Scheyville Holding Centre

Becoming a holding centre

On 5 April 1949 the Commonwealth government told the Windsor aldermen that Scheyville would be used as a reception centre for up to a thousand overseas migrants at a time. The council had to supply the run-down complex with electricity and water, which strained local infrastructure and that of nearby Pitt Town. The 1929 quadrangle was remodelled for staff and offices, and between 1949 and 1956 large numbers of prefabricated army huts were moved in and erected to the west of it. Two big steel arch-rib huts took the expanded kitchen and dining rooms and part of the hospital, education and child-minding facilities.

Responsibility for migrant accommodation of this kind had passed from the Department of Labour and National Service to its Migrant Workers Accommodation Division in 1948, and in 1952 to Commonwealth Hostels Limited, which ran such places until 1978. Legal control of the site itself was only partly clarified in January 1954, when the central portion including the quadrangle was gazetted for Commonwealth immigration purposes.

Scheyville took in dependent families, with Dutch and eastern European arrivals dominating; former residents recalled a camp full of people from the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Estonia and other eastern European countries. Accounts prepared for the 2011 reunion describe up to 1,500 people a year from twenty-two countries.

The state heritage inventory describes Scheyville between 1950 and 1964 as the largest of the migrant centres in Australia, and the National Parks and Wildlife Service calls the site the largest immigration hostel in the country. The inventory identifies the two steel arch-rib huts as SAARS huts, installed and adapted as dining and recreation accommodation and later used to house a kindergarten.

Ukrainian women organise

A Ukrainian Women’s Association branch was founded at Scheyville on 27 January 1951. The 1966 community history names Mariia Moskal as chair, with Budnyk, Dakh and O. Maykovska on the committee. I. Pelenska and L. Korzhanivska organised the founding meeting.

Thirty-five children and a choir

The branch organised a Ukrainian Sunday school with 35 children in two classes. Despite its Sunday-school name, the history says lessons took place twice weekly. O. Maykovska taught the children and directed their choir. The choir performed at camp events and also travelled to Sydney as visiting performers. The history credits Sydney priest N. Kopiakivsky with helping the branch’s educational work.

Making room for cultural life

The Ukrainian branch history recalls restrictions on ethnic-group gatherings imposed by camp management. The women nevertheless organised lessons and performances. The heritage exhibition describes a multilingual community with music, theatre, religious groups and recreation, activities that made shared accommodation a place of cultural exchange as well as temporary residence.

Buildings for everyday needs

The centre adapted the Quadrangle buildings and added accommodation along the ridge. Educational facilities, a community hall and a sports field supported daily life, while the hospital included twelve maternity beds. The large shared buildings also served as dining rooms; photographs from the 1950s show children playing between the huts and laundry drying outdoors.

Huts, laundry and the hospital

The earliest residents slept in the large semicircular corrugated-iron huts, divided into three rooms with three to five people in each; men and women were at first in separate barracks, and families were housed together once the smaller huts arrived. Those huts were single-skin fibro with louvre windows and no lining, bitterly cold in winter and hot in summer. Rooms measured about four metres square and held a steel-framed bed with a feather mattress for each person and two chairs.

Washing was done in a hall fitted with coppers, tubs and irons, with a drying area of lines propped on forked posts. One former resident described the laundry as the place where older women met each other in the course of the day, which mattered in a camp where many were parted from their husbands. Food from the kitchen could be supplemented from a small shop just outside the gates, run by a local farmer, that stocked familiar European groceries.

Work, rent and separated families

Accommodation and food were free until a family found work, after which rent was charged; in 1958 this came to five pounds for a room, over a period the source does not state. Some men were employed at the centre itself as cooks, handymen, supervisors and clerks, and residents remembered that the centre doctor was a Polish migrant. Others took the centre’s offer of a lift into Windsor on an open flat-top truck to visit the employment bureau, finding work on local farms or, by 1958, at the Port Kembla steelworks.

Men directed to distant jobs were often housed near their work and came back only at weekends, leaving women to raise families alone in an isolated place with no public telephone and no useful public transport. Many took work themselves. Local farmers came early in the morning looking for people to pick potatoes and other vegetables, work that paid three pounds a day in 1956. One woman saved her picking money for a sewing machine, then sewed for a clothing factory at night after the children were in bed, and taught a neighbour to do the same.

Church, school and the bush

A state school operated at the holding centre from September 1950, and there was a preschool on site as well. Adults had English classes and, in later years, film screenings in the cinema on Friday or Saturday nights, but former residents interviewed at the 2005 reunion said there was otherwise little organised for them. Christmas parties with singing and presents for the children were an annual fixture, and impromptu parties with tables dragged outside the huts were common.

The Catholic community was strong. Nuns ran games and craft activities for children, boys served at Sunday mass, and Father Doyle was remembered for eating with residents after church and helping them settle. The bush and dams around the camp were where many children spent their free time. The centre also had a post office, a convent and a rugby league team.

Leaving Scheyville

The Ukrainian women’s branch ceased in 1953 as members moved away. This was not the end of the migrant centre. The conservation plan dates its closure to 31 December 1964, with about 300 migrants remaining late that year. The site subsequently entered another military phase.

Stays were meant to last three to six months but ranged from three months to ten years. The site reverted to military control on 1 April 1965 as the army’s Officer Training Unit, and later held an agricultural college and a police tactical response group before becoming a national park in 1996. The worst of the decayed buildings were demolished in 1995 and the survivors have been conserved since. A state school record dates the closure of the camp school to December 1965, a year later than the conservation plan’s date for the centre itself; the discrepancy is unresolved.

Traces of the holding centre survive in what is now Scheyville National Park. The heritage inventory records the concrete foundations of the lines of prefabricated accommodation on the slope east of the quadrangle buildings, which housed the migrant families and were later adapted for the officer cadets, and two ablution blocks built for the holding centre and afterwards used by the army. Its assessment of significance treats the park as a representative example of a migrant holding hostel for displaced persons at the end of the Second World War. The National Parks and Wildlife Service has waymarked a Migrant Heritage walk around original structures of the camp, with interpretive panels on the site’s heritage.