Fremantle and Port Melbourne: the Australian arrival ports

Origins and purpose

Fremantle's inner harbour had been the state's principal passenger port since 1896, and an Immigration and Information Bureau was completed on Victoria Quay in November 1906. Apart from the Depression and the Second World War, that building, the customs sheds and the adjoining waiting rooms were the focus of immigration work in the harbour until 1962. Officials returned to it in 1948 as shipping increased.1

At Port Melbourne, Princes Pier was built between 1912 and 1915 with a gatehouse, terminal building, railway sidings and passenger gangway tracks. Station Pier was rebuilt on the site of the 1854 Railway Pier between 1923 and 1930, with inner and outer passenger terminals, a baggage room and an office building later listed as the Boat-Train Shelter. Both piers were connected to the Victorian Railways.234

The mass migration scheme devised under Arthur Calwell, the first federal Minister for Immigration, gave these structures a new task. In the peak displaced-persons years of 1947 to 1949 immigration authorities made the most of scarce shipping by turning ships around at Fremantle, so that people bound for the eastern states were landed in Western Australia and moved on by other means.1

The heritage assessment of the Port of Fremantle Passenger Terminal sets the scheme in a longer history. It records that from European settlement in 1829 until the mid 1970s Fremantle was the main point of entry for migrants and visitors entering Western Australia, that Victoria Quay became the centre for migrant and visitor facilities, and that the terminal has national significance as the point of entry for tens of thousands of migrants arriving under the federal government's post-war immigration policies. The same assessment records 19,000 displaced persons arriving in Western Australia between 1948 and 1952.17

How it worked in practice

Selection and contracts were settled in Europe before anyone sailed. Every person over sixteen, displaced person or assisted migrant, signed an undertaking to work for two years in any job anywhere in Australia, with qualifications and experience left out of account.1012

As a ship came in, immigration and other officials boarded her at anchor in Gage Roads off Fremantle to check passports and documents; only then did she berth at Victoria Quay. State officers handled passengers remaining in Western Australia and Commonwealth officers those bound for the eastern states. Representatives of both governments welcomed the passengers over the ship's speakers and explained the disembarkation arrangements, which several arrivals remembered as their first encounter with spoken English. Displaced persons were met at the wharf by the Commonwealth Migration Officer, responsible for the formalities and for onward movement.1

Customs came next, and it was rarely gentle. Officers took fruit, flowers and stuffed toys out of hand luggage; one woman remembered her cactus, a parting present from her mother, being thrown away. Hold baggage could be moved off the wharf: after the first transport reached Fremantle the luggage went up to Perth for examination on 29 November 1947, and migrants then identified their own cases at the Graylands camp, where about two hundred packages carried no legible marks. Several people never saw their belongings again.17

Medical screening was chiefly a matter of the selection examination in Europe and of the ship's hospital during the voyage, but health inspection remained part of the port routine, and a health inspector worked out of the Victoria Quay building after 1948. Arrivals could still be refused entry at the quayside: on the first transport two people were not allowed to land, one on security grounds and one who had become mentally ill during the passage.16

Transport inland was by train. At Fremantle voluntary organisations worked alongside the officials: the Good Neighbour Council, the Red Cross, the YWCA and the Travellers Aid Society met the ships, and arrivals remembered Red Cross women in powder blue and powder pink handing up an orange and a drink, and tea brewed beside the railway tracks, before the train pulled out. Displaced persons went to Northam, ninety-eight kilometres from Perth, or on to Cunderdin; British migrants were bussed to Point Walter. At Port Melbourne a train came out onto the pier so that new arrivals crossed the deck from the gangway straight into a carriage. These trains, known as red rattlers, set down their passengers at the Bonegilla siding, where staff prided themselves on serving a hot meal within an hour of arrival.11011

Reception was split between port and camp: the port did the legal work of admission, the centre did registration, English classes and labour allocation. The Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre took the largest share of the traffic from Port Melbourne, while Graylands Migrant Centre, Northam Army Camp and Cunderdin Migrant Centre took Fremantle arrivals who stayed in Western Australia.11013

