Ghosts of Abbotsford Convent: quick links
Despite being based in Adelaide, where she is currently the Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music at the University of Adelaide, the award-winning pianist, curator, festival director and writer Anna Goldsworthy has spent many an hour at Melbourne’s arts, culture and learning precinct, the Abbotsford Convent.
Melbourne, she tells ArtsHub, ‘is a place where my children were born’. Consequently, she has visited the Convent and the neighbouring Collingwood Children’s Farm – originally the Convent’s vegetable garden – many times.
‘I used to while away vast numbers of hours at the Collingwood Children’s Farm or at the bakeries on the Convent grounds, or even just visiting the 3MBS studios [on the site] for early morning broadcasts with my trio,’ Goldsworthy says.
Consequently, she was enthusiastic when Paavali Jumppanen, the Artistic Director of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), which is temporarily based at the Convent, invited her to be become involved with a storytelling project involving the current cohort of ANAM’s ambitious young musicians.
‘Then he said that perhaps the project could be about engaging the space they currently inhabit as they await refurbishments to the South Melbourne Town Hall, and so he asked me if I’d like to work with them on developing something about the Convent – engaging with the history of the place and the nature of its spaces, and I likely said, “Yes, of course, I’d be delighted”.’
The resulting work, Ghosts of the Convent, grew out of a subsequent artist residency undertaken by Goldsworthy earlier this year, and is a creative response to Abbotsford Convent developed alongside ANAM’s musicians.
ANAM, one of the elite Arts8 group of Australian training institutions, became a Convent resident after being driven out of South Melbourne Town Hall in 2020, when the Victorian-era building became unsafe following an earlier roof collapse and extensive flooding. On 31 July this year, Goldsworthy was announced as ANAM’s next Artistic Director, commencing in January 2027.
Read: Labor and Greens commit to supporting ANAM redevelopment
Abbotsford Convent’s ‘fraught history’
Once she began her research into the site, however, Goldsworthy quickly discovered a dark side to the Abbotsford Convent’s history.
‘It always just struck me as a sort of idyllic, pastoral environment. I thought, “Oh, [the Convent] would be a lovely thing to do something about.” It was only after I’d properly agreed that I took the time to immerse myself a little bit more deeply in the history of the place – and that, of course, is when I realised that there is a fraught side of this history,’ she explains.
‘It was the site of notorious Magdalene Laundries, whereby “fallen women” [known as Magdalens] were taken to be rehabilitated, essentially, through what amounted almost to a form of slave labour working at these unforgiving laundries in which they prepared linen for a lot of the top establishments in Melbourne, including the Windsor Hotel.
‘There was a saying at the time, I think, that “bad girls did the best laundry,” or “made the cleanest sheets,” something like that,’ Goldsworthy tells ArtsHub.
Built on Wurundjeri land, Abbotsford Convent was established in 1863 by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, and at its peak in 1901, was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere. A place of refuge and support for some young women, others, such as Jenny, a caller to ABC Radio Melbourne in 2021, speak of the Convent’s Magdalen Laundries as places of prolonged suffering.
‘Lots of memories, but terrible ones for young wards of the state,’ Jenny said. ‘We were forced to work in the laundry, at 14 years, not allowed to attend school and had the nuns drum religion into us, they made us lose our religion. We were children in the 60’s and worked 6 days a week, beautiful to look at but hell for us. They made a fortune from us cleaning sheets and towels for upmarket hotels, while we were children.’
A poetic response to Abbotsford Convent’s history
That grim history has informed the creation of Ghosts of the Convent, a musical response to the site’s history which grew out of Goldsworthy’s ANAM residency earlier this year.
As part of the project, Goldsworthy invited writer Nam Le (author of the award-winning short story collection The Boat and the more recent collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem) to write a poem inspired by the Convent’s story.
‘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,’ Goldsworthy said in a media statement for Ghosts of the Convent.
Le said in the same statement: ‘Having worked at the Convent for ten years, I’m grateful and delighted to collaborate with Anna Goldsworthy and the gifted musicians at ANAM on this project.
‘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. During that time I felt intensely connected to the Sisters, novices and postulants who had lived here 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,’ he said.
That curiosity has found its form in a sestina, one of the most challenging poetic forms to write given the strict formality of its structure (a sestina is a complex 39-line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end-words in six stanzas, and a closing three-line stanza known as an envoi).
A mangled sestina and a compositional answer
Le’s ‘very rigorous sestina’ is also ‘a mangled sestina, which I think speaks partly of the mangler – which was a very important part of the laundry and also quite a dangerous machine where young women sometimes would injure themselves – but also, I think because it kind of distorts the poetic strictures ever so slightly, [consequently] it takes on a bit the distortions of history, of the way stories are passed down and changed … distorted, I suppose,’ Goldsworthy explains.
After hearing Le read his poem, ANAM’s students responded by suggesting appropriate accompanying compositions from what Goldsworthy calls ‘their own internal musical libraries’.
‘We’ve used his words in this context as a kind of jumping-off point, and we devised the musical responses as a real act of co-curation. We got all the musicians together and Nam presented this poem to them, and it was just brilliant to watch the way his poem sort of reverberated, or resonated with their own internalised musical libraries – because they each carry their own musical references with them. And then we compiled, with the help of our curation team, a smaller list [of compositions]. I’m hoping this provides further resonance around was already a very, very personal poem, and draws out particularly the theme of complexity – what it is to be an artist in that type of environment,’ she says.
ANAM students are ‘learning through doing’
Acknowledging the excellence of ANAM’s training, which encourages ‘learning through doing’ with support from ‘the resident faculty [who] are incredibly caring and knowledgeable and pedagogically astute,’ Goldsworth adds that she was almost surprised by how quickly the students seized onto Le’s poem when he read it to them.
‘[What] really struck me when I came in to work with them on this project was how open minded they are and how alive they are to this notion of stepping outside of their comfort zone … I mean, these guys are excellent musicians but they’re not necessarily students of poetry. But then afterwards, when we sat down with them and listened to their musical responses, it was just an incredibly exciting environment for me to begin – not just as a musician, but also, I suppose, as a literary person, just to hear how responsive they were to this other art form, how broad-minded they all are, how creative they are, and also how knowledgeable they are. They’re just brilliant young people.’
Artists and creative thinkers, Goldsworthy continues, require ‘openness, receptivity’ and ‘there’s got to be a lot of input. There’s got to be a lot of immersing with things and engaging with new ideas, other art life experience – that’s what I think keeps inspiration happening.’
ANAM’s students will play the curated musical responses to the poem on Friday 22 August, alongside Nam Le, who will perform the poem, together with contextualising remarks by Goldsworthy.
The day prior, Goldsworthy will be conversation with Le and ANAM musician curators Shelbey McRae, Tom Allen and Timothy O’Malley about the project’s performance – while valiantly resisting sharing too many spoilers about the final array of works selected for Ghosts of the Convent. ANAM students will also offer some insights into the musical selection to be performed the following night.
‘We’ll get the young musicians up to talk about how we developed this project, to explain their own musical choices – many of which are quite experimental … [We’ll be] talking about how the music provides this sort of resonance around the poem. I guess I’m thinking this particular conversation will provide an extra level of resonance around the music that’s around the poem, just a bit of context. It’s like the making of Titanic – but not quite as expensive,’ she quips.
Ghosts of the Convent takes place in two parts: an In Conversation featuring Anna Goldsworthy, Nam Le and ANAM musicians on Thursday 21 August at 3pm, and In Concert on Friday 22 August 7pm, again featuring Anna Goldsworthy, Nam Le and ANAM musicians. Visit ANAM’s website for details.
