Dudley Flats
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Dudley Flats Melbourne, Victoria |
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 Dudley Flats
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| Coordinates | 37°48′40″S 144°55′59″E / 37.811°S 144.933°ECoordinates: 37°48′40″S 144°55′59″E / 37.811°S 144.933°E |
| Postcode(s) | 3003 |
| Location | 3 km (2 mi) from Melbourne |
| LGA(s) | City of Melbourne |
Dudley Flats was a locality in Melbourne, Australia, in the 1920s–1950s, which supported a homeless camp during the Great Depression.
It was located near the Melbourne docks beyond Dudley Street, south of Footscray Road, and on either side of the Moonee Ponds Creek. The area was formerly part of Batmans Swamp, a large saltwater lagoon, which by the mid 19th century had become fouled with effluent from the growing city.
Dudley Flats was on the fringe of the Melbourne city area, and became a dumping ground, with rubbish tips and a destructor established in the 1860s by the Melbourne City Council and Victorian Railways. The Melbourne Harbour Trust deposited dredged silt as part of land reclamation, and the railways tipped ash from locomotives at the North Melbourne Locomotive Depot from around 1888.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s (and also possibly from an earlier date), the site was visited and then occupied by Melbourne's poor and homeless who scavenged for scrap and rags from the tips, and built humpies out of discarded rubbish such as old timber and corrugated iron, even lino and hessian sacking. By 1935, over 60 humpies had been erected along the waterways and around the rubbish tips.
Despite regular raids by the police and possibly Harbour Trust officers, who attempted to move people out and demolish their huts, the area continued to be occupied at least up until World War II. The camps had been able to remain or be reestablished in part because of disputes between the various government bodies over who had authority, with the Railways Department, Melbourne City Council, the Melbourne Harbour Trust, the Board of Works, and the Lands Department, all refusing to claim responsibility for the area. Some of the residents were unemployed or underemployed labourers who occasionally gained work with shipping agents and stevedores at times of peak demands, but were otherwise left to scavenge an existence as best they could. The social reformer Frederick Oswald Barnett made several inspections of the congested residential areas of Melbourne's inner suburbs in 1933, including Dudley Mansions as the humpies were called. He photographed the slums and the residents' living conditions and recorded information on the residents' state of health, income, and where they obtained work (if at all). This material contributed to reports on slum conditions which eventually pressured the government into passing the Housing Act of 1937.
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