The Ukrainian experience

Ukrainians were part of this movement from 1948. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine records about 21,500 Ukrainians emigrating to Australia in 1948 to 1951, a national figure covering four years rather than any one port or year. They arrived within a larger flow: 182,000 displaced persons reached Australia through the International Refugee Organisation between 1947 and 1951, about a quarter going to Victoria.81214

In Western Australia the community dates its beginning to a single arrival. The Ukrainian Association of Western Australia records that the first Ukrainian emigrants reached Fremantle on the Kanimbla on 11 October 1948, a group of sixty men from Germany. Twenty went to the Kalgoorlie goldfields, others to the railways and to Mundaring Weir, which became the largest concentration of Ukrainians in the state. Later arrivals went to the hostels and camps at Graylands, Northam and Cunderdin.13

On the Melbourne side the record is family by family. A Ukrainian family of six, from Monaczyn and Ternopil by way of eight years in Germany, landed at Port Melbourne from the Skaugum on 31 May 1949 after nearly three months of travel, with a seventeen-month-old child in poor health, and went on to Bonegilla and later to Benalla Migrant Camp.15

The contract signed in Europe took effect from the moment of landing. Men were commonly sent to work within weeks while wives and children moved to holding centres, so for many Ukrainian families the port was where the household was split up.1215

Individual accounts show how differently a Ukrainian arrival could run. A study of the Ukrainians who settled in Geelong records factory owners meeting boats of displaced persons at the Port of Melbourne and nominating new arrivals for work in a Carlton clothing factory; one family that landed at Port Melbourne in 1950 was taken first to Bonegilla and then, because the father's contract was on a farm near Wagga Wagga, to the Uranquinty migrant camp in New South Wales. For one woman who came through Fremantle, all she could see on arrival were stones. Later arrivals still came by sea: a group of Ukrainians from Trieste reached Melbourne on the Fair Star on 10 January 1954, were met on the wharf by Ukrainians already settled there and were taken by train to Bonegilla in the heat of the Australian summer. In a 1964 interview Arthur Calwell recalled that he had personally welcomed Ukrainians, like many other immigrants, at the pier in Melbourne whatever the hour of the ship's arrival.18

The same study's passenger appendix records Geelong-bound Ukrainian families disembarking at both ports between 1949 and 1965, at Fremantle from the Mozaffari, the Skaugum and, as late as 1965, the Guglielmo Marconi, and at Port Melbourne from the Nelly, most going on to Bonegilla. One entry records a family transferred from the Liguria to the Nelly at Fremantle before continuing to Melbourne, the Fremantle turnaround applied to a Ukrainian voyage.18

What happened afterwards

Displaced-persons traffic gave way to assisted migration, but the ports stayed busy for another twenty years. Between 1949 and 1966 an average of 61,000 passengers a year arrived at Station Pier, all nationalities counted, peaking at 110,802 in 1960. Princes Pier received migrants until 1969.24

At Fremantle a new passenger terminal superseded the old arrangements in 1962, and the Department of Immigration officer left the Victoria Quay building on 12 December 1964. Across the peak years the buildings had handled more than 435,000 immigrants of all nationalities who settled in Western Australia.1

Air travel replaced sea passage for migrants in the early 1970s. Station Pier remains on the Victorian Heritage Register, its passenger terminals, baggage room and boat-train shelter still standing as the fabric of the arrival process.23

The paperwork of the arrivals survives in public custody. The State Library Victoria records that most European ships stopped at Fremantle before continuing to other ports and that Fremantle passenger lists for 1897 to 1963 are searchable; inwards passenger lists for the port of Melbourne for 1924 to 1964 are held on microfilm at the National Archives of Australia, which also holds the migrant selection documents completed by or for post-war assisted migrants, including those for the resettlement of refugees and displaced persons.19