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where a herd of Friesian cows could sometimes be seen wending its way up the hill to the milking sheds, where the nun in charge, in her white habit with black veil, soon merged into the herd of black and white cows. There was a large flower garden in the front of the main building (but behind the perimeter wall) and a very large vegetable garden beyond the back wall. On another part of the property was a huge steam laundry, where many of the girls worked, and the big green vans with ‘Good Shepherd Laundry’ painted on each side in gold were seen all over Melbourne collecting the city’s dirty washing and returning the washed and ironed items a few days later. My grandparents availed themselves of a similar laundry service provided by the Good Shepherd convent in Bendigo, laundry services having become the main source of income for Good Shepherd homes all over Australia.

Three: Schooldays
    There was a primary school known as St Anthony’s attached to the Good Shepherd convent, and when it came time for me to start school I was disappointed to find that that was not to be my destination. I loved the mysteriousness and vastness and silence of that great, grey place and the contrasting marble and stainedglass splendours of its huge chapel/church. I imagined that the primary school would share these wonders and did not know that in fact it was located in modest, even nondescript premises on the edge of the property. We lived right in the middle of town, and a new convent and primary school had been established just one block down the road in the year I was born. This convent had also been founded by a French order of nuns, an off-shoot of the Marists. 15 Their convent near us was next door to the parish church and whenever there was no priest available to say early morning Mass in the convent chapel the twenty or so nuns in the community would take up the two front rows on the right-hand side of the parish church to attend the public Mass. I used to be intrigued at the way in which they avoided distractions and the temptation to look around, and at how they could still move surefootedly up to the altar rail to receive Communion, by unfolding their black veils forward to cover their faces almost as completely as do the burkhas of Muslim women.
    Although the new primary school was next door to the convent and so only a few hundred metres or so down the road from our house, there was a bus stop across the road from our house and a bus service from there to the bayside suburb of Mentone, where the buses stopped outside the Brigidine 16 convent and Kilbreda College. My mother had an aunt who was a nun in the Brigidine convent, so my sister and then I were sent the six miles by bus to start school ‘with family’ rather than to either of the two local convent schools. I now suspect that there were other issues involved in this decision; the possibility of contact with adolescents from the reformatory may have weighed against our attendance at St Anthony’s, and the just-built parish school across the road was a surprisingly modern and stark structure surrounded by a quite small, tree-less concreted playground in which crowds of seemingly unruly, poorly-dressed and perhaps poorly-fed children could be seen milling noisily around. Was it suitable for the local doctor’s children to join in? I wonder.
    We not only had a great-aunt who was a nun in the convent in Mentone but we also had one of my mother’s cousins, Miss Ellie Sullivan, who came to the convent one day a week as a visiting teacher. Ellie made her living as an elocution teacher (nowadays I suppose this specialisation is referred to as Speech and Drama). She had private students who called at her house in North Melbourne for lessons and she visited a number of schools where she both took classes and gave private lessons to individuals. When I was in Grades one and two at the Brigidine Convent in Mentone, Miss Sullivan must have taken only