Migrants of the British diaspora since the 1960s: Stories from modern nomads 9781526116581

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Hammerton

The book charts the decade-by-decade shift in the migration landscape, from the 1970s loss of Britons’ privilege in destination countries and the 1980s urgency of ‘Thatcher’s refugees’, to shifting attitudes to cosmopolitanism and global citizenship by the 1990s. Key moments are the rise of expatriate employment, changing dynamics of love and marriage, the visibility of British emigrants of colour, serial migration practices, and ‘lifestyle’ change ambitions. These are new patterns of discretionary and nomadic migration, which became more common practice from the end of the twentieth century. The book will appeal to students and teachers of migration history for its unique coverage of modern migration and its novel treatment of migrant mentalities. Its engaging style will also appeal to general readers, especially former and current British migrants, who may well recognise themselves in some of the compelling migration stories. A. James Hammerton is Emeritus Scholar in History at La Trobe University, Melbourne Cover: World map with passport stamps © iStock by Getty Images

Migr ants of the British diaspora since the 1960s

This is the first social history to explore the experience of British emigrants from the peak years of the 1960s to the emigration resurgence at the turn of the twentieth century. It scrutinises migrant experiences in Australia, Canada and New Zealand alongside other countries. The book challenges the assumption that the ‘British diaspora’ ended in the 1960s, and explores its gradual reinvention from a post-war migration of austerity to a modern migration of prosperity. Building on previous oral histories of British emigration to single countries in post-war years, it offers a different way of writing migration history based on life histories, but exploring mentalities as well as experiences against a setting of deep social and economic change.

Mig r ants of the British dia spor a since the 1960s Stories from modern nomads

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

A. James Hammerton

Migrants of the British diaspora since the 1960s

Migrants of the British diaspora since the 1960s Stories from modern nomads

A. James Hammerton

Manchester University Press

Copyright © A. James Hammerton 2017 The right of A. James Hammerton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 1657 4 hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

For Marion

Contents

List of figures page viii List of tables x Acknowledgements xi List of abbreviations xiii Introduction: the modern drive to emigrate

1

Part I: Migration from austerity to prosperity 1 Postwar pioneers of modern mobility: the 1940s to the 1960s

27

2 The decline of British privilege: migrants of the 1970s

54

3 Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries: discretionary migration in the 1980s

82

4 Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’ from the 1990s 105 Part II: Life stories of modern migration 5 Migration and career stories: work in an age of mobility

135

6 Family, love, marriage and migration: the push and pull of private life

161

7 The quest for new lifestyles: migration, treechange and grey nomads 182 8 Changing faces of modern migration

207

Appendix: Tables 1–8 241 Bibliography 246 Index 255 vii

List of figures

  1 Jenny Janes (Armati) ‘Chelsea girl’ window dresser, London, 1970. Image Jenny Armati page 2   2 Susan and Theo Charles-Jones before leaving for Australia reported in the News, Portsmouth, October 1970. With permission of the News, Portsmouth 43   3 Susan Charles-Jones and family with animals, at home in Yackandandah, Victoria, Australia, 1978. Image Susan Charles-Jones 44   4 Maurice Bassindale in bachelor quarters at Riyadh compound, 1978. Image Maurice Bassindale 76   5 Communal barbecue at Maurice Bassindale’s Riyadh compound, 1978. Image Maurice Bassindale 77   6 Maurice Bassindale on Sydney Harbour, 1986. Image Maurice Bassindale 78   7 Aspiring migrants queuing in the rain for an Australian information day, Manchester, March 1981. Image Barry Pollitt 83   8 Barbara Ingram-Monk’s husband, Graham, at Blairlogie, New Zealand, feeding alpacas, March 2003. Image Barbara Ingram-Monk 112   9 Barbara Ingram-Monk at Blairlogie, New Zealand, painting house, April 2003. Image Barbara Ingram-Monk 113 10 Barbara Ingram-Monk at Kina, near Nelson, New Zealand, with alpacas, December 2004. Image Barbara Ingram-Monk 113 11 Judy Higgs with children, meeting Queen Mother at the Royal Herbert hospital, London, in 1972. Image Judy Higgs 144 12 Beth McIntosh at home in Byron Bay, 2006. Image Beth McIntosh 198 13 Jennie Christie in Toronto, 1972. Image Jennie Christie 203 14 Jennie Christie and Victor with campervan in Darwin, 2016. Image Jennie Christie   205 viii

