Visible Britons

Of late, there has been a welcome surge in the study of British migrants in Australia. James Jupp’s The English in Australia (2004) provided one of the first overviews since the 1960s. Andrew Hassam followed migrant Britons from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and younger scholars such as Sara Wills, Carole Hamilton-Barwick and Lorraine Proctor have begun to explore the local intricacies of settlement and identity. Given both the subject – numerically the largest of the postwar migrant groups – and the growth in historical and sociological accounts of immigration and multiculturalism since the 1970s, the surge has been a long time coming.

In Ten Pound Poms, the study of Australia’s British migrants most definitely comes of age. The culmination of a decade spent listening to hundreds of life stories, this masterful book shares with the best oral histories a commitment to empathy and to getting myriad stories right. Using letters, diaries and photographs, Hammerton and Thomson place people’s intimate journeys into the stories of large-scale movements without ever sacrificing those people to abstractions. They might be buffeted by the forces of history, but the characters in this book are decision-makers, negotiators and knowing compromisers.