Maribyrnong

A pyrotechnics factory first

The land the hostel took over had been the New Pyrotechnic Section of the Explosives Factory Maribyrnong, set up in 1942 to make fuses, flares, tracers and smoke grenades. It covered some 26 hectares and 150 buildings went up on it between 1942 and 1945. Production stopped at the end of the war and the buildings were put to housing migrants from Europe almost at once. Thirteen of them survive, along with remnant infrastructure including a length of overhead steam piping.

Those factory sheds did the hostel’s communal and administrative work for years: timber-framed structures clad in fibro and weatherboard, two brick stores, an infirmary, and reinforced concrete bunkers that were later lived in.

Workers and reunited families

The first accommodation used the Explosives Factory’s former pyrotechnics section. Initially it housed 400 men working for the Postmaster General’s Department, the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works and Footscray brickworks. In November 1949, 400 women and children joined their husbands. Family reunion was an important change after accommodation arrangements had separated workers from dependants.

Separating men from their families was normal practice in the first years of the scheme: the men went to hostels near work while wives and children were held at centres such as Bonegilla in north-eastern Victoria. Half a million migrants reached Australia between 1947 and 1951, three-fifths of them from non-English-speaking backgrounds and about half of them displaced people. In 1951 every one of the 1,160 residents of the Maribyrnong hostel was a displaced person.

By 1954 about 1,000 people lived at the hostel. British and other European arrivals shared a place closely linked to the factories and expanding suburbs around it. These totals describe the whole hostel, rather than its Ukrainian community.

Life among the huts

Curved, corrugated-metal Nissen and Quonset huts supplied much of the early sleeping accommodation. Older factory buildings found new uses as offices, dining rooms, laundries and educational spaces. Living here meant sharing facilities as well as living close to neighbours from different backgrounds.

The huts were bought in bulk and second-hand. In 1949 the Commonwealth acquired 660 small and 200 large Nissen huts and 100 Romney huts — a larger version of the Nissen — from the British Ministry of Works, together with at least fifty Quonset huts from a former United States base on Manus Island; all of them were dismantled and shipped to Australia by January 1950. Another 1,500 Nissen huts and fifty Romney huts followed from the Ministry of Works later in 1950 for £20,000, and 2,000 more prefabricated huts of various sizes were bought from private dealers, to be distributed among migrant centres across the country. By 1953 there was a surplus.

A surviving National Archives photograph from 1965 shows a family entering a Nissen hut at Maribyrnong. It captures the scale and form of the accommodation shortly before extensive rebuilding changed the hostel’s appearance.

Who ran it, and at what price

Maribyrnong was not only a hostel but a head office. Commonwealth Hostels Limited was set up as a private company in October 1951 to run migrant hostels for the federal government, eventually 64 of them around Australia, and its headquarters were on this site. The hostels were run as a business, charging a tariff for board and lodging fixed according to the migrant’s working situation and the size of the family. The company took on catering in Commonwealth buildings between 1977 and 1978, was renamed Commonwealth Accommodation and Catering Services Limited in 1978, and was sold into private hands in 1988.

For the residents the arithmetic was harsh. Rooms were plainly furnished, washing and eating were communal and there was little privacy, and the tariff could take about four-fifths of a migrant’s income — enough to produce rent strikes and protests in the Melbourne hostels. Assisted passages were phased out by 1981, after which the centres concentrated on arrival accommodation and settlement services for refugees and humanitarian entrants.

Midway and Phillip

On 13 March 1969 Commonwealth Hostels officially opened the new Midway accommodation. Two-storey brick apartment blocks replaced older huts as part of a wider improvement programme begun in 1965. Montgomery, King and Associates designed the buildings, and Leighton Contractors built them. The opening invitation itself survives in Museums Victoria’s collection.

Midway was commissioned in 1966 under a Commonwealth scheme to rebuild or upgrade the hostels still operating, and was completed in two stages. It runs to twenty-five two-storey accommodation buildings in six clusters, built of concrete metric modular bricks with tile-clad skillion roofs, with four laundry buildings, an English-language school, detached houses and, from 1972, a childcare centre with grass play areas and sand pits.

The rebuilt centre included an English-language school, childcare, laundries and detached houses. Architecture was part of the change: the new buildings offered a different setting from the original rows of metal huts. Midway subsequently became an arrival point for Vietnamese, Cambodian and Lao refugees as well as earlier migrant groups.

The Phillip hostel followed in 1971 at the western end. Its accommodation was arranged around circular courtyards, with shared dining facilities alongside some units with their own cooking and laundry provision. Midway and Phillip were later phases of the wider Maribyrnong hostel site.

Phillip, built in 1971 in the same concrete brick, is two concentric rings of two-storey accommodation with a two-storey walkway between them, segmented into fifteen pavilions under gabled roofs of thin flat concrete tiles. Small telephone rooms were set into the ground-floor walkway between the pavilions so that residents could keep in touch with the countries they had left, and laundries and enclosed drying areas were built on the outside of the ring. A garden of native trees and shrubs filled the middle, and the units looked either into it or out across the site. Most had no cooking facilities; a communal dining room built in the late-1970s upgrade fed them, and above its servery an illuminated map of the world showed the time zones.

Residents marked the place as their own. A mural of windmills and tulips painted by Dutch migrants survives on the side of one of the concrete bunkers, and an Asian scene apparently painted by Vietnamese migrants on the wall of an ammunition store beside the Phillip centre, along with children’s paintings. The staff built a large aviary onto the former electrical substation of the pyrotechnic works.

Making homes in Melbourne’s west

Moving out of the hostel did not necessarily mean immediate comfort. Local historical research describes migrants buying affordable land around Sunshine and initially living in makeshift dwellings while roads, water and electricity services caught up. Industrial jobs supported settlement, but families often had to build their homes in stages. This was the surrounding settlement landscape, rather than a description of rooms inside Maribyrnong.

The hostel’s role also extended beyond the original postwar migration wave. Later residents included people fleeing upheaval in Hungary, Chile and Vietnam, while the site temporarily accommodated evacuees from Darwin after Cyclone Tracy in 1974.

Closure and a changing site

Phillip closed in 1986 and Midway in 1987. The Footscray Institute of Technology, later Victoria University, took the site over in 1989 for student accommodation; Phillip was renamed the Gilmour Centre and housed students until 2001, and the Midway blocks were still in student use long afterwards. The central kitchen, built to cook for other Commonwealth Hostels operations, burned down in August 2007. The former migrant centre occupied a broader site than the separate detention facility later established on part of the land.

The place is on the Victorian Heritage Register as H2190, and in the Maribyrnong planning scheme as heritage overlay HO135, described there as the largest and only intact surviving purpose-built postwar migrant hostel in Victoria. Its Nissen and Romney huts are the only prefabricated structures left on it, out of the thousands brought into Australia for migrant accommodation after the war.

Recent redevelopment has changed the surviving landscape again. During work for the Maidstone tram maintenance facility, a remaining Nissen hut was moved less than 400 metres to a new foundation. The eight-tonne structure required a specially designed lifting frame. Its preservation retains physical evidence of the earliest migrant accommodation even as the surrounding land takes on a new purpose.