Cowra Migrant Camp

From army training camp to migrant camp

The site came to the migrants already built. Cowra Tourism records that some 80,000 Australian troops received basic training at the Cowra facility between 1940 and 1945, and that the camp was converted for migrants after the war. Cowra’s prisoner-of-war compound, scene of the 1944 breakout, was a separate establishment and is commemorated separately; the migrant camp occupied the army training camp.

Cowra Tourism counts as many as 27 nations among those who lived there, and describes work that took men away from their families: railway construction at Orange, dam building and jobs at the Edgell cannery. Two memorials now mark the two phases, one for migrants in Europa Park on Sydney Road and one on Military Parade for the training camp.

Anoma Pieris dates the change more closely. The Cowra Military Camp, established in 1940 on Darby Falls Road, was decommissioned in 1947 and converted into what she describes as the largest immigrant centre in New South Wales; she records reports of up to 4,000 migrants accommodated at its peak.

Arrivals, sorting and the railways

Pieris describes the pipeline that fed the camp. New arrivals were sorted, examined and classified at Bathurst and then separated by gender: the men were sent off to work across the country, and the women and children went to the Cowra family camp, where they remained for up to six months until secure jobs and accommodation might reunite the families.

By 1948, Pieris records, over two thousand European women and children were housed at Cowra: Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Yugoslavs and Poles.

The railway carried them. Heritage NSW records in its inventory entry for the Cowra railway station precinct that new migrants were transported to the Cowra Migrant Camp by rail until the camp closed in 1956, and that the station’s period of most intense use, during and immediately after the Second World War, is associated with the military training camp and then the migrant camp. A family history published by the Benalla Migrant Camp project shows the onward movement: a Lithuanian family that arrived in 1949 on the SS Skaugum was sent first to Cowra and transferred to Benalla later the same year.

Women organise

In her 1966 history, L. Hordiieva traces organised Ukrainian women’s activity to Cowra. Iryna Pelenska initiated a meeting on 17 August 1949. A general meeting on 13 September adopted a provisional constitution and elected a committee, with Pelenska as chair. The group held 27 meetings during its existence at Cowra.

The Australian Women’s Register gives the same founding date, 13 September 1949, at Cowra migrant camp, and calls Cowra the cradle of the association in Australia, noting that Ukrainian women were holding meetings in all the migrant centres across Australia. It renders the inaugural president’s name as “Mrs. I Polensly”, where Hordiieva gives Iryna Pelenska.

Children, dancing and celebrations

The women organised two exhibitions of Ukrainian folk art and a celebration with the Plast scouting group on 5 November 1949. St Nicholas festivities and a shared Christmas Eve brought families together. Lidiia Haievska led Ukrainian studies for children aged six to thirteen and a dance group associated with the school. Hordiieva records 22 performances in the camp and nearby towns.

Rations and the black flag

In November 1950 the camp became national news. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that women in A block flew a black flag as a symbol of mutiny after officials introduced a new scale of diet. Under the old scale each person, adult or child, had four eggs a week and 35 lb of bread was allocated daily for every 100 people. Assuming that children ate less than adults, officials cut this to one egg a week and 18 lb of bread daily for every 100 people, with vegetables and fruit reduced too and little change to meat and milk.

The paper reported that the camp then held 3,300 New Australians, mostly from central European countries, and that the camp director, Mr J. Andrews, released an extra 50 lb of flour and 40 lb of sugar to the 570 people in A block. The women the reporter interviewed asked not to be named because they feared reprisals. Some said the new scale would force them to buy eggs, lettuce and bread from Cowra shops; a Latvian woman said she still received far more food than she had in a migrant camp in Germany. The report describes migrants of several nationalities and does not attribute the protest to Ukrainian residents.

The article also explains the pattern that made the protest a women’s protest. Husbands lived on the job during the working week and saw their families only at weekends, so the blocks were occupied chiefly by women and children when the rations arrived.

A hairdresser’s working life

Brunhilde Srejic, a resident of German, French and Swiss background, recalled moving from Bathurst with about sixty women and children on the Wednesday before Easter 1950. At Cowra her family had a room to themselves in a corrugated-iron hut. She resumed hairdressing while her husband worked in Orange and visited on Friday evenings. Without a hairdryer, customers waited for their perms to dry while she supplied coffee and biscuits for their children. The family later left for a room in Orange. Her account offers a view of everyday life among Cowra’s different migrant communities.

Life in the huts

The camp’s interpretation panel describes a typical hut as six bedrooms and a shared room. Hot summers and cold winters made the converted military buildings uncomfortable. Alongside the school and chapel, the camp had a hospital, post office and canteen. The panel records dwindling arrivals by 1952 and closure in 1956, followed by the sale of buildings and removal of remaining infrastructure.

The camp school through a teacher’s eyes

Paul Couvret, interviewed for the Australians at War Film Archive in 2004, began his Australian teaching career at the Cowra Migrant Centre after a telegram posted him there. His classes held 45 children who, in his words, spoke not a word of English but “all spoke Ukrainian and Polish and Yugoslav”; he recalled that “we had them talking fluently in English in three months’ time”.

His recollections also trace the wider network and the school’s scale. In 1951 the Department of Immigration opened another migrant camp at Bathurst and, because he spoke Dutch, Couvret was sent there before returning to Cowra. He taught at the migrant centre until 1955, serving as sports master at a school he remembered as having about 800 migrant children. These are one teacher’s recollections, recorded half a century afterwards, rather than an official return.

Beyond the camp

Members gradually left Cowra for permanent homes elsewhere in Australia. Hordiieva describes the dispersal as the end of the local group’s work, but also as a beginning: women carried their organising experience into new branches in the places where they settled.

Remembering Cowra

Europa Park commemorates migrant families through a memorial wall and personalised pavers. Cowra Tourism identifies the former camp as private land and points to the historical society’s collection of residents’ stories, Australia, A New Country – A New Life.

Cowra Tourism also states that the campsite is now privately owned, that personalised pavers at Europa Park are arranged through the Rotary Club of Cowra, and that the Cowra and District Historical Society’s collection of residents’ testimonies can be consulted at the Visitor Information Centre. The 1956 closure date rests on the local interpretation panel.

Europa Park also carries a dedicated anniversary plaque. Unveiled on 1 May 1999 to mark fifty years of the Cowra Migrant Camp, its inscription records that the first European migrants arrived in 1949 and occupied the buildings of the former army base between the highway and Darby’s Falls Road, that there were over three thousand people in the camp at any one time from many European countries, and that the men were contracted to work for two years on government projects while the women and children stayed in the camp. It closes: “We came from afar to build a new home.”