The Australian pages are reception and training centres, holding centres and hostels, nearly all opening between 1947 and 1950 in army camps, flying training schools and gunnery schools left over from the war. The reception centres taught English and sorted people for work; the holding centres housed the families of men directed to jobs elsewhere; the hostels stood beside the factories and the railway yards.12
People came on assisted passages under the 1947 agreement with the International Refugee Organisation, which brought more than 170,000 displaced persons to Australia by 1951 on Arthur Calwell's condition of two years of directed work in industries vital to development. Ukrainians were 8.5 per cent of that intake. Ships landed at Fremantle, Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle, and trains carried the new arrivals inland.34
Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, holding up to 8,000 at its busiest, is the first Australian address on many of these pages. Bathurst Migrant Reception and Training Centre opened at Kelso in May 1948; Greta Migrant Camp in the Hunter Valley ran until 1960; Benalla Migrant Camp, the longest lasting in Victoria, closed only in December 1967.567
What these pages can show is individuals: identity cards recording Ukrainian nationality, a ship and a date of arrival, and family accounts gathered by camp associations. What they cannot give is a Ukrainian total for any one centre, because the records count arrivals, huts and school enrolments rather than nationalities.8910
In the barracks at Kelso, Ukrainian newcomers organised choirs, classes, exhibitions and family celebrations while preparing for work and new homes across Australia.
Ukrainian families deported to Germany as forced labourers reached this former flying training school by way of Bonegilla, and lived in its huts while work, school and a camp soccer team took shape around them. Benalla was Victoria’s longest lasting holding centre, open from September 1949 to December 1967.
A first Australian address for thousands of newcomers, Bonegilla connected Ukrainian arrivals with work, schools, worship and new communities across the country.
A transfer from Bonegilla in June 1949 brought Ukrainian families to a former military camp north of Hobart, and work contracts then scattered them across Tasmania. The camp was cleared in 1951, and the community the arrivals went on to build took shape in Hobart and Launceston rather than at Brighton.
A hostel on the army ground at Camp Road took displaced-person workers and their families, and one Ukrainian woman raising a son alone cooked in its kitchen for the better part of fifteen years. It ran for more than twenty years, and the Ukrainian community its residents built grew up outside it, in Glenroy, Essendon and Ardeer.
Seventeen wool stores and a line of Nissen huts on Melbourne’s industrial western edge were turned into family accommodation in 1949. Ukrainian residents were among the thousands who lived there until an inspection closed the hostel in 1967.
A New South Wales railway workers’ camp beside the Chullora workshops became an accommodation centre for displaced families, with a rent of a pound a week and huts built for single men. Ukrainian residents ran a Saturday school there from 1950 until 1961.
A First World War munitions factory beside the Brisbane River, later a naval base, became a workers’ hostel in 1949 and took its first residents from among the Baltic and eastern European displaced persons. Ukrainians were among the newcomers who passed through Colmslie on their way into Queensland work and neighbourhoods.
A wartime army training camp at Cowra was turned over to migrant families, and by November 1950 a newspaper put its population at 3,300. Ukrainian women founded their first organised branch there in 1949, while the camp’s rations became a national story.
Western Australia’s only elementary flying training base, built in the wheatbelt in 1940, was used as a migrant centre for 700 people between 1949 and 1952. Ukrainians were among the displaced people sent there rather than to the Perth hostels.
A migrant holding centre opened in 1950 on the army ground at Frazer’s Paddock, taking the dependants of men working elsewhere while they saved for a home. Its school, its plays and its parade floats left the clearest record of the families who passed through.
Graylands brought together an early reception camp in former army barracks and a neighbouring Commonwealth hostel built of Nissen huts, where newcomers learned English, found work and began life in Perth. It was the Western Australian reception point for displaced people, and Ukrainian community life in Perth grew out of the years its residents spent there.