Brighton Army Camp has a history of adaptation to serve the shifting demands of the many communities it has welcomed, each a chapter in its story. Brighton Council recently took possession of the land with a vision for conservation and public use in keeping with its history.
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This is the story of a place. Such stories never end because places don’t disappear, they just evolve and continue. This story involves thousands of people, from near and far, and is shaped by some of humanity’s most shameful and most honourable acts. It is a place that has constantly adapted to respond to the always, and often suddenly, changing needs of both the local and the global community.
The Brighton Army Camp is a hugely sentimental place to thousands of Tasmanians, and thousands more from further afield, who have passed through its gates and undertaken military training there. Many more have a deep connection to the site via the multiple other roles it has played over the past 75 years. It is a place of rich cultural significance and story, visibly alive still in the gate entry and original streets, Remembrance Park, the grassed open space that was once used as parade grounds and a recreation area for those living at the camp and in the former hospital.
Before European settlement, this land formed part of the Big River Tribe territory. It was part of the extensive grassland valley, still visible today, that extended north from where Bagdad and Mangalore now lie that was created with fire as hunting lands. This part of Tasmania saw some of the earliest private land grants in Australia. The property was part of a larger 1840 land grant and was farmed up until 1930.
In 1931, Tasmania’s first commercial airline operations began when Charles Kingsford Smith’s Australian Airways began services between Melbourne and the site that was soon to become known as the Brighton Army Camp. The inaugural Australia to England airmail flight began its first leg from Brighton on November 19, 1931, with hundreds of people cheering it off. When a few days later it crashed in a Malaysian rice field, Kingsford Smith took off in the Southern Star from Sydney to collect the mail and carried it on to England before returning to Brighton early in 1932. In 1935, the government relocated the aerodrome to Cambridge.
Declaration of World War II on September 3, 1939, necessitated the urgent acquisition of the land by the Commonwealth for a permanent army camp. On the September 14, the Commander of the 6th Military District wrote to the Secretary of the Military Board recommending the purchase of the land for a military camp. It was approved within days and an expenditure of £200,000 was allocated for development of the site.
Amongst other attributes, the site was considered close to Hobart, but not so close that it would offer an enticing distraction to the young men and women arriving from around the country to train and work. The site began with two rows of ten tents, each tent housing eight men.
The camp was to be used for training militiamen from various units as well as universal trainees and reservists. It developed quickly and effectively became a small town, with more than 200 buildings and a large number of tents. Amongst all these buildings, there were three churches (Church of England, Catholic and Methodist), a theatre and airtight gas chamber fitted with observation windows for training in the use of gas respirators. The hospital building, the last remaining building today, had been completed by December 1939, an illustration of the urgency with which the camp was established.
The camp quickly had a larger population than the township of Brighton; in fact it had a bigger population than many Tasmanian towns at the time. By the end of November 1939, there were almost 1500 men based at the camp, and by 1941 this had grown to 2400. It was the establishment of the army camp, with all the activity, people and relationships this created, that made Brighton grow into the town it is today.
In early December, 1939, 525 officers and men left Brighton for further training on the mainland before sailing to Europe. The Mercury described them as “lean, sun-bronzed and fitter than ever before in their lives”. Thousands more took their place. Tasmanians and men from other states arrived for tra8ining courses throughout World War II.
From 1944 to 1946 part of the camp – where Dollery Court is today – was sectioned off to house Italian prisoners of war before dispersal to farms across Tasmania. The existence of a prisoner of war camp in Tasmania is a historical rarity, but during World War II POWs were moved southward in anticipation of invasion of Australia from the Pacific. “Known trouble makers and fascists were not sent to Tasmania”, according to official policy of the day. The Italian prisoners arrived by ship in Burnie and then had an 11-hour train trip to Brighton. In August 1944, the Brighton Army Camp was responsible for 863 Italian prisoners, though many of these would have been placed on farming properties at the time.
Despite technically representing the enemy, most accounts show the Italians were popular with Brighton residents, and those in charge of the camp were sympathetic to their circumstances and the effects of imprisonment. Many locals talked to the prisoners through the fence, learned a little Italian and allowed their children to play soccer with them. Some of these Italian POWs migrated to Tasmania after they had been compulsorily repatriated in 1946.
After the war ended there was a huge shortage of housing across the country. A campaign by state politicians, members of the public and The Mercury eventually overcame resistance from the Federal Government and some of the camp buildings were used as temporary housing.
Tasmanian Premier Robert Cosgrove wrote to Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1948 expressing the eagerness of Tasmania to participate in the Commonwealth migrant program, writing that the state could place 1000 migrants and that there was suitable accommodation at the Brighton Army Camp. A section of the camp became known as the Migrant Hostel and the first group of 180 childless couples, mostly displaced people from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Baltic arrived at the Brighton train station late one night and were trucked to the camp.
More migrants, many with children, came between 1949 and 1951. In June 1950 there were 164 children living in the migrant hostel and 15 births expected. Many of the migrants gained work for councils and in textiles, or in the case of a number of women, at Cadbury’s. Brighton Council today has two long-term staff members who arrived at the army camp as toddlers, both Polish refugees whose families settled in Brighton.
