Brooklyn

A wool-storage yard becomes a hostel

Before the hostel the site was a commercial wool-storage yard on the flat, industrial ground between Footscray and Altona. The municipal heritage citation, later summarised in the Victorian Heritage Database, describes three rows of wool stores, seventeen in all, which the hostel took over, together with Nissen or Quonset huts and possibly army ‘N’ or ‘P’ huts. The record dates the hostel to 1949 and associates it with the Commonwealth Government, the authority that ran Australia’s hostel network.

The Altona Laverton Historical Society places the opening in 1949 on the south-eastern side of Millers Road, south of Francis Street, and records that within two years the hostel comprised thirteen former wool stores and eight Nissen huts. Aerial photographs cited in the heritage record suggest the Nissen huts were erected after 1951, so the earliest residents lived in the converted stores alone.

Living in converted wool stores

Accommodation varied sharply. Wool stores were partitioned into small rooms, while Nissen huts offered flats of several rooms. The main stores lacked insulation and heating; communal arrangements left families with little privacy.

The historical society is more specific about the difference. The Nissen huts were divided into two, three and four-roomed flats and were considered better than the stores, where about nine in ten residents lived. Each store held about a hundred small rooms, unheated and unlined, in buildings that looked, in the society’s phrase, little better than a barn.

A 1956 application preserved by Museums Victoria records one British family’s transfer from processing at the Royal Exhibition Building to Brooklyn. They had travelled under assisted passage arrangements. Their recollection contrasts the welcome they received with the very different Australia they encountered after reading promotional material in England.

Food, care and schooling

A crèche, baby-health service, first-aid centres, library and general store supported daily life. A fire destroyed the kitchen and dining block in June 1962. Meals then moved into a youth building while a garage became a temporary kitchen.

Brooklyn State School opened nearby in 1953. Catholic education expanded too: Annunciation School was established in the early 1960s partly to serve the hostel. Its early accommodation included up to six classrooms for as many as 200 pupils. These were neighbourhood schools responding to migrant families, rather than measures of the hostel population.

Ukrainians in the working hostel network

The 1966 Ukrainian account describes how employment contracts dispersed new arrivals from reception camps. Workers often lived in relatively basic hostels, while mothers and children could be sent to family camps. It identifies Brooklyn alongside Broadmeadows, Maribyrnong, Williamstown and Watsonia as important Melbourne concentrations of Ukrainian residents.

This placement connects Brooklyn to the transition from arrival to paid work and settled neighbourhoods. Its residents were living in an Australian workers’ and family hostel, following the earlier European stages of displacement. No source consulted gives a Ukrainian count for Brooklyn, and none names Ukrainian residents there.

Building a way out

Some British residents organised a housing cooperative. Around a hundred hostel families formed an association, acquired land at Seaholme and made timber house frames in a Brooklyn wool shed. The frames were assembled on individual plots, and completed homes allocated by ballot. The municipal heritage study records approximately 45–50 houses built through the scheme.

Closure and the industrial landscape

After a ministerial inspection in May 1967, poor conditions and surrounding industrial development led to a closure order. The historical society records that the Minister of Labour ordered the closure on the grounds of substandard accommodation and an unsuitable location inside a developing industrial estate, and that the last 300 residents transferred to other Melbourne hostels by February 1968.

Later redevelopment removed much of the hostel landscape. Building the West Gate Freeway in the late 1970s was followed by the industrial estate that stands there now, and the society records no surviving hostel buildings and no interpretive signage at the site.

The heritage record is slightly less absolute. It notes that most timber-framed wool stores had gone by the mid 1990s, but that one corrugated-iron Nissen hut survives in the north-east of the Brooklyn Estate at 431 Francis Street, that two of the old gabled stores, numbers 84 and 85, survive reclad in cement sheet, and that another Nissen hut is said to have been moved to Pier Street, Altona, for a tyre business. The council graded the surviving group of local significance but did not recommend it for the heritage overlay.