When Aboriginal elder Aunty Theresa Williams opened the Camp Columbia WWII Symposium in August, she did more than offer a Welcome to Country. In her remarks, she shared a personal recollection that prompted a reassessment of Wacol’s post-war history: that she and her family lived for a period at the Wacol camp during the 1950s.
For many attending the symposium, this came as a surprise. Wacol is most commonly remembered as a former wartime military area and, later, as a migrant accommodation centre. It is rarely acknowledged as a place where Aboriginal families also lived in the immediate post-war years. Aunty Theresa’s recollection challenges that narrow framing and points to a more complex social history shaped by war, housing shortages and racial policy.
Aunty Theresa is a respected Brisbane Aboriginal Elder who regularly provides Welcome to Country and cultural guidance at civic, community and heritage events. Her role as an Elder reflects long-standing community recognition grounded in cultural authority, responsibility to Country and the transmission of intergenerational knowledge. In this context, her testimony forms part of a broader Aboriginal oral history tradition, offering insight into experiences that were rarely recorded in official documentation.
Long before the establishment of Camp Columbia during the Second World War, Aboriginal people lived in and moved through this area for thousands of years. While there are no confirmed archaeological records of permanent campsites or ceremonial grounds on the specific site later occupied by Camp Columbia, this absence should not be interpreted as evidence of non-use. Much of the area was later heavily modified by military construction and post-war redevelopment, which significantly disrupted earlier traces of Aboriginal occupation.
Research by Ray Kerkhove in his work Aboriginal Campsites of Greater Brisbane indicates extensive Aboriginal presence in the wider Goodna–Wacol district. He identifies the likely location of a campsite in the Goodna area at Goupong Park, above Goodna Creek and west of the former rifle range, placing Aboriginal activity within close proximity to the Camp Columbia landscape. Aboriginal Elders have also described the area encompassing Camp Columbia as part of a broader cultural and economic landscape, used for hunting across the plains down to the Brisbane River, where fishing formed an important part of subsistence and seasonal movement.
A further, coincidental detail underlines the layered nature of Wacol’s history. Aunty Theresa’s sister later married a Dutch migrant. While this family connection is not directly related to Camp Columbia, it resonates quietly with the site’s wartime role, when Dutch military and government personnel operated from nearby Camp Columbia during the Second World War. Across different periods, Aboriginal, Australian and European lives intersected around Wacol, often through circumstance rather than design.
Wacol as a post-war housing camp
Contemporary evidence confirms that Wacol’s role in the early 1950s extended beyond later memories of it as a migrant centre. A Sunday Mail article published on 1 August 1954, following inspections of Brisbane’s temporary housing camps, describes Wacol as part of a network of emergency housing sites created from former wartime troop accommodation.
The article refers to Wacol as a mixed community and notes that, while non-European families were present in several Brisbane camps, the majority were housed at Wacol. In the language of the time, these families were described as “coloured”, a term that reflected prevailing racial attitudes and administrative practices rather than precise identity. In 1950s Queensland, Aboriginal families living outside reserves were commonly subsumed under this label in both media and government discourse.
At the time of the inspection, around 200 families were living at Wacol in huts originally built for wartime use and intended to last only seven to ten years. By the mid-1950s, those buildings were already deteriorating. The article describes cramped conditions, limited privacy, poor infrastructure and concern that the camps would become long-term slums if not cleared more rapidly.
Significantly, Wacol was singled out as the camp where non-European families were most concentrated. Officials framed this as a social and administrative issue, using language about adjustment and community acceptance that reveals more about government attitudes than about the residents themselves. What the article makes clear is that Wacol functioned as a residual housing site for families who fell outside the normal pathways of public housing in post-war Brisbane.
Aboriginal families and the legacy of wartime infrastructure
Although the 1954 article does not explicitly use the word Aboriginal, its description aligns closely with Aunty Theresa Williams’ lived experience. Aboriginal families in urban Queensland at this time were routinely excluded from mainstream housing and were often accommodated in temporary, marginal or repurposed facilities, including former military sites.
Seen in this context, Wacol’s post-war use reflects a broader pattern in which wartime infrastructure continued to shape civilian life long after hostilities ended. Facilities built to support Allied operations during the Second World War became, in the post-war years, places where the social consequences of the war were lived out: housing shortages, migration pressures and the ongoing marginalisation of Aboriginal people.
Aunty Theresa’s recollection therefore does not sit outside the historical record. Rather, it fills a gap left by official documentation. Like many Aboriginal experiences of the period, her family’s time at Wacol was poorly recorded in government files, yet it is consistent with contemporary reporting and known housing practices of the era.
Relevance to Camp Columbia history
This history adds an important post-war layer to the Camp Columbia landscape. While Camp Columbia is rightly recognised for its wartime significance, including its role as a major Allied staging area and as the base for Dutch military and government activity in exile, its surrounding sites did not simply return to civilian normality after 1945.
Wacol’s transformation into a post-war housing camp demonstrates how Camp Columbia’s physical legacy continued to shape lives well into the 1950s. Aboriginal families, migrants and Australian-born residents lived in former military accommodation, navigating the aftermath of war in ways that are rarely acknowledged in official histories.
Recognising this continuity positions Camp Columbia not only as a site of military and diplomatic history, but also as part of a broader social landscape where the long tail of the war was experienced at ground level. Aboriginal presence at Wacol is therefore not an incidental footnote, but part of the lived post-war history of the Camp Columbia area itself.
Conclusion
Aunty Theresa Williams’ testimony, supported by contemporary newspaper evidence and broader historical research, invites a more inclusive understanding of Wacol’s past. It reminds us that the story of Camp Columbia does not end in 1945, nor is it confined to military and migrant narratives alone. The post-war use of Wacol as a housing camp, including for Aboriginal families, forms an essential part of the site’s historical continuum.
By acknowledging this history, the Camp Columbia Heritage Association contributes to a fuller and more accurate account of how this landscape shaped, and was shaped by, the lives of those who lived there after the war.