Cunderdin Migrant Centre

An air-force base becomes accommodation

The base had been built during the Second World War for elementary pilot training under the Empire Air Training Scheme. Hangars and technical buildings occupied the airfield, while the main camp lay farther east. Later wartime operations included heavy bombers. After the war, the existing camp accommodation was adapted for migrants.

The heritage assessment is precise about how the place was made. The site for No. 9 Elementary Flying Training School was chosen about June 1940, and contracts for 47 permanent and 20 temporary buildings were let that October, most unfinished well into 1941 although flying training began early that year. It was the only elementary flying training facility established in Western Australia during the war. Training ceased in early December 1944 when the air force had a surplus of pilots, and in February 1945 No. 25 Squadron brought B-24 Liberators to Cunderdin for long-range work over the Indian Ocean.

The military occupation wound down in stages. No. 25 Squadron was disbanded about July 1946; a care and maintenance unit ran the base until May 1947, after which four civilian watchmen were employed. Apparently during 1949, the whole airfield passed from the Department of Defence to the Department of Civil Aviation. The migrant centre therefore took over buildings that had already been standing empty, or nearly so, for two years.

The heritage assessment gives the migrant centre a capacity of 700 people. This is an accommodation capacity, not a count of Ukrainians or a total of everyone who passed through. The assessment adds that research had not been carried out into what part the tarmac group of buildings played in the migrant centre, though there were some grounds to think they were used for social activities. The accommodation itself was in the main camp farther east, where the agricultural college now stands.

Who was sent to Cunderdin

Placement was deliberate rather than accidental. The Northam Army Camp Heritage Association records that British migrants generally went to the centres in the Perth metropolitan area while displaced people and other European assisted migrants were sent to Northam and Cunderdin. Over 12,000 migrants reached Western Australia in 1950 alone, from Poland, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Hungary, Ukraine and elsewhere; those figures are for the state, not for Cunderdin.

The Ukrainian Association of Western Australia records the community’s own beginning slightly earlier, with 60 men arriving at Fremantle on the Kanimbla on 11 October 1948 and going to the Kalgoorlie gold mines, the railway lines and the Mundaring Weir works. It names Graylands, Northam and Cunderdin as the hostels and camps where Ukrainians were settled, without giving dates or numbers for any of them.

A history of Dutch migration to Western Australia records that in 1949 the military camps used as initial receiving and training centres for migrants were in the Perth suburbs of Graylands, Swanbourne, Belmont (Dunreath) and Point Walter, and in the Wheatbelt towns of Cunderdin, 157 kilometres from Perth, and Northam, about 98 kilometres from Perth. The joint local planning strategy for the Shires of Cunderdin, Quairading and Tammin describes the former flying school facilities as used for a short time after the war as a staging point for displaced persons eventually sent on to Northam and other areas. Neither account gives dates or numbers for Cunderdin itself.

Learning and working towards a new life

English teaching formed part of life at Cunderdin. A teacher’s papers preserved by the State Library document her work across Northam, Cunderdin and Holden and identify correspondence about migrant education from 1950–51. The teaching network linked these temporary settlements even as their residents moved between them.

The confined accommodation could make it difficult to pursue an established profession. Recent art-historical research follows a Ukrainian painter transferred from Northam to Cunderdin while preparing for a Perth exhibition in 1951. A letter written on her behalf that June described inadequate light and cramped space for painting. The episode shows professional ambitions continuing inside a camp organised around temporary housing and employment placement.

Moves between Australian camps

Cunderdin could be one stage in a longer journey within Australia. A family recollection preserved by the Benalla Migrant Camp project records residence at Northam and then Cunderdin before a move to Benalla in Victoria after two years in Western Australia. Arrival in one state did not necessarily settle where a family would eventually live.

After the migrant centre

The migrant centre closed in 1952 and the site was divided between new uses. The heritage assessment dates the Commonwealth disposal of wartime buildings to about 1962 and states that those sold were principally the main camp buildings to the east, where the agricultural school now stands; the Shire’s own history places the start of Commonwealth disposals earlier, in 1957. Either way, the accommodation that housed migrants is the part of the base that was sold off and has gone.

Aviation continued on the western part of the site. Glider owners leased tarmac buildings from about 1956 and the Gliding Club of Western Australia moved to Cunderdin about September 1958. The runways and tarmac passed to the Shire of Cunderdin in 1992 and the surviving Bellman hangar was sold to the Shire in 1996. The eastern residential camp and the surviving airfield structures therefore represent related but different parts of the site’s history, and the buildings that survive are flying buildings rather than living quarters.