As their first home in Tasmania, often their first secure home for some time, the army camp is a special place for the hundreds of families who passed through it.
Meanwhile the site and its facilities continued to be used for army training with use intensifying during the national service intake from 1951-58 provoked by the Korean War. Army cadet and citizens military force unit camps also used the facility. During this era all men aged between 18 and 26 had to undergo 14 continuous weeks of national service training and enlist in a CMF unit for three years, followed by three to six years in the Army Reserve. The Brighton Army Camp was the Tasmanian location for the initial continuous training, bringing young men from all parts of the state. Today, most Tasmanian men within a certain age group have vivid memories of their time in Brighton.
Use of the camp by various army units continued after the end of national service ended.
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On Tuesday, February 7, 1967, the day that would become known as Black Tuesday, 60 people died and hundreds lost their homes as bushfires ravaged southern Tasmania. The Brighton Army Camp again responded to an urgent need and was quickly re-purposed, a large section being converted into a refugee centre for about 400 people left homeless by the bushfires.
From the 1970s through to the 1990s the camp was used by the Army Reserve and the 6th Training Group, but its importance was declining and in 1998 the camp was deemed surplus to Army requirements.
However, in 1999, 60 years after WWII was declared, the camp once again responded to an urgent need caused by distant events. A section of the camp was renovated and renamed the Tasmanian Safe Haven, and became the first place in Australia to provide a temporary home to Kosovars fleeing the Balkans War. One of the camp churches was converted into a mosque and about 400 Kosovars arrived under the UNHCR program.
There was no blueprint for dealing with the situation, and as such the Tasmanian Safe Haven developed the model that other centres around the country would follow. The Kosovars were free to come and go from the camp and quickly integrated into the Brighton community, becoming involved in local sporting and community activities. The broader Tasmanian community rallied and soon truckloads of donated clothes, toys, bicycles and furniture began arriving in Brighton. Brighton Mayor Tony Foster recalls an amazing time when people pulled together with a “sense of doing something for the world”.
After six months, the federal government announced it was safe for the refugees to return home. Some had nothing to return to; their homes had been destroyed. Again the Brighton community united, pleading that the Kosovars be allowed to stay, but by year’s end they had all been returned.
Soon after the Kosovars left Brighton, the Federal Government put the Brighton Army Camp on the market. The sale process involved a detailed study of the site, its heritage values and how the land could be best used. The study recommended that the bulk of the site be developed as a residential subdivision to cater for the growing population of Brighton. It also included a conservation plan requiring: conservation of the main gates and the hospital building; retention the large recreation area bounded by Menin Road and Lille Road, and retention of those road names; and a program to incorporate interpretation of the site to allow its history to be preserved and shared.
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Brighton Army Camp has a history of adaptation to serve the shifting demands of the many communities it has welcomed, each a chapter in its story. Brighton Council recently took possession of the land with a vision for conservation and public use in keeping with its history.
Most of the site will be redeveloped for housing; about 500 homes are expected to built over the next 10 years. This section that remains in public hands will be developed as open space for recreation, cultural events and community services for the growing population.
Brighton Council had the original camp gates incorporated into a new entrance, featuring a sculpture by Folco Kooper. Avenues of tupelo trees have been planted within and parallel to the old Menin and Lille Roads, which will become pedestrian and cycle ways. Behind the gateway, completed just in time for the 2015 centenary of Anzac Day, is the unique Remembrance Park, intended to provide a place of reflection and remembrance. It features huge corten steel blades representing the Rising Sun emblem of the Australian Army reaching outward from a large stone ring holding the apt words of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:
“I died with every death,
so I was able to live again
bound by my testimony
and by my unyielding hope.”
In addition the iconic park and event space, the council is developing concepts to re-imagine the former hospital building as a multi-purpose community building. It is thought that the building may be able to accommodate playgroup/childcare, a senior citizens space, artist’s studios, history room/event space, indoor market space and a range of other multi-purpose facilities and spaces.
With the help of a grant through the Tasmanian Community Fund and in partnership with the Heritage Education and Skills Centre in Oatlands, the council has begun restoring the former hospital building. The project involves a work team of local unemployed people working with guidance from specialist heritage builders, learning valuable skills and gaining qualifications while they restore an important community building for a fraction of what such works would normally cost. Some have even gone on to gain local employment or be accepted into further study.
The land that became the Brighton Army Camp seems destined to have an exciting future, adding pages to an already multi-dimensional story. Hundreds of families will live on the site in years to come and enjoy the public space, community hub and reflections of history. In keeping with the chapters already written, the army camp will continue to welcome people and serve the local community and, at times, the global community. And it will, no doubt, provide a few more surprises.
A publisher once told James that when he is asked for his bio, he should say: “James writes subversive essays about important things.” James felt a bit awkward about saying this publicly, but secretly he liked it. He has written for many publications. His books are Essays from Near and Far, Walleah Press, 2014 and The Balfour Correspondent, Bob Brown Foundation, 2017.
This article was first published in Issue 80 of Forty South print magazine.