Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

Marietta McGregor

Dirty Linen

piercing dusk
on the mountain’s slope
a scuffle of crows
 
Behind a high metal fence, the dour, bell-towered two-storey brick convent of Mount St Canice was once described as a ‘rescue home’ for Tasmanian girls and women. But the inmates were not rescued. The ‘Magdalens’ of Mount St Canice were young single females from most strata of society. Some committed here were poor, sleeping rough on the streets, orphans, abandoned or ‘difficult’ children. Others had become sexually active out of wedlock, perhaps were with child. Some had been raped by fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, neighbours. Their moral guardians deemed them all fallen women. They had to be saved…from disgrace. Out of society’s view. Under coercion.

her smock pops
its last pearl button
night stirrings

The convent of the Good Shepherd Sisters at Sandy Bay was modeled after Magdalen counterparts in Ireland. Somewhere inside was a commercial laundry run by nuns. A workhouse. From morning until nightfall, women, mostly teenaged, stood at long copper troughs, wreathed in steam with legs braced, slinging wet linen into and out of bubbling hot water and bleach with long sticks. Turning the handle of the mangle to squeeze out excess water was hard toil, particularly for a girl who had just given birth or miscarried. Wicker laundry baskets were lugged to clotheslines looped between poles in an enclosed yard. Heavy metal steam pressers and ironing eggs flattened pristine hospital sheets, crimped ruffles and smoothed fine linen handkerchiefs. Day after day, this drudgery.

 

early curfew
peeling the potatoes
twice as thick

 
The sentence for these lost girls was to live cloistered from society for as long as it took to ‘reform’ them, while they slaved unpaid. Any education they received was limited. They were meagerly fed and poorly clothed. Some attempted to escape, tying bedsheets into ropes and fracturing bones as they fell to earth. A few succumbed to despair. The ‘lucky’ ones emerged years later from captivity with chapped  and swollen hands, older bodies, wounded eyes and tightly-shuttered hearts, without ever seeing or holding the babies they had borne.
 

completely still
after the storm passes
quaking grass

 

Retired Australian botanist/journalist Marietta McGregor is a Pushcart-nominated poet whose haiku, haibun and haiga appear in international journals, anthologies, and on Japanese television. Her achievements include firsts in the 2018 UHTS Samurai Haibun Contest and 2015 Setouchi-Matsuyama Photo/Haiku Contest, Sakura Award, 2017 VCBF Haiku Contest, and An (Cottage) Prize, 2018 International Genjuan Haibun Contest. For more information, click here.