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Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- 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
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- 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
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Nam Le wins Book of the Year at 2025 NSW Literary Awards for 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
Nam Le has won the top prize at the NSW Literary Awards for his debut collection of poetry — and his second book — 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. It's his second Book of the Year win at the event formerly known as the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, after his short story collection The Boat won in 2009. At this year's event at the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, the Vietnamese Australian author also won the $30,000 Multicultural NSW Award, taking his total winnings to $40,000. The judges described the collection as "damning, frank and unwavering … passionate and bold in its depiction of otherness, trauma and struggle". Le told ABC Arts he's "stoked" to have won at the NSW Literary Awards. Accepting the Multicultural NSW Award via video message, Le — who came to Australia as a refugee from Vietnam when he was less than a year old — dedicated the award to his dad, "whose whole life has been an engine of multiculturalism in this country". Le's publisher Ben Ball accepted Book of the Year on his behalf, reading a prepared speech from Le, in which he asked whether multiculturalism has become "complacent". "If we think about the horror in Gaza — and how can we not — and how it has affected us here, perhaps we need new questions like: should the goal of multiculturalism be co-existence or cohesion?" Le wrote. "What good is harmony if it only and always exists on terms dictated by power? … What good is diversity if it recognises every group's difference but not every group's dignity? "When [diversity] doesn't challenge or threaten power, then how is it more than mere colourwash?" Le told ABC Arts the response to his newest book has been "warming" — especially among other writers from marginalised backgrounds. Other winners at the 2025 NSW Literary Awards — worth a total of $360,000 — include Fiona McFarlane, who won the $40,000 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction for her novel of interconnected stories linked to a serial killer, Highway 13; James Bradley, who won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction for his ode to the ocean, Deep Water; and Lebanese Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry for his debut book rock flight, about the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. Accepting his award, Hourani described rock flight as a book "about protests, and one that acts as a protest for Palestinian liberation". "Narratives of occupation, grief and resistance are difficult to capture straightforwardly. I wrote rock flight in order to explore both historical and speculative acts of liberation in Palestine." In some ways, Le has been working on 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem since he first started writing, giving up his job as a corporate lawyer to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the United States in 2004. But it was being asked to write a piece for the 25th anniversary reissue of Watermark, an anthology of Vietnamese American writing, in 2021 that spurred him to begin working seriously on the book-length poem. Le wanted the book to reflect his own "ambiguity and ambivalence" about the idea of a Vietnamese poem. In [2. Invocative / Apostrophic], he writes: "Whatever I write is Vietnamese. I can never not — You won't let me not — Lick the leash or bite it." Le explains: "If [the book] were to represent where I was at and what I was feeling about poetry and identity, culture and language, it would need to be something that was never fixed, always in flux, and always undermined and undermining other certainties. "What I feel is so contingent and so changeable, so I wanted a field of poems where the poems could actually exert pressure and counterpressure on each other." It gives his collection of poems a sense of energy and playfulness. It's also a reflection of Le's maturation as a writer — the collection coming 16 years after his highly praised debut, The Boat, which was released when he was just 29 years old. "As a younger writer, you're wanting to convey authority by having answers; by the carriage of certainty," Le says. "As you go on and get whacked around by life, you realise not knowing or not being sure of things is not a sign of lesser knowing. "In fact, asking questions and not being sure, and having the wherewithal to change your mind, or to hold contradictory things in your mind, is a more truthful way of representing what it actually feels like to be around." While his first taste of success was The Boat, Le's first literary love was poetry. He grew up reading Francis Turner Palgrave's anthology of English poetry, his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics, first published in 1861, and picking up books of classic poetry in second-hand bookstores. It doesn't matter if the poetry he reads was written today or centuries ago. "Good poetry, almost by definition, is alive," he says. "Whether it's written in really classical, metrical verse forms from hundreds of years ago, or whether it's written in the crucible of now, it speaks to what it sees, but it also speaks to the tradition that's around it." He describes Australian poetry today as "incredibly eclectic" and "draw[ing] from so many different traditions". In a country with such a strong migrant population, he says, "we each bring our own matrices of histories and stories and memories and cultural references". Lebanese Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani — who won the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry — finds reading Australian poetry "refreshing", because it speaks to "particular intricacies and nuances of certain movements and communities". He also appreciates the camaraderie among poets. "Because the Australian poetry landscape doesn't feel as saturated as other English language scenes, there ends up being a sense of community that translates on the page in a really beautiful and memorable way," he says. Hourani grew up between the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and Australia, reading the poetry of WB Yeats and later Carol Ann Duffy, the UK's poet laureate from 2009 to 2019. It was at university that he finally came across poetry similar to the kind he wanted to write. "I discovered that poetry didn't need to take itself so seriously, even if the subject matter itself was quite grave," he says. "[Rock flight] was an entertaining book to write because the way that I play with theme and language — while it's distressing and often so violent — it still is kind of tongue-in-cheek and playful." Hourani began writing his book-length poem rock flight during a COVID lockdown in Melbourne in 2020. In the book, he writes about visiting Palestine for the first time in 2019, when he was 22; and about historical and present-day injustices inflicted on Palestinian people. "I was figuring out what I could do from a distance," he says. "And what I could do is write and publish within this continent