[MUSIC PLAYING]
The Benalla Migrant Camp opened in December of 1949, and that was five years after the Second World War finished. And it was basically opened and designed to house people that had lost their homes during the Second World War in Europe and had nowhere to go. Benalla was a holding centre for the much larger Bonegilla Migrant Camp.
The wives of the men that went to the Snowy Hydro Scheme then needed to be housed somewhere, so they were sent to Benalla. At the same time, there was also a policy of decentralising factories to country areas. Benalla saw two huge factories open and used the migrant labour to flourish. One was a clothing factory. So people without much English at all could sit at a sewing machine and produce garments, dresses, and shirts, and things like that, and also work in Renold Chains, which was a factory manufacturing links for machine chains.
And so men and women worked at those factories. They were displaced people from the Baltic, so-called Baltic countries. And countries that hugged the Baltic Sea were Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland. And there's also a huge contingent of displaced ethnic Germans from former Baltic territories.
What happened with a lot of women-- that their husbands or partners were missing, so they actually did not know-- they hadn't seen their partners for years and years. And there are many stories like that where people-- where women with children basically made the idea to migrate for a new future for their family, because they had lost hope of ever being reunited with the father of their children.
So they were able to access 24-hour child care, because there was a creche there with live-in carers. And that was almost unheard of, which is why Benalla was referred to as the Benalla Experiment, because women would leave their children in the childcare and go off and work. And we're talking about the early '50s. So in those days, it was a very unusual thing for a mother of young children to head off to work and leave their children behind in the care of others.
And there is also a part to this story that I think is very difficult to retell, because it was something I was not aware of before I started this project. And that is that there was an active policy in Australia once women with young children arrived-- to make sure that they did complete their working commitments by encouraging the women to place their children into orphanages while they would be working off their two-year labour commitment to the Australian government. It was incredibly important to the migrants at the camp to maintain the culture of their homeland.
And I think, I can personally relate to that as a migrant, that when you are in a totally new foreign environment, you cling, probably more vigorously than you did in your home country, you cling to the customs of your homeland. One of the key differences between Benalla and Bonegilla, and probably the most crucial difference is that the people that stayed in Benalla Migrant Camp, particularly the women, stayed here for up to 15, 18 years was the maximum time. So there are actually some stories of women who arrived when the camp first opened, and never left the camp until the camp shut and they had to move out. And the government had to assist them to move out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
