Collingwood Children's Farm

This guide to Collingwood Children's Farm in Melbourne traces the paddocks back to 1863, when French nuns of the Order of the Good Shepherd built a convent and refuge here for women and girls sent away for so-called moral failings or simple poverty, put to work in the laundry, dairy and piggery. At its busiest the institution held close to a thousand women and children, fed by crops grown on this same soil. Listen for the clang of a laundry copper beneath the everyday clatter of the farm gate.