Woodside Migrant Hostel

Army barracks become a migrant centre

The army camp had been established in 1927 and expanded during the Second World War. Its barracks and training facilities provided the existing infrastructure from which the reception centre developed. Migration and military activity later coexisted on the wider property.

Residents celebrated the opening in June 1949. The centre was run as five accommodation blocks, each with its own kitchen, while mess rooms and washing facilities were communal.

The plan was modest at first: two areas of the existing camp were to become a holding centre where women and children could stay when there was no accommodation where the men had been sent to work. As the intake of displaced people rose faster than the government could house them, Woodside was expanded. The army kept part of the camp, and children remembered collecting spent cartridge cases from the firing range. Sleeping quarters were converted barracks, some left as dormitories and some partitioned into bedrooms.

A South Australian heritage assessment places Woodside among the nine Commonwealth and four State government hostels established across the state between 1949 and 1950, alongside Finsbury and Pennington, Gawler and Willaston, Gepps Cross, Glenelg, Mallala, Rosewater, Smithfield, Whyalla, Elder Park, Hendon, Semaphore and Woodville.

Work and family separation

For Ukrainians entering Australia under the displaced-persons programme, the first jobs were generally tied to two-year government contracts. In South Australia men worked on the railways, in water supply and factories; women commonly found domestic work in hospitals. These employment patterns help explain why a family’s housing and a parent’s workplace could be far apart.

A Dutch mother’s oral history describes her husband travelling to Adelaide during the working week and returning on Friday evenings. She recalled children attending school, walks among the flowers and friendships with other Dutch families, while also remembering Polish, Ukrainian, German and Czech neighbours. Her account captures both a multinational setting and the practical strain of living away from work.

Two residents interviewed in 1994 for the Boatload of Dreams project remembered the place very differently. Krystyna Pindral, at Woodside from 1950 to 1955, recalled a happy childhood even though her father was working elsewhere and her mother was out at work. Ryszard Kazimir Kobylinski, there from 1949 to 1954, said the accommodation was worse than the camps he had known in Europe, with no heating and no wooden floors, and that the difference was that at Woodside people were free and had enough to eat.

Shared spaces and different memories

The camp was run as five blocks, each with its own kitchen and supervisor. Mess rooms, laundries, linen stores, showers and toilets were shared, as at other hostels. There was a canteen, a recreation hall and cinema facilities, and a hospital with maternity, general and children’s sections; a creche and baby clinic were added in 1951.

The same oral history recalls large outdoor laundries and showers some distance from the family’s hut, without doors. The beauty of the surroundings and friendly company did not remove the discomfort of shared facilities. For someone accustomed to a private house, camp accommodation could feel like a sharp loss of independence.

A hospital, cinema, recreation hall, football and concerts supported community life. Camp footballers also played against local teams.

Films were shown regularly, and craft displays, a ball and other events raised money for amenities. The Good Neighbour Council, the Red Cross, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides were all active on site. A Catholic chaplain was based at the hostel and visiting priests held services in several languages and for more than one denomination. The Woodside United soccer team, with players from six countries, was almost undefeated in its 1949 season against South Australian sides.

Lutheran services for Baltic South Australians were also held at the hostel, after the first such service at a migrant camp in Port Adelaide on 10 October 1948.

School and language

Woodside Camp School opened in 1949 for migrant children and some children of camp staff. Many pupils initially knew little or no English. From 1960, children who had gained sufficient English transferred to Oakbank Area School; the camp school closed in 1962.

A 1952 photograph shows women and children attending an English class at the centre.

Communities also organised their own teaching. An Estonian school was established at the hostel in the summer of 1949–50; some of the Estonian displaced persons in the camp had been school teachers and had brought textbooks with them, and the school at first had twelve children aged from six to eleven.

Closure and the later site

In 1951 The Advertiser reported that more than half of Woodside’s 1,700 residents were children and that the centre had one of the highest birth rates in Australia. By 1959 numbers at what was by then the Woodside Migrant Accommodation Centre were dwindling. The government considered housing British migrants there, decided the site was unsuitable, and carried on with European arrivals until 1963.

About 26,000 migrants passed through Woodside. The hostel continued until 1963, after numbers declined in the late 1950s. It was one of at least twelve migrant hostels operating in South Australia between 1947 and the mid-1980s, and was administered by the Commonwealth from 1949 to 1963.

The military property remained in use after the migrant hostel closed. Defence’s current account places it on Nairne Road and records the sale of the separate Inverbrackie married-quarters area in 2015. In 2026, the department identifies Woodside Barracks for divestment after most personnel moved to RAAF Base Edinburgh.

The heritage assessment records that the site continues in military use as the Woodside Army Barracks and that most of the early buildings were replaced with brick structures in about the 1980s.