Padua Hall was established by the Franciscan Friars in Kew in 1945. It provided a ‘halfway house’ for former residents of the Morning Star Youth Training Centre at Mt Eliza, and also Catholic ‘youths’ who were wards of state with indeterminate sentences. Padua Hall closed in 1960.
According to ‘A piece of the story’ (1999), it provided a ‘halfway house between the Morning Star Youth Training Centre at Mt Eliza and complete rehabilitation for Catholic youths who, under the then Victorian legislation, had been committed by the courts to the Centre as Wards of State with indeterminate sentences’.
The first residents arrived in March 1945. As well as the boys, there were 2 priests and 2 matrons at Padua Hall (Advocate, 24 April 1946).
Padua Hall was listed as a government subsidised hostel in the 1953 annual report of the Children’s Welfare Department and Department for Reformatory Schools.
At a ceremony to mark the opening of Padua Hall in 1946, the Archbishop of Melbourne stated that the Franciscan Fathers were “handicapped when the time came for the boys to leave [Morning Star] as there was no home for them and, perhaps, nobody was ready to help them. The Fathers recognised that in going out in the world the boys would face many difficulties. It was their idea for a long time to establish a hostel for the boys when taking up work in the community” (Advocate, 8 May 1946).
The building, which was formerly a girls’ grammar school and a ladies’ boarding house, had 22 rooms. In May 1946, 17 boys were living at Padua Hall.
Padua Hall became financially non-viable with the passage of the Children’s Welfare Act 1954, which made all sentences for children determinate (Department of Human Services, 2001). Padua Hall closed on 30 September 1960.
Padua Hall became a boarding house when many Slovenian male migrants stayed when the first arrived in Melbourne. Later it was known as Baraga House, a religious and cultural centre for Slovenians in Australia.
From
1945
To
1960
1945 - 1960
Padua Hall was located in A'Beckett Street, Kew, Victoria (Building Still standing)