List of figures  ix 15 Book cover of Eunice Gardner’s The world at our feet, 1957. With permission of Random House 16 Eunice Gardner and Diana Williams ‘on the road’, waving to a Malayan pearl cutter, near Broome, Western Australia, c. 1954. With permission of Random House 17 Julie Watts family farewell to son Daniel to London at Melbourne airport, 1996. Image Julie Watts 18 Stephanie Hayward at Ashes cricket match with England’s ‘Barmy Army’, Perth, 2006. Image Stephanie Hayward 19 Stephanie Hayward, with husband and daughter, at Australian citizenship ceremony. Perth, 2007. Image Stephanie Hayward 20 Best of British shop front, Floreat, Western Australia. Image Anne Howe 21 Anne Howe in Best of British TV interview for birth of Prince George, 2 June 2013. Image Anne Howe  

217 218 227 230 230 233 233

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

List of tables

All tables appear in the Appendix, p. 241 1 Emigrants over 15 living in OECD countries by selected country of birth, 2010–11 page 242 2 Emigration destinations, select years to select countries, British citizens from UK 242 3 Estimates of British citizens registered living abroad, over 12 months, by country of residence, 2000–7, top 13 countries 243 4 British migrants to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, select years 243 5 Gender of interviewees 243 6 Social class of interviewees by occupation classifications (percentages) 244 7 British region of origin of emigrants and population (percentages) 244 8 Last residence of interviewees 244

x

Acknowledgements

Any large oral history project owes its first debt to those who volunteer to tell their stories. For this book some two hundred contributors offered their assistance, many with extensive written accounts. From these I selected 121 for interview, including fourteen couples, drawing in 135 interviewees across seven countries. Their engagement with the project, their frank and detailed testimony, often venturing into surprisingly intimate territory, helped to shape the book into the kind of social history of modern migration I hoped to write. Most needed little prompting, and their enthusiastic testimony, written and spoken, was in the best traditions of storytelling, sharpened by their awareness of the personal impact of mobility. Every interview, every written story, played its part in the book’s writing; unfortunately not all of them could appear in the text but they are listed in the bibliography. In different ways they are all the stars of the book. Original funding for the project came from the Australian Research Council in 2005 and from the then Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University. I am grateful to both. I have been fortunate to benefit throughout the writing from exceptionally frank and supportive advice from friends and colleagues. Most importantly, over several years the members of the ‘Melbourne life-writers group’ scrutinised each chapter in forensic detail, usually leaving me utterly drained but the chapters immeasurably improved. Over several years Ian Britain, Barbara Caine, Donna Dening, Susan Foley, Ruth Ford, Katie Holmes, the late Rhys Isaac, Jim Mitchell, John Rickard, Charles Sowerwine, Alistair Thomson and Christina Twomey provided a depth of intense collegial support that might inspire the envy of countless scholars. I enjoyed similar levels of support, discussion and occasional hospitality from colleagues and friends around the world, including Marilyn Barber, Tony Barta, Judith Brett, Richard Broome, John Cashmere, Nigel Dalziel, Anna Davin, the late John Hirst, Chris and Pam Jowle, Angela and Peter xi

xii  Acknowledgements Lamb, Andree Levesque, Philippa Levine, John Mackenzie, Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes, Eric Richards, the late John Salmond, Ken Seymour, Gwenda Tavan, John Tosh, Murray Watson and Jim and Pierrette Winter. The project would never have found its way without the indispensable support of a talented team of research assistants, particularly in the technical realms beyond my capacity, like database programme setup and thematic coding of transcripts. Marina Larsson was on top of the project from the start, followed by Janine Rizzetti and Marion Jones. As ever, Mandy Rooke performed sterling transcription work. My partner, Marion White, has been a consistent – and patient – source of intellectual and emotional support, an astute critic and prose-watcher; in a small measure of appreciation I dedicate the book to her.

