THE hotels in Wollongong, south of Sydney, went through a major transformation during the 1930s, following a population explosion after the establishment of Hoskins Iron and Steel Works at Port Kembla in 1927.
The works, a few kilometres south of Wollongong, became Australian Iron and Steel the following year, and as the 1930s progressed, the Illawarra region struggled to accommodate the thousands of men seeking employments at the works.
The old pubs that had lined Wollongong’s Crown Street for almost a century, catering for farmers and coal miners, suddenly became inadequate to cater for the influx of men.
To compensate, the hotels underwent major renovations and extensions to provide for the increase in population. Despite this the pubs were unable to keep pace with the rapid growth.
By the late 1930s it was obvious Wollongong needed more hotels to accommodate the steelworks swelling workforce.
On the eve of the completion of two new hotels at Wollongong – The Grand (November 1937) and The Illawarra (November 1938) – Sydney newspaper, Smith’s Weekly sent a reporter to Wollongong.
The reporter found it almost impossible to find accommodation in the overcrowded hotels, revealing, in a story published on September 11, 1937, the cramped conditions.
The reporter told how in some houses of accommodation steelworkers were “double-banking” in beds, and how, in some cases, three men were using the beds in shifts over 24 hours!
“ALL the situations conceived by Gilbert and Sullivan in their libretto, “Box and Cox,” have been brought on to the stage of real life at Wollongong, rejuvenated city of steel and coal on the South Coast of New South Wales.
Flooded with a new population of workers employed in their thousands by the rapidly expanding steel works and subsidiary industries of the adjoining Port Kembla, Wollongong is suffering from such an acute shortage of beds that it has produced not one Box and Cox, but hundreds.
IT was revealed to ‘Smith’s Weekly’ that not only are some of the workers ‘double-banking’ in beds, but, in cases, three men are using the beds in shifts over the 24 hours. A representative of “Smith’s,” on an assignment to the South Coast last week, dropped into Wollongong, unaware of the accommodation shortage, and this was his experience.
About 10pm he decided to take a room at an hotel, but a round of the leading hotels resulted in nothing but an apology from proprietors, apparently astonished at the existence of such an optimist. From the last hotel, ‘Smith’s’ was directed to a boarding-house, where the landlady offered a bed on condition that it should not be used be used before 11.30pm – as one of the ‘steelies’ was sleeping out his shift. It was a further condition that the bed should be vacated by 7am, so that another home-coming worker should be accommodated.
Offered undoubtedly in the friendliest spirit, ‘Smith’s’ representative was impelled to decline it. Out on the foot-path he met one of the ‘Boxes’ or ‘Coxes’ of the show. He said that the place contained 15 rooms, and that there were 53 men living there. In another place, he said, five men were sleeping in a garage with no light. For their board the men were paying up to 30 shillings a week, and the landladies offered them a special inducement of 5 shillings a week reduction to go home to mother at the weekend, where that was possible. It was only through a thousand-to-one chance of meeting a personal friend that ‘Smith’s’ man finally got a real bed with no proviso.
Miners and steelworkers have been forced to solve their accommodation problem by going far out of Wollongong, and now some of them are living as far as 25 miles from their work at Port Kembla. To catch the shifts for these men, the Railway Department is running special trains from as far north as Scarborough. Houses for private families are a practical impossibility except for those able to pay big rents, and many, well-placed people on the Coast are sharing their homes.
The hotels of Wollongong are very modern, and when accommodation can be obtained it is of a very high order, but the situation must be eased both for the travelling public and residents. It is understood that the State Government has been stirred into activity, and the Licensing Board will investigate the situation as the first move. But even at the rate that building is progressing, it will be a long time before the Boxes and Coxes cease their 24-hour testing of Wollongong’s boarding house beds.
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Categories: Illawarra Hotels, NSW hotels
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