A 'temporary' life

They were poor, but they were happy. It was humble, but it was home. They were often just ordinary Queenslanders, forced to live in extraordinary conditions.

World War II was over but money was scarce. Jobs were hard to come by, and a house to call your own was, for many, a distant dream. Makeshift housing became common.

Many families simply couldn't afford to make ends meet and lived in flimsy bark shelters, rough cardboard boxes, pitched calico or hessian tents and plain old rusty tin shanties.

On 21 September 1946, The Courier-Mail reported about one Queensland family paying a tenth of the average adult male wage to live in a makeshift dwelling made of reject sawn timber and roofed with flattened kerosene tins. “Gaps in the walls and roof were plugged with paper... the only floor was dirt,” the newspaper report said.

Returning soldiers and an increase in immigrants created a national housing shortage made worse by a lack of building materials and a skilled workforce.

Times were certainly tough.

But in 1946 the Queensland Housing Commission helped ease the housing crisis pressure and the potential for wide-scale homelessness by converting old military buildings into temporary family accommodation.

A few years later in 1949 the Queensland Housing Commissioner, Mr W J Young, congratulated his staff for their hard work.

“Appreciation is expressed of the manner in which the staff available to the Commission has worked at high pressure throughout the year to cope with the heavy volume of work required to be performed,” Mr Young said.

“The demand for accommodation in temporary housing establishments has been heavy.

“In many cases there was no other accommodation available and many of the families were anxious to obtain the accommodation at low rentals.”

'Many cases' over the years added up to a staggering number – closer to tens-of-thousands. They were often large families who, from 1946 to 1960, were housed in these temporary quarters while they waited to be allocated a permanent house.

Known by those who lived in them as 'the temporaries', 14 were set up around the State. The conditions were crammed with little privacy; showers, toilets and laundry facilities were shared.

There were often no proper roads so women were forced to fight the unwinable war against persistent dust. The weekly family wash was a chore that took an entire day.

For some, camp life was a hard knock – but for the majority camp life was a blessing – and the promise of something better was just around the corner.

For many, those tough times were the best years of their life.

They were all waiting for the Australian dream - a place to call their own.