Abbreviations

ABS ALP IBM IPPR IPS IRA IT MCP MO OECD ONS

Australian Bureau of Statistics Australian Labor Party International Business Machines Institute for Public Policy Research International Passenger Survey Irish Republican Army Information Technology Migrants Canada Project Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Office for National Statistics

xiii

Introduction: the modern drive to emigrate

Jenny Armati’s global migration story In 1971, Jenny Janes, 26, single and ‘with forty pounds in my pocket’, left London for Sydney, ‘just to have an adventure’, paying her own way to avoid the restrictive conditions of an assisted passage. Her impulse followed nearly a decade of work in fashion retail, designing window displays as ‘an art form’. ‘For ten years in swinging sixties London that’s what I did, forging a career in fashion retail that would take me around the world.’ The pay was low. At times she took a second job to make ends meet, but her emigration decision was not in the conventional mould of economic migrants, rather a diversion from personal dissatisfactions. Her thriving career had followed a turbulent, often dysfunctional, family life, with communist-inclined parents often at war with each other and never enough money, despite her father being an accomplished electrical engineer with London Underground. Still, together with her two brothers, she absorbed a strong parental work ethic, though not parental politics; her aesthetic interests in ‘nice things, nice clothes, nice houses’ always rankled with her mother. Living alone in 1960s London – Earls Court, surrounded by Australians – was not, though, all rosy, and she suffered from periods of depression, at one point sinking into a nervous breakdown for about three months. A working holiday in Sydney, ‘just to go and see’, seemed to offer a welcome break.1 After an exciting three-month sojourn in Hong Kong Jenny found her feet rapidly in Sydney; she had welcoming friends to stay with and plentiful job opportunities, promptly leading to stimulating work with the peak department store. The contrast with her poor paying job in London seemed stunning. ‘My first job there paid three times as much and the cost of living was much less. In short I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.’ Two years later she continued to thrive, was in a serious though volatile relationship with an Englishman, Barry, and both decided to 1

2  Introduction

1  Jenny Janes (Armati) ‘Chelsea girl’ window dresser, London. 1970

the modern drive to emigrate  3 return to England, mainly driven by Jenny’s feelings of guilt about leaving her now divorced mother. But a brief stay in Perth en route turned into a four-year stopover, where, again, she flourished in stimulating work and, apart from her increasingly unstable relationship, enjoyed the small city atmosphere of Perth. Finally, in 1977 they returned to London, but return to her old job, the turbulent ‘on and off’ relationship, very few friends and living with her mother led to another spate of depression, only ending when she resolved, after about 18 months, ‘that Australia was the place for me’. They returned in 1979. An intended brief stay in Perth before moving on to Sydney again turned into long-term residence. Her relationship finally ended soon after arrival. Jenny summarises her next decade or more in Perth as an increasingly settled migrant: I was immediately offered my own job back. I ended up staying for [12] years, getting married, changing careers to fashion, homes and food journalism, opening a restaurant and food manufacturing business, becoming a food photographer and stylist and doing lots of different things. I found Australia to be much more receptive to new ideas.

Jenny’s migration showed all the signs of becoming a stunning success story, soon marked by purchase of a house. But marriage in 1982 to Douglas Armati, an Australian entrepreneur and writer, was to shift her story again into unanticipated directions. Douglas had had two previous marriages and two young children, with access to them on weekends, which involved Jenny in a degree of childcare. Her work continued to flourish, apart from a temporary setback through a ‘huge loss’ on a promising house purchase when the property market collapsed. By 1991 they were seeking fresh pastures, and with Jenny’s brother established in Antibes, France, they jumped at his offer to join him, resettle and run their business ventures in Europe. For Douglas this was his second migration, following an earlier extended period in London and Spain, for Jenny it was another move in her ongoing adventure, as her continuing part in the British diaspora intersected with Douglas’s in the Australian diaspora. While Douglas continued to work on promising computer software projects, it was Jenny’s work which drove the move, combined with a romantic dream. ‘I was going to write cookbooks, take photographs, and live a romantic life in Provence. … That was the whole notion, and Douglas was going to be promoting the cookbooks. … I was in my forties and I was still living in a dream world, you know.’ The dream world failed to materialise. While they stayed for three years the publishing contracts and other ventures never took off, but they survived by finding casual work, for Jenny cooking in Monte Carlo and on charter boats, for Douglas running a boat-building company. Looking back,

