was for schooling. So there were four sections in all. When my father placed me in the convent (I wasn’t in trouble by the way, at least not pregnant…), my father got rid of me as a plaything and the convent was as good as anywhere else.

We girls got up early, went to mass, came back, attended the refectory where we all had breakfast (such as it was) then we went to work. I was only a kid back then and didn’t know better, I just accepted their slavery as normal! Hubbys Bub [another poster on the disucssion board] the stories we could tell, your friend and I except my heart already feels as if it is breaking in two. As for my anger it’s getting like a great big ball. I don’t dare say too much else, as right now im not coping well at all.

This I want to say: breakfast was luke-warm porridge with a slice of STALE bread. Lunch on the other hand was soup, with the morning’s left over porridge added for volume! Please, I just need someone else to back me up as I know it sounds unbelievable!

We worked so hard. I usually worked in the ironing room, but did some time in the mangle room, which is a huge round press that one fed sheets and such into! Anyone who knows me will tell you I loathe ironing, hence most of my clothing is drip dry!

We had a huge bath and toilet area. We had a bath once a fortnight from memory and even so the water we used had been used several times before we got in Y…..UCKO! The crows, usually called auxiliaries, would drag us down there and beat the bejes-s out of us if some nun had a complaint against any of us. Never mind if it was true or not. Biff! Bash! And cop that! Until we grew older and now and then fought back.

There was also a method of complaint called standing on the slab. We would walk off work and stand in the middle of the room and that’s where we stayed until bedtime. We could eat the muck they gave us for breakfast, then the nun in charge of our workplace would ask us if we were prepared to work. I was too stubborn to comply and so went without many a meal. Some of the girls would try and smuggle us something, but it was usually at extreme risk to themselves, and many a child went down the toilet just for feeling pity for a fellow sufferer.

I make absolutely no apologies whatsoever for despising those cows called nuns if they were the gaurdian of our souls then god help us. I looked at my granddaughter and thought I wasn’t much older or bigger than that when I first went there! HANG your heads in shame, you women who were portrayed as the gaurdians of our bodies and souls. SHAME SHAME on you! The only time I have ever stepped inside a Catholic church since was to attend a funeral. I wandered around for some time after that eventually I realised I had a spiritual need so looked deeply into the Bible, and now I know what’s actually in the Bible, I despise them even more. Not only because they were nuns, but primarily because they were WOMEN!

Totally unforgiveable bvehaviour, however I can forgive (not easily ) but because the Bible directs us to! I DEFINITELY CANNOT FORGET THOUGH. I have deliberately wiped a lot of menories away, in order to survive and a survivor is exactly what I am and can take a little comfort in that.’

I received from Miss K for Christmas Catherine Kovesi’s book Pitch Your Tents on Distant Shores (2006, Playwright Publishing), a beautifully written and very substantial large-format hard-back history of the founders of the Abbotsford Convent, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. It was, and may still be, available from the Sisters’ Provincialate Office at the discounted price of $55. It is remarkable in being quite accessible to the lay reader whilst doing what institutional histories must do. It has many photos of the Abbotsford Convent. Not given to reading religious histories, I am enjoying it.

No doubt it is a commissioned history, which may explain this frank admission in the introduction:

“More problematic has been the question of the stories of those numerous girls and women who found themselves occupants of the many institutions of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Victims of a society which saw women who deviated in any way from the norm as outcasts, they have stories, often of excruciating pain and heartbreak. Whilst I have tried to include some of these stories, the prime focus of this study has been the sisters themselves and their work. I hope that this might provide a foundational backdrop for others to publish work on the lives of the former residents and inmates whose stories need telling.”

But it is clear that Dr Kovesi rails against too hysterical an imagination of the strictures imposed by severe nuns on their wards (referred to as “children” regardless of their age) by blind assumptions based for example on Marxist Peter Mullan’s film The Magdalene Sisters. It horrified Melburnians a few years ago with its depiction of depraved sadism of Catholic nuns towards “fallen women” in 1960s Ireland. Dr Kovesi says “In the case of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd there has been not so much a shortcoming of history, as a shortage of it altogether and speculation has been allowed to run unchecked,” and suggests such speculation is but the most recent in a centuries old history of disparagement in certain quarters amounting to a “‘Magdalen’ genre”. (The common view of Mary Magdalen, to whom Jesus is said to have first revealed his resurrection, since the 13th century is of a prostitute, however she is referred to in the Bible only as a sinner who tearfully repented her sins to Jesus). Dr Kovesi says:

“For many Catholics the work of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd behind these enormous walls was the subject of hushed conversations, usually out of earshot of younger children in the household, with the occasional threat to their teenage daughters that if they behaved badly they would end up in the care of the sisters. …

For non-Catholics, what went on behind the walls of this and other complexes of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd was often the subject of rampant speculation and, at times, outrageous assertion. The sisters were described as ‘torturing demons, proselytising the souls and battening upon the bodies of their luckless victims’, the convent represented as a ‘gloomy prison wherein girls and women, as well as young children, are immured and most cruelly tortured, and a place where’s God’s sunshine of a smile is ever absent.’ The Sisters were accused of running sweatshops, of undercutting competitors in the marketplace, of forcing women to stay against their will. Common to these views was that of the walls as sinister and negative; the privacy they afford was seen as allowing heinous acts to be performed, their height was seen to be aiding the imprisonment of the inhabitants.”

Dr Kovesi records that the Sisters did not entirely escape the wave of complaints about institutional abuse in the 1990s, but did comparatively very well given the vast numbers of residents who had passed through their door. She emphasises that unlike some other religious orders, corporal punishment was absolutely banned, no complaints of sexual abuse were levelled against the Sisters in Australia, and she found no evidence of residents being detained against their will. Indeed, there was a “no touching” rule which it is suggested led, ironically, to an unfortunate absence of physical affection.

There is no record in the book of any complaints made by former residents of the Abbbotsford Convent to the Senate Enquiry into Children in Institutional Care. It seemed to me from the Report itself that there were in fact 4 such complaints. I asked Dr Kovesi about the apparent discrepancy, and she explained to me that though there were 4 submissions referring to Abbotsford Convent recorded in the Senate report, none was made by a former resident of the Abbotsford Convent, and a mention in a submission is not necessarily a complaint.

The book notes that between 2000 and 2005, the Sisters settled 39 claims from former residents of the Sisters’ many residential institutions in Australia, pointing out that the majority of these claims addressed the lack of educational opportunities provided by the sisters. Given the numbers who passed through their institutions, in other words, they fared well. The fact that the claims were settled out of court tells us nothing about the settlements, especially as the claims were made in a system designed to reach a negotiated settlement.