Magdalene Laundry Australia, 1 of 6 - Good Shepherd Convent in Abbotsford, Melbourne, Victoria, 2008, by Curwood, Paul, courtesy of YouTube.
[Description taken from youtube]: This video was taken in Nov 2008 at the Good Shepherd Convent in Abbotsford, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It is a present day guided tour with a tour guide. This first of six videos features the tour intro with a general introduction from the Arch-Bishops Office at the Abottsford Convent. The camera work and production were undertaken by Paul Curwood, the son of a former inmate who endured this home between 1928 and 1931. In its heyday and for many decades the laundry at the convent was one of the biggest commercial laundries in Melbourne, serving many public hospitals and church clergy. It was a big money earner for the Catholic Church and the Good Shepherd nuns. As late as 1970 it was totally staffed by unpaid young women who had fallen foul of the law or the social morality of the time. These young women had the misfortune to end up enslaved by the nuns until they were eighteen years old. The girls self estemes were systematically disempowered by the nuns. All inmates became severely institutionalized. Some stayed in the nuns 'care' until their deaths. The women who were released were often crushed characters who never realized their full potential. These are the stolen generations: different types of 'stolen generation' when compared to the Australian Aborigines. These unfortunates, numbering thousands, have never been apologized to ,or compensated for, their enslavement. Who said slavery was not a twentieth century practice in the civilized Western World?
Last updated: 4 August 2023
Cite this: https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/ref/australia/objects/FD0000015.htm
First published by the Find & Connect Web Resource Project for the Commonwealth of Australia, 2011
Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License