I was a Ten Pound Pom – yes Oz was rough and ready but here’s what the BBC’s whinging drams gets wrong
I ARRIVED on Bondi Beach on my first day as a “Ten Pound Pom” during the summer of ’65.
The crescent of white sand in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, was thronged with athletic, sun-bronzed surfers in budgie smugglers and tiny bikinis.
I was a pallid, 22-year-old, 10st weakling in a charcoal-grey suit, carrying a portable typewriter and all my worldly goods in my grandmother’s cardboard suitcase.
For me and a million other Assisted Passage Migrants, a tenner was the bargain of a lifetime — a world totally foreign to the BBC’s death-and-disaster saga of Whinging Poms currently being shown on Sunday nights.
Home had been Redhill, Surrey.
Now it was a hostel in Tamworth, a bush town 200 miles north-east of Sydney, on the far side of the Great Dividing Range.
My first impression was of dazzling sunshine, gum trees, screeching cicadas, raucous cockatoos and endless horizons.
My second impression was of smiling, friendly Aussies and the discov- ery that this truly was a classless society.
OK, I was a “Pommy b*****d”, but that was merely a term of endearment.
Back then Britain was riddled by class division, captured brilliantly by the forelock-tugging “I know my place” sketch with John Cleese, Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker.
“I look up to him,” whimpers little Ronnie.
“And I look down on him,” sniffs Cleese. It was the time of the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, when the judge asked jurors to consider if they would “allow their servants to read” D.H. Lawrence’s saucy novel.
Back in Surrey, my dad was an upholsterer. Mum worked in the Co-op.
We played football or snooker. Golf, tennis, shooting, horse riding or waterskiing were toffs’ sports.
In my new home town (pop: 25,000) everyone could do everything.
And they did. We had an open-air, Olympic-size swimming pool where I learned the Australian crawl, a huge reservoir for water-sports and thousands of grassy acres to gallop around on horseback.
I even tried learning to fly, sadly wrecking the local gliding club’s only aircraft by crash landing.
All of this was possible on a modest disposable income.
My job with the local newspaper was to cover magistrate courts, councils, rodeos and drought.
Tamworth had a Working Men’s Club, but not as we knew them back home.
This club was a giant, air-conditioned palace of leisure, with bars and restaurants funded largely by one-armed bandits, or “pokies”.
One day I walked in and spotted the Mayor of Tamworth and the chief magistrate at the bar in shorts and thongs (flip-flops) drinking schooners (three-quarter pints) of ice-cold Pilsner lager.
“G’day, mate, come and join us,” they said.
That scene is burned in my memory as the definition of egalitarian society.
Of course, as the BBC’s Ten Pound Poms drama series makes clear, not everything was perfect in The Lucky Country.
There was the White Australia policy which included allowing in Southern Europeans but barred everyone else.
Aboriginals had been — and still were — treated appallingly.
New migrants were sometimes housed in decrepit hostels.
Children were shipped out from home, sometimes without their parents’ consent.
The Catholic Church is still facing up to its history of abuse.
But if you believe the BBC account, this was the hideous daily lot of all newcomers to Australia.
It was a world of incessant bullying, betrayal, corruption and drunken thuggery.
Sleep in a pig sty
In Episode One, a character is speared to death by a broken roof beam, due to negligence.
In a swirl of plot lines, Kate Thorne (Michelle Keegan), tried to kidnap her own child who had been forcibly sent to Australia before her, Annie Roberts (Faye Marsay) is unfairly locked up by cops, her husband Terry (Warren Brown) is involved in a night-time drunken hit-and-run collision with an Aboriginal child and Sheila Anderson (Emma Hamilton) tries to drown herself after being seduced by the camp “commandant”.
The sun does not shine on this dystopian distortion.
My father-in-law was a Barnardo’s Boy sent to Oz. He had to sleep in a pig sty on a farm.
It was hard, but he went on to make a good life for himself, an unlikely prospect in his native Liverpool slums.
My Dubliner father had a tough time arriving in London aged 12, when landlords had signs saying: “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs”.
Indeed, far from the savages portrayed in Ten Pound Poms, Australians were in the vanguard of the sort of social reforms which came late to the UK.
In 1965, dances and weddings saw the men at one end of the room, near the bar, while “the Sheilas” assembled at the other. They joined only to dance.
Pubs were men-only arenas, with floor-to-ceiling tiles and drains so they could be hosed down after the Six O’Clock Swill.
By 1970 it was a different world. Feminism took root early in Australia.
Pubs became soft-furnished lounges. Sheilas were in the vanguard of women’s rights.
Australia embraced its Aboriginal people. Gay rights made Sydney the Mardi Gras capital of the Southern Hemisphere.
Australia went green, forcing environmental restrictions on mining and saving historic inner-city areas from the wrecking ball.
This is a nation of immigrants whose example of fluid assimilation could offer a lesson to Britain.
It takes in the world’s huddled masses, on its own terms, and they mostly identify, after one generation, as Australian.
They include refugees from two World Wars, conflicts in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and tides from the Indian sub-continent, Vietnam and Hong Kong.
The population when I arrived almost 60 years ago was just over 11million. Today it is more than 26million.
Australia is still a land of smiling, friendly people.
I’m often asked why I left. I sometimes ask myself the same question.