A critical reading of the Abbotsford Convent complex: Confronting sites of trauma, social memory, lived experience, and institutions of state “care”

Abstract

The article utilises an auto-ethnographic approach to examine the former Abbotsford Convent and Sacred Heart Complex, which incorporated the Magdalene Asylum, a reformatory for young offenders and the Industrial School for neglected children, in inner-suburban Melbourne, Australia, from the auto-ethnographic standpoint of the lead author, a former ward of the State of Victoria. The “repurposing” of the Convent complex in recent years to accommodate an arts precinct, restaurants and scenic tourism is discussed in light of the site’s history of the imprisonment, enslavement, and abuse of generations of women and girls deemed by the Church to have “fallen.” The case of the lead author’s mother ..