Tenant feuds, a fiscal cliff and board upheaval: Why ‘saved’ Abbotsford Convent under new cloud

Between funding drying up, tribunal brawls with tenants and directors resigning, the historic precinct is facing pressure from all sides.

It’s two decades since one of Australia’s most effective grassroots uprisings “saved” Abbotsford Convent. That insurrection, timed against the political backdrop of inner-Melbourne’s inflection from Labor to Greens, stopped the 19th-century monastery from becoming apartments.

Now, the social contract that prevented private ownership of the historic precinct appears to be fracturing. Mounting financial pressures, governance upheaval and very public scraps with those bringing life to the convent’s buildings have brought fresh scrutiny to the delivery of the promises of the early 2000s.

Last month, three of the convent’s board members resigned, including chair, and respected business figure, Gillian Franklin.

The organisation says the departures are orderly – but they come as the convent faces a financial cliff: hundreds of thousands of dollars in emergency pandemic-era state funding has ended. And earlier this year the convent failed to have renewed the $200,000-a-year funding it received in the previous four years.

Its 130 tenancies delivered rent of $2.4 million last financial year, while a car park gifted to the convent by the state in 2005 – a key element of the Bracks government’s “saving” of the precinct – turned over $1.1 million. In the face of substantial fixed costs and inflation, though, those millions don’t make ends meet. The convent foundation posted a $690,000 loss last year – its sixth consecutive year of losses, all up totalling almost $4 million. The precinct last broke even in 2019.

Richard Wynne, the former Labor MP for Richmond, steered the project through the Bracks government’s early years.

“It was a magnificent victory for the community to guarantee that this precious part of Melbourne stayed in public hands,” Wynne recalled this week. “But it was always made clear that the precinct needed to be financially self-sufficient, and for many years it was.”

Wynne’s use of the past tense is telling. In response to financial pressures, the Abbotsford Convent Foundation, which has 26 full-time staff, is trying to reposition the 6.4-hectare public site on a sweeping loop of the Yarra River as a premier commercial tourist destination.

The repositioning, though, is bringing with it tensions. It has produced open warfare with anchor tenant Joe Shin, who runs the Convent Bakery and Kappaya Japanese restaurant at the heart of the precinct.

In May, a lease dispute led convent management to seize back Ka