For some women, the convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalene asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet working late on the second floor.) Residents were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, “bad girls do the best sheets”. Over the 20th century, the convent mutated further to incorporate a youth training centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by La Trobe University. A developer’s plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the convent’s “dense repository of heritage”, while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel’s garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger. Of course there is no single version of the convent’s history, but a clamorous polyphony, which since 2020 has incorporated the young musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), based at the convent as they await the refurbishment of the South Melbourne Town Hall. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, the academy’s artistic director, stepped into the role in 2021 with a commitment to engage the musicians with community, and for the convent to be a “laboratory” of new ways to make music. He notes the site’s “troubled history”, and seeks to “make music here in ... a relevant way, and in a way that is connected to the place”.