Why did the 10 Pommes go?
From 1945 to 1972, over a million United Kingdom migrants travelled to their new Australian homeland on board ships of the P&O and Orient Line. Known as the Ten Pound Poms, this mass exodus was a scheme devised by the Australian and British Governments in order to help populate Australia.
What is the Ten Pound Pom program?
What was the original ten pound Pom scheme? In 1945, the Australian government introduced the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme to attract immigrants from Britain. Those who came to the country under the scheme were charged a £10 fare for their travel, more than 10 times less than the price of a normal fare.
What impact did the Ten Pound Poms have on Australia?
They needed people and they needed them fast, so they looked to the old world to populate the new. These ‘ten-pound poms’ would become central to Australia’s post war recovery and have left an indelible mark on the country. For Britons at the time, it looked like a great deal.
What was populate or perish?
‘Populate or perish’ was a rallying cry of post-World War II Labor Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell as he sought to overcome domestic resistance to immigration. For Calwell, immigration was the key to quickly boosting Australia’s population numbers in the interests of economic and military security.
Why do they call Brits poms?
POMS is an acronym standing for prisoners of mother England … it’s what Australians sometimes call the British. It is also a sports team dance squad that carry pom-poms.
Why do Aussies call Brits poms?
Australians have been using the word freely since its probable emergence in the late 19th century as a nickname for English immigrants, a short form of pomegranate, referring to their ruddy complexions.
Why do Australians call English poms?
Where did Ten Pound Poms come from?
The term ten pound Pom, (also ten pound migrant, ten quid migrant, and ten pound tourist), is first recorded in the 1970s. It refers to those people from the UK who migrated to Australia under the Assisted Passage Scheme, a scheme run by the Australian Government after the Second World War.
Are 10 pound poms Australian citizens?
Ten Pound Poms (or Ten Pound tourists) is a colloquial term used in Australia and New Zealand to describe British citizens who migrated to Australia and New Zealand after the Second World War.
What does the term white Australia mean?
The White Australia policy is a term encapsulating a set of historical policies that aimed to forbid people of non-European ethnic origin, especially Asians (primarily Chinese) and Pacific Islanders, from immigrating to Australia, starting in 1901.
Who coined the slogan populate or perish?
Arthur Calwell
The first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, promoted mass immigration with the slogan “populate or perish”.
Where did the term Pommie come from?
There are several folk etymologies for “Pommy” or “Pom”. The best-documented of these is that “Pommy” originated as a contraction of “pomegranate”. According to this explanation, “pomegranate” was Australian rhyming slang for “immigrant” (“Jimmy Grant”).