FULL BOARD AND LODGING HOSTELS FOR MIGRANT WORKERS IN EARLY POSTWAR MELBOURNE

This article supports a number of recent calls for more research into Australian housing experiences, but argues that these enquiries should go beyond histories of traditional housing to include all types of dwellings and all tenure types. Based partly on a case study of a number of hostels for immigrant male workers established in Melbourne in the early postwar years, the article seeks to broaden our understanding of the accommodation options available to Australians at different times in their life cycles and at different periods in our history. This article has been peer-reviewed. Since the time of Robin Boyd’s Australia’s Home in the 1950s, Australian housing history has privileged architecture over people, and has focussed almost exclusively on the housing patterns of the well-to-do. In a recent History Australia article, Meredith Fletcher added her voice to a growing number of calls for a broadening of this history, insisting that more democratic housing histories include the stories of rural and regional Australians as well as the urban (or suburban) majority (Fletcher 2004 p. 08-2; Boyd 1961). Her call echoes similar ones by Patrick Troy and Tony Dingle, each of whom has been highly critical of our meagre understanding of the housing experiences of most Australians. Both Troy and Dingle have noted how remarkable it is that, for a country so wedded to the idea of ‘home’, Australia has so few studies of vernacular housing or knowledge of the everyday housing stories of ordinary women, men and their families (Troy 2000; Dingle 2000). Marilyn Lake has gone further in criticising Australian histories of housing, berating the heritage profession for its tendency to celebrate the housing stories of wealthy nineteenth century men while almost always ignoring those of women- including the women whose labour was essential to the running of large 'historic ' houses (Lake 1991). Two recen