Convicts, gold and scandal: the musical digging up our secret past
Around her, a big band swirls. Mick Thomas, with smashing bushranger beard, leads members of Weddings Parties Anything and guitarist Jeff Lang and other local legends through rehearsals for Vandemonian Lags, a piece of musical-theatre that reckons with colonial Australia's lesser-known past.
'She got pregnant to a lieutenant,' Short says of the subject of the song. 'She was 16; too young. And she settled up next to the river and had the baby there. She didn't end up staying with the lieutenant because he had a family of his own back home.
'I love a story of a strong woman back in the 1800s. I love it when those stories are lifted up, because history is often told by big white men.'
That spirit of recovering lost voices – convict, female, otherwise muted – lies at the heart of Vandemonian Lags, a song cycle performed in costume and based on true stories from Tasmania's convict past (the title combines a name for inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land, as the island was known until 1856, and a term for convicts).
First staged at Dark Mofo in 2013 and performed only a few times since, the show returns this week to Melbourne, Bendigo, Ballarat and Frankston with a cast that also includes Tim Rogers, Brian Nankervis, Darren Hanlon, Sal Kimber, Van Walker, Ben Salter and newcomer Claire Anne Taylor.
The stories come from 19th-century records of the 75,000 convicts sent to Van Diemen's Land; some include details of their later lives after crossing to Victoria during the gold rush. UNESCO has called it the most detailed archive of the Victorian working class ever recorded.
'The Vandemonian is a pestilential addition to our population, and his coming is an evil we must guard against at all costs,' raged The Argus in 1852. But neither the convicts nor their stories could be stopped.
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The Advertiser
9 hours ago
- The Advertiser
TAINTED: burlesque show merges Victorian-era tales with 90s grunge sound
A Victorian-style tragedy full of magic, slapstick, pole dance, burlesque and fire dance, all set to a 90s grunge soundtrack is coming to Sun Street Studios. Sophie Cook and the Wollombi Burlesque Troupe are bringing TAINTED - A Burlesque Tragic Opera to Maitland for one night only on Friday, August 29. Inspired by Victorian stories and English films, TAINTED covers everything from plague and pestilence to age and love, with live 90s grunge music from the likes of Nirvana and Soundgarden. Sophie, who wrote and produced the show, and plays vaudevillian Legs 11.11, said it's is very comedic but also has depth. Going through menopause has impacted Sophie's life and the way she has written the show. "There's just so many different things that I'm taking on from writing to producing, to performing, and it does seem a lot harder now that I'm in this menopause," she said. "It is something that we all go through and even though it's not very sexy, it's a big shift in your life and I'm trying to come to terms with that it's a really empowering time, I've heard women say that they do their very best work when they sort of push into this new phase." Sophie said this has led her to embracing playing more of a matriarchal role in this show, rather than the siren she's known for. "I'm also just doing those gross things on stage that I probably wouldn't have done when I was 25, and I'm still ballsy enough to take off some layers of clothing, but I guess in this particular act... she is celebrating her body but she's also looking in the mirror and is kind of not happy with her body," she said. "I'm trying to bring in the humour that everybody feels as they get older, whereas if I was 25 I wouldn't even be considering putting a thread like that in my own work." TAINTED will be Sophie's fifth show in Maitland, and she said while it's a huge undertaking, she doesn't know what she'd do without the shows and the creative process. "It's going to be a really fun night out and the band is amazing, they've got some really incredible performers so it's something different," she said. "I don't think you [usually] get a chance to listen to much grunge music, unless you're looking for it." Get tickets from $45 for adults at A Victorian-style tragedy full of magic, slapstick, pole dance, burlesque and fire dance, all set to a 90s grunge soundtrack is coming to Sun Street Studios. Sophie Cook and the Wollombi Burlesque Troupe are bringing TAINTED - A Burlesque Tragic Opera to Maitland for one night only on Friday, August 29. Inspired by Victorian stories and English films, TAINTED covers everything from plague and pestilence to age and love, with live 90s grunge music from the likes of Nirvana and Soundgarden. Sophie, who wrote and produced the show, and plays vaudevillian Legs 11.11, said it's is very comedic but also has depth. Going through menopause has impacted Sophie's life and the way she has written the show. "There's just so many different things that I'm taking on from writing to producing, to performing, and it does seem a lot harder now that I'm in this menopause," she said. "It is something that we all go through and even though it's not very sexy, it's a big shift in your life and I'm trying to come to terms with that it's a really empowering time, I've heard women say that they do their very best work when they sort of push into this new phase." Sophie said this has led her to embracing playing more of a matriarchal role in this show, rather than the siren she's known for. "I'm also just doing those gross things on stage that I probably wouldn't have done when I was 25, and I'm still ballsy enough to take off some layers of clothing, but I guess in this particular act... she is celebrating her body but she's also looking in the mirror and is kind of not happy with her body," she said. "I'm trying to bring in the humour that everybody feels as they get older, whereas if I was 25 I wouldn't even be considering putting a thread like that in my own work." TAINTED will be Sophie's fifth show in Maitland, and she said while it's a huge undertaking, she doesn't know what she'd do without the shows and the creative process. "It's going to be a really fun night out and the band is amazing, they've got some really incredible performers so it's something different," she said. "I don't think you [usually] get a chance to listen to much grunge music, unless you're looking for it." Get tickets from $45 for adults at A Victorian-style tragedy full of magic, slapstick, pole dance, burlesque and fire dance, all set to a 90s grunge soundtrack is coming to Sun Street Studios. Sophie Cook and the Wollombi Burlesque Troupe are bringing TAINTED - A Burlesque Tragic Opera to Maitland for one night only on Friday, August 29. Inspired by Victorian stories and English films, TAINTED covers everything from plague and pestilence to age and love, with live 90s grunge music from the likes of Nirvana and Soundgarden. Sophie, who wrote and produced the show, and plays vaudevillian Legs 11.11, said it's is very comedic but also has depth. Going through menopause has impacted Sophie's life and the way she has written the show. "There's just so many different things that I'm taking on from writing to producing, to performing, and it does seem a lot harder now that I'm in this menopause," she said. "It is something that we all go through and even though it's not very sexy, it's a big shift in your life and I'm trying to come to terms with that it's a really empowering time, I've heard women say that they do their very best work when they sort of push into this new phase." Sophie said this has led her to embracing playing more of a matriarchal role in this show, rather than the siren she's known for. "I'm also just doing those gross things on stage that I probably wouldn't have done when I was 25, and I'm still ballsy enough to take off some layers of clothing, but I guess in this particular act... she is celebrating her body but she's also looking in the mirror and is kind of not happy with her body," she said. "I'm trying to bring in the humour that everybody feels as they get older, whereas if I was 25 I wouldn't even be considering putting a thread like that in my own work." TAINTED will be Sophie's fifth show in Maitland, and she said while it's a huge undertaking, she doesn't know what she'd do without the shows and the creative process. "It's going to be a really fun night out and the band is amazing, they've got some really incredible performers so it's something different," she said. "I don't think you [usually] get a chance to listen to much grunge music, unless you're looking for it." Get tickets from $45 for adults at
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. 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. Loading 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'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
The Age
2 days ago
- The Age
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. 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. Loading 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'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
