Chullora Railway Camp

The workshops that made the camp

The camp existed because of the railway works beside it. In 1926 the Sydney Morning Herald described huge new workshops rising at Chullora on 485 acres, eleven miles from Central Station, already employing more than a thousand men and intended to replace Eveleigh. During the Second World War the workshops built Beaufort bombers.

After the war the New South Wales railways expanded again, employing some 60,000 workers by 1948, and that growth pressed hard on housing near the workshops. A camp for railway workers was established near the corner of the Hume Highway and Brunker Road in 1948, covering 18 hectares, with about twenty huts, called chalets, at first. Smaller huts housed single men and larger ones railway staff such as drivers, firemen, guards and conductors.

Railway housing in Sydney

The Australian Government’s institutional listing records Chullora Railway & Migrant Camp for 1948–1964 at the corner of Brunker Road and Hume Highway, Greenacre. A heritage assessment places the accommodation southwest of its separate 2 Hume Highway study area.

Intended as temporary, the camp continued after the war and became a migrant accommodation centre. Families occupied housing designed for single men. Drawing on Sue Rosen’s history of Bankstown, the assessment describes limited running water and sewerage, and its historical photograph shows rows of modest huts facing an unpaved lane.

The same assessment states that the centre came to house 2,047 migrants in 640 huts and 136 chalets. It gives no date and no source for those totals, so they describe the eventual size of the migrant section rather than a population return for any particular year.

Rent, rations of space and everyday comfort

A local history account reproduced by the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations, drawing on the recollections of a resident named K. T. Groves, sets out the terms of living there. Rent was a pound a week, electricity included, for two ceiling lights and two power points. A hand-fired coal boiler shared between several chalets supplied the only hot water and worked badly. Two families shared a laundry with a concrete tub and an ironing board, and the chalets were hot in summer and cold in winter.

The camp had an Australian section and a migrant section. The account describes the migrants as mostly eastern European displaced people, with Poles the largest group, and families living in cramped quarters. A Polish family ran the general store. Rent in the migrant section was also a pound a week, with ten shillings more for a chalet with a sleep-out. By 1951 the place was known as the Chullora Accommodation Centre for Migrants.

The account quotes a 1957 Sydney Morning Herald article, ‘A Shanty Town that makes the Railways Ashamed’, describing fifteen hundred men, women and children in substandard huts. In the smaller huts one room served as kitchen, bedroom, living room and bathroom. Cooking was done in a galvanised iron shack over an open coke and coal fire burning under two lengths of railway track, and there was no running water in the smaller huts unless tenants pushed a garden hose through a window. Tenants added vegetable gardens, kitchenettes, carports and fences.

Lithuanians lived at the camp as well. A retrospective history of the Sydney Lithuanian communities records that in 1948 and 1949 many Lithuanians completing two-year work contracts with the Australian government were housed near Bankstown, in what it calls the railway workers tent “city” at Chullora and in the water reticulation workers camp at Regents Park. It gives no numbers for them and does not say how long they stayed.

The camp’s changing names

The Ukrainian Women’s Association’s 2001 history records a sequence of names: Railway Camp Chullora, Chullora Park, and Accommodation Centre Chullora. The account credits resident supervisor Claudius Bilinsky, a Ukrainian immigrant, with helping establish a place for community activity.

A hall becomes a Saturday school

Early in 1950, a Ukrainian Saturday school opened at the camp. Bilinsky arranged a large transportable building that could serve as both community hall and school. Lidia Hayevska-Denes of the Ukrainian Women’s Association helped run it. The association’s history places the initiative among Sydney’s earliest Ukrainian Saturday schools.

The 1966 community history records that teaching continued until 1961. It names L. Haievska as an early teacher, followed by the Shkurupii couple. The school’s eleven-year history shows community education continuing as residents rebuilt their lives in Australia.

The Ukrainian school was one of several religious and welfare provisions. The local history account records that the Catholic Church built St Frances Cabrini at the camp in 1949 and that it closed in 1965, that the Sisters of Charity opened an infants school for 120 children because many mothers worked, and that Sister Brendan ran a club for young girls. Weekends brought the pictures at Bankstown and Punchbowl and Sunday afternoon soccer, which the account says the migrants particularly enjoyed.

One family, two camps

Lydia Mamtschak recalls arriving in Sydney with her parents on 6 June 1949, after childhood displacement from Lviv to Austria. They travelled to Bathurst, where they stayed together for two weeks. Then Lydia and her mother were sent to Greta in the Hunter Valley, while her father went to Chullora.

Her father repaired damaged seats at Redfern Railway Yards. Although he held a doctorate in law and spoke several languages, he could not find the legal or interpreting work he had hoped for. Her mother’s teaching qualifications were also unrecognised. Mamtschak’s account connects railway accommodation with the separation and changes of occupation experienced by one Ukrainian family.

Leaving the camp

The Department of Railways always regarded Chullora as temporary. A Housing Commission scheme put up 80 cottages at Chester Hill and 122 at Lidcombe on railway land, but it stopped for lack of money, and many railway workers instead bought land in the district. Land opposite the workshops sold for £100 in 1950, hard to save for on £8 a week; the resident quoted in the local history bought a block at Greenacre in 1955 for £500 after years of overtime.

The federal listing closes the camp’s recorded period in 1964, and the workshops declined from the late 1950s as land was sold into private ownership. No surveyed boundary for the camp itself has been traced, and no record of its final closure has been read.