and hope that it will spread to different continents too." Like Le, Hourani reflects on the limitations of language in his poetry. "i go to palestine with a new journal thought i'd write some metaphors but return with scant pages of questions and fodder. the more time i spend with words the more i realise that they just won't do." The NSW Literary Awards judges described rock flight as a "rendering of crimes, a guide for survival, and a recognition of the disruptive potential of paper, voice and stone". Hourani made some of his last changes to the book in October 2023. Since then, more than 53,000 Palestinians — including at least 160 journalists — have been killed in the war in Gaza. "It feels really distressing to see that this book is being read and shared and even published, when journalists across Palestine and specifically in Gaza have been targeted and killed," he says. "It has been really confronting seeing that all of my references in the book predate 2023 and yet they still remain as relevant as they are." He says when he started writing the book he wanted to "advocate for Palestinian liberation to people who might not yet be convinced that's a just thing for us to ask for". It started as a work of non-fiction, tracing his family's history in the region, including his grandparents escaping war-torn Palestine in 1948. But he soon realised he could do more with poetry; he could make the book non-linear and tangential, and pepper it with recurring motifs like rocks, flight and contaminated water, all building to a picture of the history of Palestinian struggle. "It's felt a lot of the time like history has been repeating over again for the better part of a century," he says. "The long-form poem allows it to be one contained story, in the way that this history is one contained story." Hourani also wanted to write for other Palestinians and allies. "Palestinian writing in Australia, but also now globally, isn't being given that freedom of expression and that airtime that it deserves and needs," he says. "I really wanted to utilise the space as much as I could." He wants his readers to "feel like there is always something to be done, tangibly and materially, to contribute to the struggle". "A poet could dedicate this time to bearing witness to these atrocities, or they could dedicate the time to recoup and have readers feel re-energised to enter the struggle after a week of awful headlines. "There is no one answer to what a poet's duty is at a time like this." Book of the Year ($10,000) 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia) Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000) Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin) Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000) Deep Water by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton Australia) Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000) rock flight by Hasib Hourani (Giramondo Publishing) Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature ($30,000) Silver Linings by Katrina Nannestad (HarperCollins Publishers) Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature ($30,000) Anomaly by Emma Lord (Affirm Press) Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000) Three Magpies Perched in a Tree by Glenn Shea (Currency Press/La Mama Theatre) Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000) Inside by Charles Williams (Simpatico Films, Macgowan Films, Never Sleep Pictures) Indigenous Writers' Prize ($30,000) When the World Was Soft by Juluwarlu Group Aboriginal Corporation (Allen & Unwin) Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000) 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem by Nam Le (Scribner Australia) UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($10,000) Jilya by Dr Tracy Westerman (UQP) Translation Prize ($30,000) The Trial of Anna Thalberg by Eduardo Sangarcía, translated from Spanish by Elizabeth Bryer (Restless Books) Special Award Liminal University of Sydney People's Choice Award ($5,000) The Lasting Harm by Lucia Osborne-Crowley (Allen & Unwin)
Sydney Morning Herald
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Sixteen years ago, Nam Le's debut won a major literary prize. His follow-up has done it again
More than 16 years after Melbourne-based Nam Le burst onto Australia's literary scene to critical acclaim and a slew of prizes, his second publication has taken out book of the year in the 2025 NSW Literary Awards. Le's hardcover volume 3 6 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem was also the winner of the individual category, Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000), for what judges said was a work of 'poetic brilliance, power and accessibility'. Established in 1979, this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards were presented at the NSW State Library on Monday night, kicking off the Sydney Writers' Festival. The Vietnamese born writer was no older than a toddler when his parents brought him to Australia as they made their way as refugees on a boat. In 2009, his acclaimed short story collection The Boat went on to win the NSW Premiers Literary Prize's book of the year as well as the American Pushcart Prize, among other notable awards. Since those accolades, Le has ventured into screenwriting, and collaborated on an online graphic adaption of The Boat. 'My writing process is, in a word, slow,' Le told the Herald via a statement. 'I reckon I must have one of the worst words read/written/rewritten-to-published ratios around. A lot of iceberg for so little tip.' In the years in between publications, Le said he had 'done a lot of living, a lot of writing'. He has two young children, and is still working on the long anticipated second work of fiction.
The Age
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Sixteen years ago, Nam Le's debut won a major literary prize. His follow-up has done it again
More than 16 years after Melbourne-based Nam Le burst onto Australia's literary scene to critical acclaim and a slew of prizes, his second publication has taken out book of the year in the 2025 NSW Literary Awards. Le's hardcover volume 3 6 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem was also the winner of the individual category, Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000), for what judges said was a work of 'poetic brilliance, power and accessibility'. Established in 1979, this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards were presented at the NSW State Library on Monday night, kicking off the Sydney Writers' Festival. The Vietnamese born writer was no older than a toddler when his parents brought him to Australia as they made their way as refugees on a boat. In 2009, his acclaimed short story collection The Boat went on to win the NSW Premiers Literary Prize's book of the year as well as the American Pushcart Prize, among other notable awards. Since those accolades, Le has ventured into screenwriting, and collaborated on an online graphic adaption of The Boat. 'My writing process is, in a word, slow,' Le told the Herald via a statement. 'I reckon I must have one of the worst words read/written/rewritten-to-published ratios around. A lot of iceberg for so little tip.' In the years in between publications, Le said he had 'done a lot of living, a lot of writing'. He has two young children, and is still working on the long anticipated second work of fiction.
