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A riveting history of the ‘Ten Pound Poms’, a wave of British citizens who migrated to Australia and New Zealand after the Second World War.
Between the 1940s and 1970s, more than a million Britons migrated to Australia. They were the famous 'Ten Pound Poms' and this is their story.
The authors draw on a vast trove of letters, diaries and personal photographs, as well as hundreds of interviews with former migrants, to offer original insights into key historical themes. They explore people’s motivations for emigrating, gender relations and family dynamics, the clashing experience of the ‘very familiar and awfully strange’, homesickness and the personal and national identities of both settlers and returnees.
Filled with fascinating testimonies that shed light on migrant life histories, ‘Ten Pound Poms’ will engage readers interested in British and Australian migration history and intrigued about the power of migrant memories for individuals, families and nations.
‘Masterfully traces intimate journeys and large scale movements without sacrificing people to abstractions.'
Times Higher Education
‘With its sophisticated use of oral history methodology and sensitive analysis [it] stands as a model for the exploration of migration.'
Oral History Review
‘One of the most engaging and finely written monographs of Australian immigration scholarship.’
Australian Historical Studies
‘Hammerton and Thomson pull together a vast collection of sources to give voice to British migrants in the post-war period.’
Catherine Kevin, History in Focus
‘With Ten Pound Poms, Hammerton and Thomson have provided a definitive history of this migratory movement.’
Shirleene Robinson, The Oral History Association of Australia Journal
Introduction
Part I: Emigration
1 Imagining Australia
2 Leaving Britain
3 Between two worlds
Part II: Britons in postwar Australia
4 Strangers on the shore
5 'Butlins without the laughs': life on the hostel
6 An Australian working life
7 Suburban dreams and family realities: making a home in Australia
8 Ten pound pioneers of the back-packing generation
9 ‘My wayward heart’: the British exodus from Australia
Part III: Migration, memory and identity
10 Coming 'home'
11 British Australians: migration, nationality and identity
Index