The nuns who ran Our Lady’s School shared the same first name. Mary. The head of school was Sister Mary Josephine, followed by her deputy, Sister Mary Agnes.

Next in line was the head of junior school, Sister Mary Bernadette. And on it went. At the commencement of each school year the nuns paraded into the school hall, each wearing a starched white habit with a set of black rosary beads and silver crucifix drawn around the waist. With the arrival of the colder months of the year, the starkness was discarded for a dull brown colour, more appropriate for a school existing perpetually in the shadows of the church of the same name next door.

The church and school had been built in the late nineteenth century, indestructibly, from slabs of bluestone rock. Our Lady’s Church sat in the middle of an inner-city suburb with a reputation for hard men and their crimes, from robbery and menace on the street to family violence behind closed doors. It was also a suburb of sectarian boundaries, with the Catholic community in no doubt that they lived under siege by Protestant leaders who dominated local government and business.

Police were more likely to be Catholic, which produced mutually beneficial relationships between local crime bosses and the constabulary. Religious dedication was largely an affair of women and children. Most men never bothered with a conversation with God, leaving it to their families to attend mass and pray on their behalf for their numerous sins, at least until the men aged and became more concerned about the afterlife awaiting them. It was only then that they attempted a peaceful exchange with God.

The doors to the church had been shaped from lengths of heavy timber and were secured with brass hinges and locks. The building resembled a jail more than a house of worship, accurate to the point that the state’s prison, north of the city, had been built from similar bluestone tablets. The stained-glass windows in the church were long and narrow and let little light into the building. The school itself looked as foreboding and drove fear into the hearts of children before they’d entered the schoolyard. Each classroom had a raised platform and blackboard at the front of the room, where the collective Sister Marys paced in a military fashion, keeping a watchful eye on their pupils, ready to pounce on any student who transgressed…