My wife and I live in a unit that is surrounded by other units occupied by workers at Harvey Beef and Harvey Fresh. Businesses like these need large numbers of workers who need to be housed. With all the new projects in our region the demand for accommodation has hit the headlines on many occasions.
The highly labour-intensive timber industry was also in this situation back in the late 1800s and up to comparatively recent times.
In those times expectations for accommodation were not high, so initially workers lived in tents and bush humpies. Fortunately, the industry was about a major building material and soon timber accommodation became available. This took the form of single men’s one-room huts, two-room cottages and four-room cottages, all built with green timber and roofed with galvanised iron. The use of the rooms was determined by the location of a fireplace for cooking. One or two verandahs were attached. These not only provided shade and places to sit but also extra sleeping accommodation. Later they were sometimes used to house bathrooms and laundries. Initially toilets and wash-houses (for laundry and bathing) were outbuildings. The latter usually had a copper, a copper tub over a steel or brick enclosed fire. Water wasn’t necessarily available from an internal tap and sinks and baths were optional extras. Lighting was from kerosene lamps and heating was from an iron stove and oven in the kitchen or an open fireplace. The rooms were sometimes lined with wooden boards but often, especially in earlier times, with hessian. Often improvements and modifications were made to the cottages by the occupants. All very basic but still appreciated by people isolated from the rest of the world and in the middle of dense forest.
We lived in modernised versions of these at a Forestry Department settlement near Wellington Mills where the house was built in the 1930s, and at a mill town called Donnelly River, house built in 1948. The rent for the Forestry Cottage was very cheap but the Forest Department charged extra for luxuries such as a hot water system; I think that this was two shillings and sixpence (25c) per week on top of the 6 pounds ($12) rent.[1]
Wellington Mills main street early 1900s, I Weetman/M Hall Collection
A Wellington Mills Forestry Department cottage.
One of the typical Yarloop mill cottages before the Fire, Shire of Harvey Municipal Inventory.
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[1] From ‘The Phoenix Rises Very Slowly’ Part 25, by Allan Ward.