Wacol

From army camp to migrant centre

The United States Army built Camp Columbia at Wacol, sixteen kilometres from Brisbane, to accommodate American troops during the Pacific War, and used it from 1942 to 1945. After the war the site passed to the Australian Army. The immigration facility occupied the northern side of Ipswich Road within that landscape; the southern section continued as an army establishment while the Department of Immigration acquired the northern accommodation in 1949. It became the Wacol East Dependants Holding Camp for Displaced Persons.

Holding centres accommodated dependants while family breadwinners worked and sought homes. Wacol belonged to a Queensland network that also included Enoggera, Stuart and Cairns; the Department of Immigration was planning four such centres in the state in June 1949, and Wacol was the first to open. Its standard capacity in 1952 was 1,465 places for residents of all backgrounds, and at that date thirteen holding centres were still active across Australia.

The buildings were the army’s. The original timber huts contained 340 rooms served by communal toilet and ablution blocks. The camp’s estimated capacity in May 1950 was 600 people; when the conversion was finished it stood at about 1,600. During 1950 and 1952 that capacity was exceeded and the population approached 2,000, and tents were pitched to supplement the huts. Wacol also housed some of its own staff: Australians worked mainly in administration, clerical and supervisory jobs, while migrants were employed as cleaners, in the kitchens and linen store, and as groundsmen.

The scheme that filled it

The Displaced Persons Scheme brought people to Australia from the first transport in November 1947 until it was discontinued in January 1954 for want of available people, and 170,700 came under it.

The people it brought had spent years in camps in Germany, Austria and elsewhere: former prisoners of war, people taken to Germany for forced labour, and people who had fled westward before the Soviet advance in 1945. Many chose Australia ahead of Canada or the United States because Australia was the first to accept family groups.

Once here, the arrangement separated households. Displaced persons went to holding centres where dependants stayed until the breadwinner, working within reach of the centre, could afford accommodation elsewhere; the Department of Immigration ran the holding centres while the Department of Labour and National Service ran the workers’ hostels. From January 1952 Commonwealth Hostels Limited, a Commonwealth-owned company, took over the running of the hostels, and from May 1978 a successor company managed them in Queensland until 1987.

Rooms, meals and everyday routines

A resident describing 1959 remembered huts divided into six or eight rooms, with doors opening outdoors. Washing, toilets and laundry were in shared blocks. Walking outside at night could be unsettling. Meals came from communal kitchens, and residents could eat in the dining hall or carry food back to their rooms.

The same account describes a post office, weekly exchanges of sheets and bath towels, and announcements delivered over loudspeakers in several languages. Each accommodation block had a supervisor. The railway station was within walking distance, and a bush track led to shops at Darra. A self-service store made shopping easier for people still learning English.

Families and separation

For some families, arrival in Australia brought another period of separation. Two sisters who arrived in November 1949 recalled being placed at a convent school in Ipswich from January 1950. They returned to Wacol during school holidays for the following two years. Their recollections combine the lack of toys with memories of affection and care.

Rules about dependants could also intrude into married life. One woman recalled that in 1955 officials removed her husband’s camp bed after he formally moved out, although he continued staying with her. The couple shared the remaining narrow bed. Her account gives a more personal picture of administration than a simple accommodation total can convey.

School and community life

The camp had a primary school, free evening English lessons, a Catholic chapel and a cinema. In the 1959 account, a nurse was available daily and a doctor visited during the week. School, worship and medical care were part of the same small settlement as the huts and kitchens.

Work and a home beyond the camp

The move out could be quick but expensive. A Dutch family arriving in July 1954 spent about two weeks at Wacol. Members first took casual cannery work, catching a steam train at 5.30 in the morning and returning after 6 in the evening. Their rented house at Eagle Farm cost £10 a week, nearly two weeks of one wage. The account illustrates how employment, long journeys and housing scarcity shaped the transition from hostel to household.

Ukrainians at Wacol and afterwards

An account of the Queensland Ukrainian community written by one of its long-serving presidents describes the route plainly: people sent to Queensland passed through camps in the outer suburbs of Brisbane — Enoggera, Colmslie and the largest of them, Wacol — and it was in and near Wacol that many Ukrainians subsequently bought land. Men were often sent north or inland to cut cane, work in timber or work on the railways under the two-year labour contract, and most gravitated back to Brisbane when it ended.

Families reunited in the camps were generally the first to buy land and build. In most cases people built their own dwellings, putting up a wooden or cement-block garage as a temporary residence and then the house itself, helping one another and paying off land and houses quickly.

Organised community life began while the camps were still filling. An initiative committee started meeting in July 1949 at a house in Buranda, and from October 1949 forty or fifty Ukrainians gathered weekly in a school building lent by the Roman Catholic parish of St Luke there, where English classes were started. The foundation general meeting of the Ukrainian Association of Queensland followed on 27 December 1949. The first Ukrainian Catholic mass in Queensland was celebrated in March 1950 at St Luke’s, Buranda, and the first Ukrainian Orthodox community in the state was organised in the Enoggera resettlement camp in 1951.

The community that grew out of the camps was young and mostly of peasant background — in Queensland, largely people between twenty and thirty-five, single or recently married, some with small children. The first Ukrainian Saturday school opened in the Oxley-Darra area in 1954 and a second in South Brisbane the following year; within five years the Brisbane school had 80 children and the Oxley school 60. In the 1976 census, 1,044 people in Queensland said they spoke Ukrainian regularly.

A changing population and the end of the centre

Wacol continued receiving migrants after the first displaced-person arrivals. Government policy had been that British migrants would not be sent to holding centres, but the June 1959 Nest Egg Scheme, which offered assisted passage to Britons with £500 in savings and no accommodation sponsor, created a need for emergency accommodation: Yungaba and Colmslie were to be used first, and any further British arrivals could join the Dutch migrants at Wacol. When Colmslie closed on 31 March 1963, residents who could not find other housing were allowed to move to Wacol, which Commonwealth Hostels was then taking over from the Department of Immigration.

The centre outlasted its huts. Additional brick accommodation blocks containing 93 bedrooms opened in July 1968; the original timber army huts fell into disrepair and were disposed of in March 1985. A redevelopment was considered in 1987 as part of a national move away from institutional accommodation, but it did not proceed.

The Wacol Migrant Centre ceased operation in 1987 and the site was cleared in 1990. The Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre now stands on it. Its history spans several generations of arrivals, while the surrounding former military land acquired other institutional uses. Ukrainian settlement in the neighbouring suburbs was one lasting connection between the temporary camp and the city that grew around it.