“Set on broad, high, gently sloping ridges, eleven miles south of the Brisbane General Post Office and just out of sight of the main Ipswich Road, lies the Commission’s greatest venture in housing, the Satellite town of Inala”—began the story of a new 1950s Brisbane suburb, also known as Serviceton.
At a cost of £20 million, it was to provide affordable housing, modern amenities, and coordinated infrastructure to thousands of working-class families. The seeming ordinariness of the suburb’s design was, however, misleading. Inala’s houses were prefabricated in Europe according to the Commission’s designs, then shipped to Brisbane together with construction workers—an undertaking made possible by special Commonwealth migration and import dispensations introduced to alleviate the pressing housing need. To address these global histories, the essay expands the methodological framework of construction history to the scale of an entire housing development.
By zooming into different layers of Inala’s design, this contribution reconstructs the global networks of materials, objects, people and ideas involved in the suburb’s construction. In doing so, the essay engages with the broader social and political conditions of post-war Australia, particularly interested in the points of convergence between the imported ideas and their local adaptations.
