Mount Saint Canice

A reflection

Mount Saint Canice undoubtedly became a part of my story — an unwanted chapter, perhaps, but one that unquestionably shapes the arc of my life narrative in ways I can neither fully understand nor entirely escape.

In a landscape of uniform bleakness, Mount Saint Canice stood like a grotesque monument to an old world’s ideal of purity and penance, an ideal made flesh by the women consigned to its harsh regime. These were girls, some barely of an age to be called women, who were entrusted to the moral guardianship of the Good Shepherd Nuns in Hobart, Tasmania. There were several such Magdalene Laundries in Australia and, indeed, in other parts of the world, the very names of which invoked a peculiar mix of fear, shame, and resignation. They were the repositories of a society’s moral failings, a kind of collective social unconscious.

The brutality of my first morning at Mount Saint Canice is etched in my memory. Six a.m., pitch dark and cold like the underside of a gravestone. Lights flickered on, sudden and glaring, as a nun swept into the dormitory, announcing the day in the name of a God who seemed unfamiliar to me. The Lord’s Prayer was the uninvited guest at this early hour, a ritualized supplication in a place where prayers were as empty as the eyes that muttered them. This was the immutable rhythm of life in Mount Saint Canice. Obedience or punishment: There was no third way.

I never did hear my name called for those visits in the Parlor. The years went by like molasses, slow and…