Yallourn South

A separate camp south of the town

The South hostel was established in 1949. It was different from the older South Camp near the briquette factory, which had closed in 1939, and from the Eastern Road Hostel. These were separate sites with different operating periods, even though local memories and captions often use the broader name Yallourn.

A list compiled by Virtual Yallourn from Joseph Sestokas’s map sets out six accommodation sites in the district and their dates: the North Camp of 1887 to 1959, the East Camp of 1920 to 1928, the West Camp of 1921, the original South Camp of 1921 to 1939, the Eastern Hostel of 1949 to 1971 and the Yallourn South Migrant Workers Hostel of 1950 to 1953, besides married quarters towards the Latrobe River. Sestokas’s own book is a study of the North Camp, where displaced people were housed, so a reference to Ukrainians at Yallourn need not point to the South hostel at all.

Children, school and everyday surroundings

Children could attend State School No. 4673 inside the migrant centre’s recreation hut. The school operated in 1950 to 1952 and averaged about thirty pupils. A building intended for leisure therefore also served as a classroom, bringing education into the temporary accommodation complex rather than requiring children to begin with an established school elsewhere.

A British family’s account gives a closer view of arrival. They reached Melbourne in February 1952 and moved to the Yallourn South migrant camp, where they lived in a curved metal hut. A young child remembered bush around the camp and the excitement of seeing kangaroos. Her father, a motor mechanic, found work in Morwell; the family later moved into a house there. For this household the camp was an initial foothold, followed by local employment and an ordinary residential street.

The huts and their dispersal

The accommodation did not remain intact after the hostel closed. An auction on 11 September 1953 offered twenty-five Nissen huts at the Yallourn South site. Their hardwood ends and floors could be moved with the structures, while internal partitions had divided some into smaller spaces. Buyers could purchase a whole hut or separate units. The sale turned temporary government accommodation into reusable building material.

The auction was held on the instructions of the Department of the Interior, the Commonwealth department responsible for such property, and conducted by the Morwell firm Hanson and Watson on a site described as about four miles west of Morwell. The Yallourn newspaper the Live Wire reported that the sale drew a large crowd of buyers and onlookers, that one well-known Morwell citizen paid about 240 pounds for the first hut, and that ten further huts then went for little more than 114 pounds each.

A lasting Ukrainian community in the valley

The region offered work beyond the camp gates. Ukrainian newcomers joined other migrants at the Latrobe Valley’s mines and power stations, including Yallourn, and many settled locally after completing their initial employment contracts. State Library Victoria’s account connects this continued settlement to the security of industrial work.

Community life subsequently developed around a Saturday school teaching Ukrainian language and culture, and a hall used for concerts, religious celebrations, folk dancing, weddings and meetings. Neighbours were invited to take part. These were institutions of the wider Latrobe Valley Ukrainian community: the South hostel was one temporary accommodation site within a much longer regional history.

The association that grew out of that settlement met in a hall which had been moved from Yallourn and rebuilt at Newborough. It closed in 2014, its president saying that the first generation of Ukrainian migrants had largely gone and that support and funds had run out; under an agreement with the Association of Ukrainians in Victoria the proceeds of the hall’s sale were to go towards a monument at the Immigration Park in Morwell. The president, who reached Australia by boat in 1949 as a two-year-old, described parents taken to Germany as forced labourers, then displaced persons camps, then three camps in Australia before the family settled at Sale, with his father returning at weekends from railway work at Moe. None of this is attached to the South hostel specifically.