Just a roof over their heads: temporary dwellings on Sydney's urban fringe 1945-1960

This thesis is an historical investigation of the construction and occupation of temporary dwellings in post-war suburban Sydney, a crucial early shaper of suburban development and home-ownership yet an under-researched phenomenon in Australian urban and housing history. Between 1945 and 1960, a critical housing shortage forced thousands of Australian families to live in garages, huts, sheds, tents and other makeshift homes that became a long-term feature of the outer suburban environment of most cities and towns. The largest proportion of these dwellings existed on the metropolitan fringe of Sydney, Australia’s largest city. Generally constructed by their mainly working-class owners and used as interim accommodation while they amassed the financial and material resources to construct a permanent home, typical examples used basic materials and construction techniques and provided very restricted accommodation, while a lack of public utilities and infrastructure forced the occupants to be almost fully self-reliant. The dwellings were commonly designed to be removed or repurposed as domestic outbuildings, however examples remain as material evidence of the living conditions accepted by occupants in their pursuit of housing security during a period of crisis. Using the interpretational frameworks of theories of human motivation, historical institutionalism and systemic cycles of accumulation, the thesis investigates the advent, existence, and decline of these dwellings as a viable housing form and introduces a theorized analysis of the circumstances which underpinned the presence of this transitory form of housing in one city in Australia. The historiographical approach adopted is that of the Annales school, which regards the social, political and economic aspects of historical events equally. The research methodologies of historical interpretation, case-study and oral history interviews are employed, in the form of archival investigations, site assessments and 35 interviews, to survey the scale of the phenomenon and locations of dwellings in three Sydney localities and assess the various types of buildings used for shelter, their structure, materials, and context as well as the occupants’ living conditions and methods of financing. This thesis provides a portal into a new dimension in the study of mid-twentieth century housing in Sydney, and the very human struggles for secure shelter, satisfactory living conditions, and entry into the post-war housing market