Wallangarra

A depot at the break of gauge

The Army established 3 Advanced Ordnance Depot at Wallangarra in January 1942. Its location was dictated by the railways: the Queensland and New South Wales systems used different gauges, so everything moving north or south had to be unloaded and reloaded at the border. Two defence sites faced each other across the state line. The stores depot stood on the Queensland side at Army Avenue; on the New South Wales side, at Jennings, 1 Advanced Ammunition Depot was set up in the same year.

Building went on for most of the war. The Allied Works Council developed the Wallangarra area from March 1942 until 1945, the Queensland Main Roads Commission built on both sides of the border, and a Toowoomba firm, Dredge and Hodge, held the contract for the ordnance depot; the commanding officers of the two depots took up their commands in September 1943. At the peak in 1944 as many as twenty-eight trains from New South Wales and thirty from Queensland came into Wallangarra in a day. The depot generated its own electricity and had its own water supply, and the Army powerhouse ran until 1954, when the mains reached Wallangarra from Tenterfield.

The work the depot existed for was heavy and largely manual. Ammunition arriving at the peak of the war was unloaded by hand by an employment company and carried from the Jennings railway siding to the ammunition depot by two sections of horse transport, at something like nine thousand tons a day. The buildings the labour served were plain: semi-underground ammunition shelters at first, then timber structures and prefabricated Sydney Williams huts, with the trees around them left standing to hide the site from the air.

By the time the migrants arrived the names had changed. In 1948 the Wallangarra depot became 5 Central Ordnance Depot and the Jennings depot 1 Central Ammunition Depot. The published sources for the 1949 posting say only that the migrants worked for the Army at Wallangarra, at the Army depot or in the military camp. The Ukrainian account speaks of a military camp with free food and accommodation.

The depot’s wartime workforce was not only Australian. On 7 December 1943, 150 Indonesian political internees from the Dutch internment camp at Tanah Merah were transferred to the semi-military Australian Employment Company at Wallangarra and to nearby Toowoomba and Helidon, where they worked on farms and in an ammunition depot. Around New Year’s Day 1944 two of them left Wallangarra to enter Dutch service.

From Bathurst to the border

On the evening of Tuesday 25 October 1949 more than 350 displaced men of about 28 nationalities left Sydney by train after a term at the Bathurst displaced persons’ camp. Fed on the platform at Armidale the next afternoon, they were bound for Army installations between Wallangarra and Brisbane under two-year government contracts. A Ukrainian was among those a local reporter spoke to; several said they welcomed the certainty of two years’ work.

The party split at the border. Of the 350, 240 left the train at Wallangarra, where the Courier-Mail reported they would be attached to the holding camp for maintenance of drainage, building repairs and equipment maintenance. Ninety-three went on to Brisbane and were stationed at Wacol, Chermside, Gaythorne, Cooper’s Plains, Bulimba and Colmslie. Two of them stepped off the train clutching fishing rods they had brought from Europe.

The parish history of St Andrew’s Ukrainian Catholic Church in Sydney records a group of twenty Ukrainians sent from Bathurst to Wallangarra, near the Queensland border. The author of the account had arrived in Sydney on 29 September 1949 and found the Bathurst camp unpleasant, with poor food and long queues at a communal kitchen. At Wallangarra the Ukrainians worked in the kitchen, formed a choir and a volleyball team, and earned five pounds a week with free board because it was a military camp.

They had come up the line that made the place what it was. Trains from Sydney terminated at Wallangarra, where the long platform carried the New South Wales gauge on one side and the Queensland gauge on the other, and passengers and freight changed trains at the state border.

A mixed camp

The Ukrainians shared the camp with what the parish history calls many Russians from China. Brisbane newspapers explain who these were: White Russians who had reached Australia early in 1950 from temporary sanctuary in the Philippines and were working for the Army at Wallangarra, their families expected to follow later in the year. In February 1950 the Commonwealth Employment Officer at Warwick counted more than 300 displaced persons in his district, some of them at the Army depot at Wallangarra and others in forestry, irrigation and shire work.

Religious life reflected the mix. There was no Ukrainian priest in the camp, only an Orthodox clergyman of Belarusian origin, and the Ukrainian account records its first meeting with a Ukrainian Catholic priest only in 1952, in Sydney. Free English classes organised for migrants working at Army establishments, including Wallangarra, continued through the school holidays of 1949 to 1950.

Leaving the camp

The posting was a stage rather than a settlement. The Ukrainian account describes visiting relatives in Sydney once a year at Christmas, marriage in 1950 and later work and a shared family house in the Sydney suburb of Auburn.

Wallangarra remained an Army logistics site long after the migrant contracts ended. The unit passed through a series of names — supply companies from 1973, Wallangarra Supply Company from 1983, Wallangarra Logistic Company from 1994 — and it still functions as a stores depot.