Holy Cross Laundry

Businesses and hospitals still use this laundry, not realising that it is a rare surviving example of a 19th century workhouse for the down-and-out that still operates as a charitable institution.

The Sisters of Mercy engaged colonial architect FDG Stanley to design the building - which in its first incarnation was part of the Magdalen Asylum – to provide work for the destitute, unmarried mothers, the psychiatric and intellectually challenged who were sheltered at the nearby Holy Cross Retreat.

Stoves capable of heating sixty-eight irons were installed, with the rooms divided into mangling and ironing rooms.

In the 1890s they started attracting commercial contracts and by 1920 were amongst the largest laundries in Brisbane. Two steam rollers from 1936 and 1940 are still in operation and today the original steam laundry is used is still under the umbrella of the Sisters of Mercy and is used as a sheltered workshop for the intellectually disabled.