Rushworth Migrant Camp

The internment camp before

The site belonged to a group of seven internment and prisoner-of-war camps established around Tatura and Rushworth, chosen for their distance from any seaport and for their food and water supply, and holding between four and eight thousand people at a time. Camps 3 and 4 were the Rushworth pair; Camp 3 held mostly German family groups, while Camp 4 held Japanese families. The land it stood on was leased to the government by the politician John McEwen, and was bought by the Commonwealth when the camp became an immigration centre.

A Victorian holding centre

Rushworth belonged to the second tier of the Commonwealth system. A list of centres as at 27 June 1949 places it among the holding centres, alongside Benalla, West Sale, Somers and Mildura in Victoria, and distinct from the reception and training centres at Bonegilla and Bathurst; it appears again as a Victorian holding centre in the 1950 Commonwealth hostels programme. Holding centres took the families of workers who had been allocated employment elsewhere, so a stay there generally followed rather than preceded a work placement.

The Shepparton Advertiser, reporting the camp’s end in June 1953, summarised who had lived there. The first migrants to use the camp were displaced families from various parts of Europe, who brought a good deal of business to Rushworth; they were followed by unmarried Italian men, after which the camp mattered less to the town commercially. A photograph in the Making Multicultural Australia collection shows a group of workers at the camp in 1953, at the end of that Italian phase.

Ukrainian families at Rushworth

The 1966 Ukrainian community history explicitly names Rushworth among Victorian camps where Ukrainian families lived. Its account describes the wider pressures of family separation, travel costs and the search for rented rooms or a first home. This places Rushworth within the unsettled early years of Ukrainian migration, when accommodation and employment could be in different places.

Orthodox pastoral care

In 1949, Father Dmytro Burtan received an Orthodox pastoral assignment covering Rushworth, Bonegilla, Benalla and other Victorian immigration camps. The history records a responsibility to care for Ukrainian Orthodox people and organise parish life across his assigned area.

Religious teaching for children

Bishop Ivan Prashko also names Rushworth among camps visited from Melbourne. Recalling the period after his arrival in May 1950, he describes teaching children and preparing them for first communion during his camp visits. Catholic and Orthodox clergy thus maintained connections with Ukrainian families whose accommodation was scattered across Victoria.

A family follows the fruit-picking season

The Fergin family’s published history gives a personal route through Rushworth. Teodor and Maria arrived in Melbourne with their son Eugene on 14 January 1950 and travelled to Bonegilla. Teodor was then sent to pick fruit around Shepparton. Maria and Eugene moved to Rushworth a few weeks later, before the family relocated to Benalla in April or May. Their daughter Rozalie Dean suggests the Rushworth stay may have lasted only for the fruit-picking season. This Polish family’s story shows how a holding centre fitted around employment and onward accommodation.

The camp closes, June 1953

The end was reported in detail. On 19 June 1953 the Shepparton Advertiser announced that Immigration Camp No. 3, about five miles from Rushworth, would be closed completely by the end of that month; the migrants had left the previous Friday and only administrative and caretaking staff remained. The camp director, named in the report as Mr R. Bain, said that the place would be completely abandoned and that the land, buildings and some equipment would be handed to the Disposals Commission, which would sell them on the site at a later date.

The reason given was a slowing immigration programme. The Italian quota had been completed and the main intake was to be West Germans with a sprinkling of Dutch and Greek migrants; Bonegilla was to become the only centre for work units, while Benalla would remain a holding centre for families without accommodation. The paper added that the closure was not expected to affect the availability of seasonal labour the following summer, which is a measure of how far the camp had become part of the district’s working life.

After the migrant years

The museum dates the end of migrant accommodation to 15 June 1953, which agrees closely with the newspaper’s account of the last residents leaving on 12 June. It preserves the history in a folder of papers and photographs under reference C1997, alongside the Camp No. 3 research collection C7953, and catalogues a photograph of a kindergarten concert at the migrant camp whose title and transcribed inscription give conflicting dates. The camp sites around Tatura and Rushworth are on private property and are not accessible.