The Trip Of A Lifetime

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday October 29, 2007

Larry Schwartz

One million Brits took part in a unique migration, writes Larry Schwartz.

All Saints star John Waters was raised in south-west London. "I was a melancholy kid," he says. "I was moping around."

He knew little of Australia until his uncle Tom told him of his experiences as a bookkeeper on outback sheep and cattle stations. Waters decided to investigate an Australian migration scheme that provided passage to Australia for #10. "I didn't know much about city life in Australia . . . I thought I could go and be a cowboy."

In late 1968, the 19-year-old Waters went to work on a sheep station, 120 kilometres from the central Queensland town of Longreach.

After wintry London, Longreach might have seemed infernal but Waters was unfazed. "It was January," he says. "I'd left snow behind. It was [46 degrees] when I stepped out of the train. I had no fear of that. I thought, 'This is fantastic. This is what I've been hankering after.' I wanted it to be as hot as it could and I wanted to see this bizarre place. It was like going to Mars for me."

Waters narrates Ten Pound Poms, an ABC documentary examining the scheme, which attracted more than a million British migrants to Australia. "It may have been one of the largest planned migrations of the 20th century," director Lisa Matthews says, "but their stories have somehow slipped from the radar."

The scheme lasted from the mid-1940s until 1982. Migrants were "sold the dream of a modern British way of life in the sun". Propaganda films lauding a beach lifestyle, abundant food and space were persuasive to those living in London after World War II. London may have been "swinging" by the time Waters contemplated coming here but he says it was still hard for a young person to find a job.

Many migrants sailed from Britain on liners but Waters flew out on a chartered Bristol Britannia airliner that picked up Italian migrants in Rome and refuelled at stops including Calcutta, Bombay, Singapore and Darwin. In Brisbane, he found a man who knew his uncle and recommended a station outside Longreach, saying, "No other bastard is mad enough to want to go out there."

"I worked as a station hand," Waters says, "and was not qualified for country life at all. I turned my hand to what I could and they took [pity]."

Only once was he berated for his background. "One of the station hands was a bit of an ignoramus. He told me to 'shut the f--- up, Pommy bastard.' He was very much on his own. All the others said, 'Don't worry about him."'

Under the scheme, migrants had to remain in Australia for at least two years or pay the full fare for the passage home. Many were disillusioned by life in Australian cities, which they found relatively backward, and 250,000 returned to Britain. Nearly half of those, however, returned to Australia.

After Longreach, Waters gained a lead role in the 1969 Sydney production of the rock musical Hair before returning to England in 1971. He soon came back, borrowing money to pay the full fare. "I discovered as the years went by that I preferred it," he says. "It is a more egalitarian society."

Waters became an Australian citizen in the mid-1990s and retained his British passport. He frequently returns to England with his wife, Zoe, who is from Leeds. "I've become a part of Australia through my work," he says. "And yet . . . I feel my Englishness very, very much."

Ten Pound Poms airs on the ABC on Thursday at 8.30pm. See preview, page 24.

© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald

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