Williamstown

Racecourse accommodation and the flood

In May 1949 the federal government announced that it would take over eighteen wool sheds at Braybrook and two hostels at the Williamstown racecourse, a wartime army camp. Importing Nissen and Quonset huts was expected to house a further two thousand or more people at the racecourse alone. Local people objected to losing a recreation area, although since the war the course had been used for horse training rather than racing.

The first residents arrived in December 1949. In April 1950 flooding forced nearly a thousand people to evacuate temporarily to Broadmeadows. Accommodation subsequently shifted to the old racecourse carpark across the creek.

A kiosk operator’s family remembers the racecourse grandstand kitchen being used for early camp meals. Their business served the migrant community during the 1950s, offering more than refreshments: clothing, bicycles, radios, toiletries and familiar continental foods such as sauerkraut and smoked sausage. Tables for tea and coffee made it a meeting place as well as a shop.

Daily life and community connections

Each hut held three families with about three rooms each. Residents shared outside toilets, ate at long tables in a common dining area and used communal laundries. A prominent landscape designer, Emily Gibson, was engaged to soften the bare coastal site with salt-tolerant planting. In the early 1950s the hostel was described as the only mixed establishment in Victoria, the only one then accommodating both English-speaking and non-English-speaking residents.

Early accommodation consisted largely of military huts shared by several families. Toilets, washing and dining were communal. Families nevertheless adapted daily routines, sometimes cooking in rooms despite hostel rules.

The nearby Baptist church extended its work into the hostel through English classes and Sunday school. This connection placed language learning and children’s activities within a wider network of local organisations responding to new arrivals.

A preserved 1965 Christmas menu records a communal celebration at Altona Hostel. The family who kept it had stayed for two years while working in construction, pipeline work and a nearby factory. They eventually returned to Britain after finding that buying land did not resolve the difficulties of getting established. Their story shows that settlement did not always end in a permanent Australian home.

The hostel’s reputation troubled the district. By January 1951 a run of court cases involving residents had produced enough local concern that journalists were invited in to report instead on residents’ talents, good citizenship and sport. Williamstown councillors wanted the city’s name detached from the place; Werribee, Paisley and Altona were all proposed before the composite name Wiltona was settled on. Soccer grew quickly nearby: a district that struggled to raise one team in 1950 had two senior and two junior sides by 1954.

From huts to brick accommodation

Melbourne’s hostels were run by the Commonwealth Department of Labour and National Service and from 1951 by Commonwealth Hostels Limited. Through the 1950s and 1960s they held between 500 and 1,500 residents each, with a nominal maximum stay of twelve months, and rent often took a large share of a migrant’s income. Williamstown was one of the sites chosen for reconstruction in the late 1960s: the first brick units were finished by early 1968 and the second stage by the end of that year, to a design by the architect Reg Grouse that was nominated for a state architectural award in 1970.

Major rebuilding during the late 1960s replaced much of the hut accommodation with two-storey brick units. Courtyards and covered walkways connected the blocks. The Wiltona name combined Williamstown and Altona.

The Melbourne Harbour Trust hostel at Monomeath on The Strand was a separate establishment, with a different location and purpose.

Closure, reuse and a continuing housing story

The hostel closed during the 1970s and reopened for refugees in 1978. Demand had fallen away by 1984, when the site was declared temporarily surplus while the Commonwealth said it would keep the hostel in case it was needed again. The following year it was earmarked for disposal after an audit of Melbourne’s hostel sites, and it was offered for sale in November 1986. A proposal to adapt the complex for emergency housing was dropped because Williamstown councillors opposed continued residential use.

A July 1987 government notice formally rezoned the former Wiltona hostel to general industrial use.

The buildings became Williamstown Techno Park. Residential use persisted alongside offices and industry. In 2024, ABC reporting documented a dispute over council eviction notices affecting people who had made homes in the estate. The former hostel remained connected to questions of affordable housing long after its Commonwealth migration role ended.

Seven of the original clusters of brick units survive, some with their courtyards filled in and one almost swallowed by later additions. The footbridge over Kororoit Creek has gone.