A feature by Emma Schloeffel and Serena Farrington
Tucked between the glass buildings of UOW’s Innovation Campus and the flats of university student accommodation, a couple of curved corrugated tin huts still cling to the earth. They are Nissen huts – relics of a past Australia.
One now holds the Alumni Bookstore, the other a childcare centre. Seventy years ago, they were the homes for families stepping off of ships from Italy, England, Yugoslavia, and Denmark, chasing the post-war dream of a new life promised by the Australian government.
The old migrant hostel huts currently at UOW’s Innovation Campus. Picture by Adam McLean.
“The Nissan huts that we lived in were the same as what we kept our chickens in when we lived in England,” Tracy Sands recalls.
Tracy turned six inside one of these huts – cake, jelly, and ice cream shared on creaky floorboards, perched between two single beds and a pull-out lounge, listening to the muffled sounds of the family next door through impossibly thin walls.
Six weeks prior, her parents had been notified by the Australian Government that if they could pack up in time, they had a spot in Australia.
“We could only bring so much, so my younger brother Mark and I could only bring one toy each. I still have Larry the Lamb.”
At the time, there were 182 of these huts, lined up in neat rows across Squires Way in Fairy Meadow. Together, they formed the Balgownie Migrant Hostel – a makeshift village built in the early 1950s to house the influx of new arrivals under Australia’s ‘populate or perish’ program.
At its peak, in 1956, more than 1,100 people called the hostels home. The communal dining halls served 3,000 meals a day in a steady rhythm of clattering cutlery and murmured conversations. Outside, buses rumbled in and out, ferrying men to shifts at the Port Kembla steelworks, while children darted barefoot between the huts, kicking tin cans, chasing one another, and inventing games in a dozen different languages.
The Balgownie Migrant Hostel. Image sourced from the Illawarra Mercury.
For 35,000 migrants, this was their first taste of Australia – a patch of corrugated iron and red dirt where hope met homesickness.
And for Tracy’s family, who arrived from rural England, it was the beginning of a new life.
“We arrived in Australia on Friday the 13th, and it frightened mum as she thought it was bad luck,” Tracy said.
“I think it was probably good luck.”
Her fears didn’t last long. Tracy’s mum, Margaret, now 88 years old, fondly recalls her time at the migrant hostel.
“It was so lovely, just like a holiday.”
At the hostel, life looked completely different for Margaret as a mother of two.
“Her days were filled with looking after my brother and me and going to the beach. Nothing like the work she had to do in England,” Tracy says.
“In England, it was all work. If she wasn’t working in the house, she was working in the garden or in the chicken sheds.”
Tracy stood at the back with her younger brother Mark. Accompanied by her friends Emma and Philippa, and a young Turkish boy who Tracy’s mum taught English to.
Tracy’s father, John, agreed that Australia was more work than play, and that there was no reason to ever return to England.
“Dad always said, “Why would I go back, it has been one big ruddy holiday since we got here!”
Of course, the hostel could not be entirely without flaws. For six-year-old Tracy, the meals were a disappointing drawback.
“I remember the packed lunches for school. I threw mine in the bin and the teacher pulled them out and made me eat them. The jam and butter had soaked through the bread and the bread was dry,” Tracy said, “I lived on jelly and ice cream.”
For most six-year-olds, a diet of jelly and ice cream might sound like the dream – but at the Balgownie Hostel, it spoke to something else. Food was a constant sore point among residents, many of whom arrived expecting a taste of prosperity and instead found rations that were barely edible.
The Illawarra Daily Mercury captured the frustration in May 1953, reporting claims of “starving” migrants. British couple Mr and Mrs W. Ray told reporters, “I’ve lost two stone in weight in two years… There have been maggots in the meat… We will live on the streets rather than eat that horrible food again.”
It wasn’t long after the first groups of British migrants arrived that frustration began to simmer. Within months, complaints about the living conditions at the Balgownie Hostel reached Canberra.
On 2 July 1951, a delegate representing the residents took their protest directly to the Minister for Immigration, Mr Harold Holt. The petition, signed by 102 residents of the hostel, read, “We, the undersigned, protest against the increased tariff to be imposed from the 1st July 1951, until such time as facilities in this hostel are greatly improved and brought up to the standard promised us whilst in the United Kingdom.”
An Illawarra Daily Mercury article listed the complaints of the British Migrants.
They were as follows,
- “Meals of poor standard are being served to migrants”
- “No amenities are provided for the residents of the camp”
- “Meals provided children are lacking in nutriment”
- “Lighting in the camp is poor”
- “Conditions in the camp are generally poor”
Despite some subpar conditions and often distasteful food, through the eyes of five-year-old Snežana Petersen, the Balgownie Migrant Huts were a new-found paradise.
She arrived with her family from the former Republic of Yugoslavia on the 9th of June 1970.
“It’s the day that I celebrate every year,” shared Snežana.
After Snezena’s time at the hostel, her family made their way to Erskinville, the heart of Sydney’s inner-west, a suburb whose culture is founded on the hard work of immigrants.
“We were one of the families that moved to Sydney. We moved to Erskineville and lived and shared a home, a terrace house with another Yugoslav family,” she said/
The impacts of the Balgownie migrant hostel travel well beyond personal stories, having helped shape current communities throughout the Illawarra and greater Sydney Areas.
“Wollongong became a little bit multicultural, I would say most definitely. So did Sydney as well, in the 70s,” Snežana said.
“You had the Balkan restaurants in King’s Cross. Different foods were introduced. Migrants brought their own flavour, and as the 70s went on, delicatessens opened up, and this opened up and that opened up.”
Now living on the Sunshine Coast, Snežana’s home is a mosaic of memories from the era of the Balgownie Hostel.
“Our home is full of all my memories from my childhood, of how Australia used to look, because they were the sweetest memories, that stuff was just so rich in my life.”
Below is a window into Snežana’s home now – a tribute to her family’s early days in Australia.
Today, whilst only two of the thin-walled, tin huts remain, the legacy of the Balgownie Migrant Hostel endures. For thousands of migrants, like Snežana and Tracy, the hostel was never just a temporary home, it was the threshold to their new life. Within those corrugated walls, the foundations of a modern multicultural Australia were laid, shaping communities that still carry their imprint today.