Graylands Migrant Centre

Barracks and a neighbouring hostel

The reception and training centre opened in 1947 in unlined wartime army barracks. Its huts contrasted with the adjoining hostel’s Nissen accommodation, built with purpose-designed huts intended primarily for British migrants but also used by Dutch families, who were allocated a couple of rooms each and described the change as a considerable improvement. Photographs from the collection of Nonja Peters show newly arrived Dutch men cleaning the barracks and standing with their luggage outside the ablution block in January 1949.

Graylands stood at the head of the Western Australian system. A Commonwealth list of 27 June 1949 names it as the state’s reception centre, distinct from the holding centres at Northam and Cunderdin. The neighbouring hostel is dated to 1951 in the Peters research and to 9 May 1952 in a parliamentary return, which probably reflects the difference between building work and the formal start of hostel operation; both dates are given here rather than reconciled. The hostel stood in Lantana Street.

Both belonged to a government system intended to receive newcomers and connect them with employment. Under the agreement with the International Refugee Organisation, Australia paid displaced people’s passages in return for two years in allocated work. Former military accommodation helped provide places to live during this transition.

The rhythm of camp life

A surviving camp-rules sheet sets out a closely regulated routine. Residents were expected to attend meals promptly, leave huts ready for morning inspection, care for issued equipment and report damage. It also provided for medical attention, a canteen and luggage storage. Entertainment was advertised on the noticeboard, while complaints went to the administrative officer.

The document’s strongest emphasis was on preventing fire: cigarette ends, matches and equipment needed careful handling. Its printed spaces for opening hours remain blank in the surviving copy, leaving the rules clearer than the actual daily timetable.

Former residents remembered the communal side of it. The accommodation provided shelter and adjustment training but little privacy, and the food was unfamiliar; Helene Melnema, who arrived from the Netherlands in 1953 after a stay at Holden in Northam, recalled puffed wheat for breakfast, tomato soup at midday and plum jam sandwiches at school, and found Graylands the friendlier place of the two. Brian Brown, who came from England in 1958 with a family of seven while his father worked at the Kwinana refinery, remembered it as lively and difficult at once, and noted that many people could not manage it and went home.

Children and the local school

A camp school opened in 1951 as an extension of Graylands Primary School. By 1953 the arrangement had been outgrown, and its teachers and pupils transferred to the main school. Over subsequent decades, successive arrivals changed the school’s work. Specific provision for English as a second language developed in the 1970s, with four teachers assigned to the Intensive Language Centre in 1979.

The school’s own heritage record describes the relationship from the other side. Graylands Primary School had been founded as an infants school in 1917 and was established as a full primary school in 1949; by the early 1950s, with post-war migration and new housing, enrolments had passed four hundred. The hostel in Lantana Street and the school remained connected for decades, and in March 1977, as South-Asian refugees began arriving at the hostel, a Child Migrant Resource Centre was opened at the school.

A Ukrainian community forms

Ukrainian organised life in Perth began at almost the same moment as the camps. The Ukrainian Association of Western Australia records that the first sixty Ukrainian men reached Fremantle on the Kanimbla on 11 October 1948, formed a dancing group and a choir, and gave what it describes as the first Ukrainian concert in the state before being split into work parties for the Kalgoorlie goldfields, the railways and the Mundaring Weir. As more people arrived they were settled in hostels and camps, named in the association’s history as Graylands, Northam and Cunderdin.

The organisations that followed were based in Perth rather than in the camps. A first committee was formed in October 1949, and the first annual meeting was held at St Patrick’s Church in Perth on 25 February 1950 with seventy-eight people present. A choir was founded on 6 June 1951 and first rehearsed in an Anglican church hall in Aberdeen Street, which the Ukrainian Orthodox congregation was also using for Sunday liturgy; the Kyiv soccer team followed in 1952 and the first Ukrainian Catholic priest in the state arrived in 1953. Land for a hall in Hann Street, Leederville, was bought in 1955 and the building was finished in 1962.

From temporary rooms to Perth homes

One Dutch family remembered moving from Holden to Graylands in 1953, then into a Subiaco house where they took in Dutch boarders while the father worked in the building industry: a route from rural temporary accommodation into Perth.

For Ukrainians, Graylands formed part of a wider Western Australian settlement network alongside Northam and Cunderdin. Community organisation gradually moved beyond the camps, with meetings in Perth and later a hall in Leederville.

Later arrivals

The hostel outlasted the displaced-person years by a generation. Further blocks of family accommodation were built on the site during 1967 and 1968, and by the late 1970s the Nissen huts had been demolished and replaced with brick and tile buildings with landscaped gardens and a swimming pool. South-Asian refugees arrived from 1977, and Vietnamese and Iranian residents followed. The hostel closed in 1987, by which time more than 35,000 migrants were said to have passed through, and the land was afterwards redeveloped, leaving little trace of its migrant past.