Copyright theage
In 1975, Kelvin Templeton was an emerging teenage star footballer, who found himself without a dwelling after living with local, mainly elderly couples. One of them housed him in a backyard bungalow. The Bulldogs, then known as Footscray, came up with an astonishing accommodation solution – they placed Templeton, then 18 and straight out of Traralgon in Gippsland, in the Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel, alongside refugees and other “displaced persons.” Templeton was the only Bulldogs player of that time to live in the migrant hostel, where he shared a floor with two other men, whom he guessed were central European. “There was this really tiny sort of lounge room – it was a couple of chairs in it, that was about all,” he recalled of the migrant hostel, on the site of old explosives’ factory in Maribyrnong. “Off that were three doors, three bedrooms. I had one of them.”
