The war was barely over when Australia launched its Assisted Passage Migration Scheme in 1945 – and in many respects the project was about the war.
The urgency in the political slogan behind it – “populate or perish” – was a product of quite how close Japanese forces had come to Australian soil. The country, it was believed, needed people not only to work in its industries, but also to establish Australia as a home for the European races.
For Britons, the scheme promised an escape from post-war privations in favour of, as the billposters on walls in London put it, “a sunnier future”. For a processing fee of £10 (about £450 today, so not quite as cheap as it sounds) there was the promise of a new life as a “Ten Pound Pom”. By the time the scheme ended in 1982, more than a million British people, along with selected immigrants from other European countries, had taken up the offer. (The equivalent policy in New Zealand brought in about 77,000.)
Writer Danny Brocklehurst’s Ten Pound Poms opens in 1956 with Terry (Warren Brown, Strike Back), a former prisoner of war trying to feed his family as a builder but being crushed by PTSD and the drinking and gambling that accompany it. His wife, Annie (Faye Marsay, Andor), sees an ad in the paper and five minutes of dramatic time later, the family are stepping off the boat and into a new land.
They’re soon disappointed when they’re transported not to the promised suburban house with a sunny backyard but to one of the hinterland “migrant hostels” that held the new arrivals. There are further let-downs, as it becomes clear Terry’s only employment option is a brutal labouring job where he answers to Dean (veteran Australian character actor David Field), a gibbering racist sociopath with a thing about poms. But Terry and his family are in a sense prisoners: as a condition of the scheme, they’ve given up their passports for two years.
Brown is terrific, playing Terry with a tortured dignity, and the family’s situation is historically authentic even if Terry and Annie’s shock at rampant Australian racism seems overplayed. So it’s a shame Brocklehurst hasn’t had enough confidence in the social history to carry the story.
Instead, we get several subplots laid over a narrative that might have been interesting enough on its own. Kate (Michelle Keegan, Coronation Street), an unmarried nurse who drugs her fiancé on the eve of departure to make the voyage on her own, befriending Annie on the way, emerges as an awkward mix of grieving mother and femme-fatale spy. Other characters seem to exist only for the sake of other subplots.
The migrant scheme changed the lives of those who took it up – even the ones who eventually went home. It changed Australia politically (Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were both assisted migrants) and culturally. The Easybeats met at the Villawood hostel and AC/DC, the Bee Gees and Jimmy Barnes were all Ten Pound Poms.
It’s easy to imagine this story being told with a generational sweep that captures that change, but Brocklehurst has created a family drama with frills. It’s far from terrible – it looks good and the acting is strong – but the sense persists that it might have been more.
Ten Pound Poms, TVNZ 1, Saturday, June 3, 8.55pm; TVNZ+
