Ten Pound Poms

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Many of us have been watching a new BBC Sunday evening drama, Ten Pound Poms, prompting friends to ask how it compared with my family’s experience. The brief answer is completely different and I have found myself being irritated by some aspects of the series, not enough to stop me watching it though! In the drama it is the 1950s and the characters sail out to arrive in Sydney six weeks later, six seconds later for viewers. They are taken on a bus to a migrant camp, winding through bushland till some Nissan huts hove into view. My first annoyance was we had no idea how far away from Sydney they were, all it takes is for a character to say ‘blimey, a hundred miles from the city…’

Anyway, there they were with Nissan huts, dreadful looking outside ‘dunnies’ ( toilets ) and shower blocks. My running irritation is that one of the main characters, Kate the nurse, has make up more suited to modern reality shows or a girls night out. Her eyebrows are ridiculous and in the Australian heat her makeup would be running down her face, not that matron at the hospital would have allowed her to wear such makeup!

The Australians they meet are mostly awful, but so are some of the migrant characters; there are a lot of running stories packed in to this series. They seem to be in the middle of nowhere, but also near a country town, a hospital, the sea and some very swanky houses. What themes do ring true in this drama are the treatment of the Aborigines, who were not counted as humans in the census till the 1960’s and the fact that English children were sent out to Australia as orphans, but many had parents who didn’t know where they had gone.

Perth, Western Australia in the 1960’s

My family’s story is not as dramatic, for any of you who are watching the television series. It took Mum and Dad only six months from the time of applying to us all getting on a chartered migrant flight at Heathrow in October 1964. They chose Perth, Western Australia and we had a ‘sponsor’ who was a chap Dad knew ‘from the office’, the two families had never met. He met us at Perth airport at 1am and took us to the caravan he had booked for us. A week later my parents had found a house to rent. If we had needed to go to a migrant camp I’m sure my mother would not have stepped on the plane! By Christmas they had bought a house on a quarter acre block in a new suburb. Migrants were told that all houses were built on a quarter acre block, that idea didn’t last, but our house had natural bushland.

My novel Quarter Acre Block is inspired and informed by our family’s experience, but not autobiographical. It is told from the point of view of the daughter, who may have some similarities to me… and of the mother. Mum helped me with the adult experience point of view. In the rented house in an older suburb Mum said the only neighbour who talked to her was Dutch, but at our new house we quickly became friends with our new neighbours, who were dinky di Aussies from the goldfields of Kalgoorlie.

The lifestyle migrants looked forward to..

We knew little about Aborigines, I guess we assumed they were enjoying their lifestyle out in ‘the bush.’ We knew nothing about migrant children and stolen Aboriginal children being abused in orphanages.

‘In the nineteen sixties many ‘ten pound pommies’ had never left England before and most expected never to return or see loved ones again. George Palmer saw Australia as a land of opportunities for his four children, his wife longed for warmth and space and their daughter’s ambition was to swim in the sea and own a dog. For migrant children it was a big adventure, for fathers the daunting challenge of finding work and providing for their family, but for the wives the loneliness of settling in a strange place.’

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Have you been watching Ten Pound Poms, or have you or your family had experience of migrating to another country?

29 thoughts on “Ten Pound Poms”

  1. I’m in the US, so I have not seen the program, Ten Pound Poms, but I can certainly identify with seeing TV programs that never properly explain the experiences you have actually seen and lived! My mother’s family was British, and she and her two brothers migrated to different continents with their families – my mother to America, one brother to Africa, and the other brother to Australia. The one who moved to Australia, left a teaching career in Liverpool in the 1960s, and after arriving in Australia, joined the Royal Australian Air Force. From what I can tell, they all loved living there. I have lived in several countries (which I have loved) as a result of jobs, but I can’t imagine the experience of migrating to a new country and having to look for work and settle in from the start! I imagine it is both an exciting and a worrying experience for a family, and takes great courage and fortitude from the onset!

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    1. Hello Anita, your mother’s family certainly spread themselves round the world, they must have lots of tales to tell. My aunt and uncle went to Montreal with Uncle’s work for three years and he loved it, but my aunt did not. Mum’s other sister and her husband thought they were completely mad, but Dad’s side of the family followed us out. It was a challenge, but a friendly country that speaks the same language and shows British TV programmes was obviously easy compared with being a refugee in a strange land.

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      2. So Liz you would feel at home there. Canada is a lovely big country we don’t hear enough about. My aunt did track down some Canadian relatives in pre internet times. Then via Ancestry DNA the granddaughter of my grandmother’s older brother got in touch. He had gone to Canada before the first world war. I think I have lots of relatives there.

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  3. I have not seen Ten Pound Poms, but I am familiar with television/movies/books that miss the mark regarding accuracy and authenticity. While we like things to be entertaining, they should reflect the actual environment.

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  5. I remember my parents discussing the 10-pound opportunity of a lifetime that was touted everywhere they didn’t take it up…When we visited Kalbarri there is a big section at the skywalk on how the Aboriginals were treated and what is now being done to rectify the past …my daughter doesn’t think enough is being done and is quite upset about the treatment in certain places and what is still happening to this day especially where children and young adults are concerned…so sad and wrong as for Perth it most certainly has changed and not all for the better…I still love WA though …

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    1. Hello Carol, yes I have met lots of people who ‘nearly emigrated’.
      It’s hard to undo the destruction of a people’s history.
      Councils in towns and cities all over always manage to do things people don’t want, probably because money always speaks.
      Glad you had a great holiday.

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  6. Pingback: Monday Musings…12th May 2023…Cholesterol’s debated role in Heart Disease, The 10 pound Poms… | Retired? No one told me!

  7. I haven’t watched it but I assume that the experiences people had were very varied. As would have been their motivations for going. We look back and wonder how anyone could treat another group as ‘savages’ or ‘non-humans’, ‘export’ children and so on. But I wonder what my great great grandchildren will make of our world now?

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  8. I haven’t watched the series, but from what you’ve said, the conditions sound a lot like what happened to me and my parents when we arrived as refugees from Hungary [after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956]. I turned four on the plane, somewhere over Bangkok, so my memories aren’t extensive, but I do remember the camp in Bonegilla. It was awful, as was the food. Luckily we weren’t there for long as my Dad [an engineer] got a job in Wagga Wagga at a brick factory as a labourer. We lived with an Australian family on the outskirts of Wagga, and that year will always shine in my memory as one of the happiest of my life. 🙂

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      1. It was good of Australia to take Hungarian refugees and bring us out by plane, but I think there was a world of difference between a New Australian who was a ‘Ten Pound Pom’ and one who arrived with nothing from Europe. The average Australian didn’t want us here back then. That’s what we discovered when we arrived in Melbourne. The contrast to the warmth and kindness we experienced in the country was quite stark.

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      2. That was hard for your family. It is of course ironic that any white Australian would be prejudiced against newcomers when they had stolen the land from the original inhabitants! Yes there was a pecking order in the sixties with Greeks and Italians for example, more likely to be biased against than English and Aboriginals were at the bottom of the pile.

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      3. Yep, and then post Vietnam there was another wave of refugees and they were shunned as well, but the Aboriginals remained at the bottom of the list. I think it’s only now that the average Aussie is starting to see Indigenous people and their culture as something for /us/ to be proud of. Change has been a very long time coming.

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