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.”

Former VFL champion Kelvin Templeton. Credit: Wayne Taylor

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

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