Abbotsford Convent

This guide to Abbotsford Convent in Melbourne traces its decades as the Magdalen Asylum, where Irish nuns of the Good Shepherd order arrived in 1863 and built an empire of unpaid labor around one of Melbourne's largest commercial laundries. You'll hear about the orphanage and reformatory beside it, and the more than a thousand people who once lived on this riverbend, washing linen for hotels, ships and railways building the city. Look up at the glass roof monitors and pressed-tin ceilings of the laundry building, still standing where you walk today.