Nelson Bay

From naval base to migrant accommodation

HMAS Assault was developed during 1942–1943 as a naval training centre. Its sick bay and other buildings later formed part of the migrant settlement. After the war the facilities were maintained in a caretaker mode until the Commonwealth took the site over for migrant accommodation; a plan of the site at that takeover shows the former naval camp and an adjacent United States camp.

In January 1949 the Newcastle Morning Herald reported that the naval depot might be taken over to house European migrant workers. It described hut accommodation for a large number of people, mainly of galvanised iron, on a site running along the waterfront about half a mile east of the township and already equipped with water and sewerage. In April 1949 a Newcastle firm, J. D. Judd Bros of New Lambton, was awarded a Commonwealth contract worth £7,099 to convert the site. An initial intake of 49 migrants helped to prepare the hostel.

The accommodation was then enlarged. Prefabricated Nissen huts bought in Britain were shipped out and re-erected at places such as Newcastle and Port Stephens, and in June 1951 a further contract worth £20,972 was let for additional prefabricated buildings. A 1950 account of hostel design in the journal Construction lists Port Stephens among twelve New South Wales hostels built or building since 1948, designed and built by the Commonwealth Department of Works and Housing and then transferred to the Department of Labour and National Service. By the time the site was sold it comprised about 50 timber buildings and 10 Nissen style huts.

Steelwork, family reunion and camp life

The hostel was created for the steel industry. In May 1949 the Minister for Immigration said that up to 800 displaced people would be accommodated at Port Stephens for steel production, 300 of them almost immediately. A November 1949 report described 94 men starting work at the Newcastle steelworks on 12 September and 74 more on 20 September, naming them as Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs and Latvians, all married men who would be joined by their wives and children at a hostel with accommodation for 600. They were paid about £7 a week, from which they paid for their keep.

Until October 1949 the hostel held only single and married men, whose families remained at Greta or Bathurst. One report of that month described 300 residents waiting for the camp hospital to be finished so that the place could become a family hostel; work in progress included a new kitchen, a kindergarten, recreation rooms and further living quarters converted from naval dormitories. Long bus journeys to the steelworks made for long days, and the separation from families was a recurring grievance. The hostel was run by the Department of Labour and National Service; its commandant in 1950 was Wing Commander Littlejohn, and the manager of the family hostel at Christmas 1953 was named as Mr Travis.

Contemporary reports also record community life. In August 1949 the first marriage of migrants at the hostel was celebrated at the Nelson Bay Roman Catholic church between Iryna Matlock and Mykola Kowalsky, both Ukrainians, who had met in a displaced persons camp in Germany four years earlier. Residents ran table tennis tournaments and a cabaret dance, floor shows were given by two Latvian professional tap dancers, and a Yugoslav footballer tried to raise a soccer team. In December 1949 the Legion of Catholic Women gave a Christmas party for about 170 children, and the first baby born to hostel residents was recorded that same month.

Life there was not uniformly settled. In October 1949 about 200 residents boycotted the dining room for a day in protest at the cut lunches supplied for work at the steelworks; two men were assaulted on the works bus, one man was charged, and the protest ended that evening. In November 1949 the shire council complained that it had no authority to enter what it regarded as Commonwealth territory while investigating a scarlet fever case. In July 1950 a Polish resident, Zygmund Wroblewski, died with an Australian workmate after benzol fumes overcame them in a storage tank at the steelworks; the inquest returned accidental death by benzol poisoning.

Children and education

The state education record lists the Nelson Bay Holding Centre school from January 1951 to December 1954, and a departmental file covering the establishment of the school, the appointment of teachers and its floor plan survives for 1951–1952. Camp schools formed part of a programme in which the Commonwealth supplied buildings and New South Wales provided teaching. The intention was to introduce the Australian school routine before pupils moved into local schools.

A set of official photographs captioned Commonwealth Migrant Workers’ Hostels, 1951 shows what that meant day to day: kindergarten children of nine nationalities walking around the grounds holding a guide rope, meals served cafeteria style from bain-maries, communal laundries and ablution blocks, and subdivided Nissen huts furnished with standard beds, chairs and a wardrobe. Peter Toedter, who arrived from Germany in June 1954 and stayed two weeks, remembered being seated at the back of the class because the teacher knew most camp children were transient, and his father leaving and returning in the dark after an hour’s bus journey each way to the steelworks.

A workers’ hostel in a wider system

Commonwealth planning distinguished migrant workers’ hostels from reception and holding centres. A programme table reproduced by the Migration Heritage Project identifies Nelson Bay and Shoal Bay as accommodation for displaced-person workers and families, with construction in hand and completion estimated for December 1950. This regional programme expanded as demand for housing grew.

The hostel served people already in Australia and moving towards employment and independent housing. It was a different stage of migration from the displaced persons camps they had left in Europe.

Closure and the buildings afterwards

Accounts of the ending differ. A parliamentary return tabulated by the Migration Heritage Project gives the closing date of the Nelson Bay hostel as 27 August 1955. The buildings were offered for sale and removal by auction at the site on 27 November 1954, the advertisement listing dormitories, a hall with a stage, offices, storerooms, kitchens and dining rooms, three Quonset huts, seven Nissen huts, ablution blocks and latrines. The memorial on the boundary of the site records the years 1949 to 1956. A local history account of the naval base dates the hostel's establishment to 1948 and its closure to 1953.

The former sick bay operated as a local hospital from April 1956 until 1981. That August its buildings passed into community arts use. The surviving hospital building remains the core of the Port Stephens Community Arts Centre, and apart from it little survives beyond concrete floor slabs, path remains and brick foundation piers.