Unconventional Women: The story of the last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia

In the 1950s and 60s, six young women left their families to join a strictly enclosed order of nuns in Melbourne. They could leave the convent only for medical appointments and rarely received visitors, who they would meet from behind a partition built into the parlour. Their lives were confined by the convent walls, the rhythms of the Divine Office and the dictates of the Mother Superior.

By the late 1960s, this community of women was upended by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, a...