Parkes Migrant Camp

The airport site

The camp occupied the former RAAF accommodation at Parkes Airport, five kilometres east of town on Henry Parkes Way. The aerodrome had been built in the early 1940s for the Empire Pilot Training Scheme, and units based there included No. 1 Air Navigation School and No. 2 Wireless Air Gunners School from 1941 to 1945 and, from 1944, the Central Flying School and No. 8 Operational Training Unit. All RAAF presence had gone by 1946 and the barracks were left empty.

Newspaper and community accounts describe how the buildings were used. Most of the long barracks became dormitories for single people, while others were partitioned into small rooms for families with thin plywood that gave little privacy. The centre had its own hospital, and the council’s local history records that several hundred babies were born there. A Commonwealth list of 27 June 1949 places Parkes among the holding centres, distinct from the reception and training centres at Bathurst and Bonegilla, and it appears again as a New South Wales holding centre in the 1950 Commonwealth hostels programme.

Opening and scale

The centre opened on 9 August 1949. Parkes Municipal Council minutes of 24 January 1950 record that 2,000 people were accommodated there, which required additional infrastructure from the town, and the Parkes Shire Library’s account of the district’s population notes that the camp temporarily added up to 2,000 people to the shire. That is a figure for the whole centre; no count of its Ukrainian residents has been found.

The camp’s presence ran through the district’s public health and emergencies. Cases of poliomyelitis were found at the centre during the 1950 outbreak in the central west. When severe flooding left Forbes almost empty in 1952, flood-affected residents were housed at the Parkes Migrant Centre, and women from the camp were reported as saving the Forbes bean crop.

Living there

Millie Schillick, who arrived as a small child in 1949, recalled the camp through her parents Ivan and Sonia Schillich. Her mother was born in Ukraine in 1926 and had been taken for forced labour when the German army invaded in 1941; the family reached Sydney from Naples six days before the Parkes centre opened, went first to Bathurst, and then travelled by train to Parkes, where they were given a small room with thin partitions in a long hut with shared toilets. Her father was offered work at Newcastle, Maitland and Wilcannia, but refused to be separated from his family again and took local jobs clearing rocks, pitching hay and cleaning railway and cattle yards.

Her account also describes the everyday texture of the camp: children minded by whoever was not working that day, European food cooked on smuggled primus stoves, complaints about greasy mutton and tinned vegetables that were eventually met by putting migrant cooks and kitchen hands into the kitchen, and camp social nights at which townspeople came to look at the food. After about eight months the family left the camp for work at a Parkes hotel, and the camp remained their social world, with word going round that there were migrants behind the bar. Historypin’s account of the camp, written by the same former resident and held with a Parkes Library rights statement, adds that many of the men were sent away to farms, factories and other states, leaving the women to work in the camp or locally as domestics or on factory lines.

Ukrainian families were not the only displaced people at the centre. A family memorial page devoted to the Latvian weaver Anna Apinis records that the family lived at Parkes Holding Centre on arrival in Australia in 1950, and that, suitable weaving materials being difficult to find in post-war Australia, her husband Ervīns put his engineering skills to use and designed an unplying machine there. The page is a private retrospective account rather than a camp record.

Anna and Kate Babij wait for a family home

In an interview recorded for Orange’s migration heritage project, Kate Babij traces her mother Anna’s journey from Ukraine through forced labour and displaced-persons camps in Austria. After arriving in Sydney in September 1949, the family went to Bathurst. Kate recalls that her father Nikola received work at Orange’s Emmco factory in October, while she and Anna went to Parkes.

Kate remembers six months at Parkes while Nikola lived in a tent beside the factory in Orange. In April 1950, mother and daughter joined him in a rented orchard packing shed. They lived there while he built a house in Tynan Street, moving into the unfinished house around March 1951. Other Ukrainian families and individuals shared the house as they too established themselves.

A second interview in the same project describes the identical pattern. Rosalie Borschtsch, deported from Ukraine to Poland in 1943 at the age of sixteen to build railways, married Wasyl in Munich in 1946 and reached Australia with their daughter. She spent a year at the Parkes migrant camp while Wasyl worked at the Emmco plant at Orange and lived in the tent city beside the factory; the couple later shared a house in Tynan Street with another Ukrainian family. Parkes, in these accounts, was where the women and children of Ukrainian families waited out the two-year work contract.

Ukrainian pastoral visits

Parkes was part of the circuit served by Ukrainian Catholic priests. A letter dated 8 April 1951 from Father M. Kopiakivsky, reproduced in the 1966 community history, reports Father Bosky visiting Cowra, Parkes and Greta. The clergy heard confessions, celebrated liturgy and gathered children for religious instruction during their camp visits.

School, closure and the site today

A state camp school operated at Parkes from July 1949 to May 1952, and its admission register, covering September 1949 to April 1952, survives in the New South Wales state archives. These schools were intended to teach English and the Australian school routine so that children could move on to local schools.

The centre closed on 30 May 1952, reportedly against the wishes of Parkes people who valued what the migrants had brought to the town; the council’s own history dates the closure to the early 1950s. Several thousand people had passed through, many of them Polish, and some stayed and settled permanently in the district. Concrete foundations remain at the airport site, with a commemorative plaque recognising those who passed through.