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

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 is recounted, given evidence she was a laundry inmate as a teenager and suffered the forced adoption of her newborn baby. The article critiques the Abbotsford site’s adherence to the establishment-oriented sanitisation of history that heritage scholars dub Authorised Heritage Discourse, a “managed” narrative which contributes to the commodification, obfuscation, and distortion of lived experience and social memory connected to the site’s dark past. Further, in highlighting significant omissions and silences within the criminological field, we appeal for renewed engagement and critical research informed by care leaver activism, advocacy and lived experience that brings to public awareness the systemic harms and violence associated with state care institutions.