From the early 1890s to the 1960s, most Australian state capitals had a large Roman Catholic convent that contained a commercial laundry where the work was done by the mostly teenage girls who were placed in the convent. They were committed, voluntarily or involuntarily, for reasons such as being destitute, "uncontrollable" as judged by family members or picked up by the police. According to James Franklin, the girls came from a variety of very disturbed and deprived backgrounds and were individually hard to deal with in many cases.