These three camps were stopovers for an estimated 100,000 people on their way to somewhere else. Children at the Bradfield Park camp in the early 1960s Credit:Michele Brighton For my family, moving to Bradfield Park was a shock. With nowhere else to go it was somewhere for a bankrupt family to stay - we weren't migrants, just homeless after a bank turfed us out of the house my father and his brothers had built themselves at Padstow - until a Housing Commission place came up. But with its cramped and dilapidated huts and dirt roads, it never felt like home for a seven-year-old whose parents were struggling with financial disaster and our father's ill-health. It was six months of character-forming experiences: collecting firewood from demolition sites and the bush so my mother could cook on a fuel stove; rock fights with a gang of scrappy English kids from the migrant section of the camp; cockroach infestations; fighting a bushfire threatening the camp and being robbed at knifepoint on the way to the shops.

After visiting Bradfield Park in 1961, Liberal MLC Roger de Bryon-Faes suggested setting fire to what were not just slums but "breeding grounds for disease, unhappiness, social misfits and communism, in which human beings degenerate and become frustrated and bereft of all hope, initiative and ambition." He added that: "These hovels must be the most miserable place in Australia." Although there are echoes of his comments in recent protests about new affordable housing developments in well-off suburbs, the many former residents who went on to productive and successful lives suggest he was over-reacting. For star actor Bryan Brown, living in Bradfield Park with his mother and sister was a happy time. His family had been staying with a friends and relatives before a Labor councillor helped them get into the camp while waiting for a Housing Commission home in 1951. "I remember it incredibly fondly," Brown says. "They were all Nissen huts that we lived in. You played underneath them because they were up on stilts in a lot of areas." While they had to use shower and toilet blocks, it was an adventurous time for a boy.

Children play in the puddles at Bradfield Park in 1958. Credit:Bruce Adams "The great thing was there was a massive amount of bush around," Brown says. "Even at the age of four, we all had our gangs. I can't even start to think what they must have been like. At one stage we dug a hole, put glass in it and covered it up so the other gang might fall in it. As luck would have it, I ended up falling in and having to go up to the doctor's and getting 12 stitches on my arm." Brown remembers his mother had to take on part-time work after his father left. "My mother taught me at a very early age that if the welfare men came, just tell them mum is visiting Aunty so and so," he says. "She made us very wary of the welfare man. She said if he comes, he can take you away if she gets caught being a worker." Brown thinks his family was at Bradfield Park for nine to 12 months.

"I remember it incredibly fondly": Bryan Brown Credit:Matilda Brown "You got three offers of Housing Commission houses," he says. "You could turn the first two down but you had to take the third one, wherever they sent you. I remember we got offered Panania as our first one [and later on] mum said 'I didn't know what second or third would be and I wanted a home so we took the first one'." Bradfield Park scene with former resident Catherine Haines (centre) hitching a ride in 1952. Credit:Catherine Haines While he believes embarrassment about the camps is the reason Bradfield Park is so little-known now, Brown says he has never felt that way about them. "I've always thought of them as an incredibly important part of the society for those people who didn't have the opportunity of being able to get a house that was clean and secure, where you were looked after until maybe you could find a house," he says. "They weren't scummy or anything. They were quite reasonably looked after. I know my mother had enormous pride [in ours]."

On two Facebook pages devoted to Bradfield Park, former residents cheerfully share anecdotes and photos, and arrange reunions. Former hostel resident Jan Wright (back row centre) with friends at Bradfield Park in either 1966 or 1967. Credit:Jan Wright Catherine Haines, a former NSW Police Force Academy teacher who lived at Bradfield Park in two stints from 1952 to 1958 after her family migrated from Scotland, also remembers it fondly. "For kids it was great," she says. "You just ran wild. You just ran free." While the challenges for families in the migrant camp including eating at a canteen rather than cooking themselves, Haines was much happier there than when her family moved into a Housing Commission home at the newly developed Lalor Park.

"They were little sheds, I suppose, the huts," she says. "No airconditioning, no flyscreens. Kids adapt though, but I don't know how the parents did it. The accommodation was pretty awful and they weren't able to live normal lives so close to each other." A former associate professor at the University of Sydney's government department, Michael Hogan, who lived at the camp as a 10-year-old in 1947, has chronicled its colourful history in the book Almost Like Home. He notes that Bradfield Park is so poorly remembered that a plaque on the site now gets the dates wrong - suggesting that it was a migrant camp from 1955 to 1973 instead of 1949 to 1971, and failing to even mention the larger "Australian" settlement that ran from 1947 to 1964. Hogan says there were many reasons for the housing emergency at the time, including the lack of new construction because of the Depression and the war; returning soldiers needing homes; the post-war baby boom; inner city slums being razed; country people moving to the city; evictions from rent-controlled properties; and Britons arriving in the wave of post-war immigration. "Unlike modern homelessness, it involved mostly complete families and not just socially displaced individuals," he writes.