2005 Media Releases
Thursday, 18 August 2005
Australia’s new migrant plea recalls ‘Ten Pound Pom’ story
As Australia unveils plans to admit 20,000 foreign skilled workers to boost the economy, migrants from an earlier era are recalling their experiences in a new book co-authored by La Trobe University historian Dr James Hammerton.
Are there any lessons to be learned from the experiences of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’ for today’s migrants, who can spend as much as $30,000 to relocate to Australia?
The book, Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants, tells the story, based on their own accounts, of the one million so-called Ten Pound Poms – Britons who left for the promise of a better life via a £10 one-way passage in the decades after World War II. The book explores the motivations, the struggles, and successes British migrants experienced in Australia as well as those who returned to Britain.
The authors comment: “In many ways, British people who emigrate to Australia in the 2000s will have it easier than their predecessors. They won't face the acute housing shortage of postwar Australia and they should be able to afford to buy a new home, so they won't end up in the notorious migrant hostels.
“In the 1950s, Australia seemed as far away from Britain as Mars; today's migrants can travel relatively easily between the two countries, while email and mobile phones have made communication much simpler than it was in the days when a phone call 'home' was an expensive, annual affair.
“The regular migrant’s horror story of receiving the telegram from home only weeks after arrival informing of a parent’s death and being unable to return is unlikely to face the new generation of migrants.”
“But the new generation of migrants will still be lured by images of a sunny paradise, and like their predecessors they will need to realise that Australia is not just like 'Britain in the sun'.
“In subtle but powerful ways,” the authors say, “they too will experience Australia as profoundly strange, the converse of what Australians experience during their first visit to Britain: all the smells and tastes will seem 'wrong'; the Australians speak a different 'English'; they live and work in different ways, and they can still be brutal to 'Pommy' newcomers.
“Perhaps most importantly, new British immigrants will face the universal problems of all migrants: family dislocation and homesickness. Twenty-five per cent of Ten Pound Poms returned to live in Britain, mostly because of a desperate longing for family and friends or a nostalgic sense of 'home'.
“We could expect a similar return rate in the 2000s, though perhaps the ease of global travel will make it easier for 'boomerang migrants' to move back and forth between the two countries.”
Dr Hammerton is now researching this later generation of British migrants and is seeking their participation for his study.
“Stringent entry requirements to Australia and our ageing population are seen as reasons for the need to plug the skills shortage. It was a similar gap in the labour market that led to the Ten Pound Poms initiative – a solution as controversial in Australia then as is migration policy today,” Dr Hammerton says.
The hostility was reflected in some Ten Pound Pom experiences.
For example, Muriel Miller found out what Australia thought of her family when her children returned home from their first day at school there in 1963 and said: “Mum, what’s a Pommie b*****d?”
“That’s what they called my children,” remembers Muriel, who returned to England in 1966. Now back in Hove, East Sussex, Muriel regards those three years, however, as among the most exciting of her life. This opinion, common among returning migrants, is one of the key themes of the book, which draws on the experiences of more than 200 returning Ten Pound Poms together with 1200 who stayed.
Note: Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants, by A. James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson, is published by Manchester University Press, distributed in Australia by Footprint Books, Ph 02 9997 3973, sales@footprint.com.au.