One of the world's most beautiful art deco hotels is not where you'd expect
Despite the rapid development of the past three decades, many of them are still standing. Art deco's distinctive ziggurats, speed lines and curves are everywhere. 'You just have to look up,' says Tina Kanagaratnam, co-founder of Historic Shanghai, a group devoted to recording and celebrating Shanghai's unique history.
One of the most famous of all these buildings is the Peace Hotel. Commissioned by British tycoon Victor Sassoon and completed in 1929, the hotel was promoted as the most luxurious hotel in the east. As well as exquisite furnishings and interior design, it also had such radical innovations as indoor plumbing, air-conditioning and a sprung floor for dancing. The hotel lived up to the hype, immediately becoming the place to stay or be seen in Shanghai. Its jazz club was said to be the social hub of the city.
Kanagaratnam takes me on an impromptu tour, pointing out some of the easily missed original stained-glass windows. In one of them you can make out the word 'Cathay', the original name of the hotel from the old European word for China.
The level of detail in this space alone is extraordinary, from the sculptures and artworks reflecting the free-flowing fashion of the day to elaborate staircases and decorative ironwork, tiles and marble. It's also home to coffee shop Victor's and the Jasmine Lounge, where you can book in for afternoon tea and dine on delicate cakes and sandwiches while a pianist plays on the hotel's original Steinway. The Old Jazz Bar, behind a timber door with a grill, is an atmospheric space with a long timber bar, small stage, and clothed tables. Every night, anyone can sip a cocktail and listen to the band and guest singers.
After our walk around the hotel and the local neighbourhood, where we spot many other deco masterpieces, Kanagaratnam leaves me to check in. I've been staying in the hotel equivalent of a musty cupboard for three nights and the cost of my one night in the cheapest available room at the Peace Hotel ($564) is almost double those three nights combined, so I'm determined to make the most of it.
Tonight, I'll be sleeping in a building once graced by Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich and, more recently, Richard Nixon, Barack Obama and Justin Trudeau. They each stayed in one of the hotel's nine original Nation Suites, and it's easy to imagine them at home in these elaborately decorated, glamorous spaces. My room is merely the standard level of uber luxury – in art deco style yet thoroughly modernised with an enormous bathroom, coffee station, walk-in closet and the elegance, light and high ceilings the era was famous for.
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Sydney Morning Herald
12 hours 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
12 hours 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.
ABC News
17 hours ago
- ABC News
Bodhana Sivanandan becomes youngest female chess player to defeat grandmaster
A 10-year-old girl has become the youngest female chess player to defeat a grandmaster. British junior Bodhana Sivanandan beat 60-year-old grandmaster Peter Wells in the last round of the 2025 British Chess Championships in Liverpool this week. The International Chess Federation said Sivanandan's victory at 10 years, five months and three days beat the 2019 record held by American Carissa Yip, who defeated a grandmaster at 10 years, 11 months and 20 days. In chess, grandmaster is the highest title given to a player. Once it is attained, the rank is held for life. Sivanandan has now been given the woman international master rank, which is the sits as the second-highest rank given to women exclusively and is just behind woman grandmaster. The young chess sensation told the BBC she hoped to achieve her ultimate goal and become a grandmaster. Her father Siva said last year that the family was shocked at her chess ability because he and his wife were not good at chess. Sivanandan victory over the grandmaster was not smooth sailing. Partway through the match it looked as though her opponent would comfortably win. But some calm and calculated moves helped her overcome the tricky situation and win. "How on earth did she win this? She must be some kind of magician," the English Chess Federation's commentator Danny Gormally said on the live stream. "She likes to play simple positional moves … very solid player. But she tends to outplay her opponents later in the game," Mr Gormally added in his commentary. "There's a touch of Magnus Carlsen or the great Jose Raul Capablanca about her play." As director of Junior Chess, Tim Wall oversees the age group categories at the English Chess Federation. He said: "Bodhana is an inspiration to girls." "The way she exudes calmness and maturity on the board … she clearly has a very strong work ethic," he said. "She certainly has a very high ceiling."