4  Introduction Jenny insisted that ‘I absolutely loved it, I wouldn’t have not done it’. But their continuing poor language skills and difficulties negotiating the challenges of ‘getting through daily life’, ultimately forced another change, back to the Anglosphere in 1991, back to England and another coastal idyll in rural Suffolk. The hard times persisted back on home ground, with Jenny putting in long hours cooking to support them while Douglas did IT research for his book project, which, they both believed, had exciting potential. Slowly their circumstances began to improve. Douglas augmented their income through consulting, then published his book advancing innovative ideas on intellectual property in electronic environments, which led to a job offer from an American company, eventually requiring a move to California. She describes the moment that changed their lives: I got the phone call at midnight, after having cooked for twelve hours that day, saying that he’d been offered this fantastic job, and it was like winning the lottery, it was absolutely unbelievable. … It was a very exciting time because the whole IT boom was on, he was getting shares in this American company as well as this nice big salary.

Anxious about her mother, Jenny stayed behind and continued to work. Douglas faced frequent travel, so while Jenny eventually gave up cooking, she stayed in England, ‘commuting’ between Suffolk and Palo Alto, ten trips a year funded by the company. At this stage too, with an eye on her mother, she was unwilling to embark on another permanent migration. She was particularly reluctant to live in America indefinitely, but ‘emotionally, I didn’t really want to have another move, so I just thought I’d keep both, a foot in both camps’. Legally unable to work during her California sojourns, she turned to her old hobby of painting, which soon took off into a lucrative pursuit – ‘the beginning of my new career’ – as her transcontinental ‘commuting’ continued. At this stage Jenny was, tentatively, becoming a contented return migrant, with diminishing desire to return to Australia. A further boost in their fortunes seemed to seal her resolve. Douglas’s company went public, enabling him to cash in valuable share options, then a profitable resignation and return to England. Our life was turned around overnight. … No, we never intended to come back to Australia. We bought a fabulous big house in Suffolk and he finished working for the company, and we were planning to stay in Suffolk. … We did a bit of property developing for a while, and we were very happy there.

After nine years in England family matters intervened. Jenny’s mother died in 2002, then a visit to Australia confirmed to both of them that they

the modern drive to emigrate  5 should return to Perth, enabling Douglas, finally, to be closer to his two children, by then in their twenties. Now they could afford a comfortable re-entry, and ultimately acquired a large house in the north-east hills and a small apartment in the city centre. Leaving Suffolk was ‘the biggest wrench, I’ve ever had, … and Douglas was actually happier there, even than me I think, he really liked it there, and he was the Australian sort of made good in England’. But for Jenny, at least, the Australian re-entry was relatively painless; it ‘felt like coming home’ and she easily renewed contact with old friends. Although Jenny insisted that ‘I could go and live anywhere, I think, as long as it had some aesthetic about it’, this seemed to bring her serial migration journey to an end, with comfortable settlement in Perth and easy access to international travel. By 2013, though, with the children grown up, they both confessed to feeling ‘restless’, considered a move to Melbourne but finally found another handsome residence in Hobart, attractively for them both, off the ‘beaten track’, since neither was attracted to big-city living. The ease of even this move testified to Jenny’s continuing comfort with mobility, which had reinforced her strong antipathy to patriotic enthusiasms. She had acquired Australian citizenship in 1986 after marrying Douglas, largely for convenience of travel, but insisted that, while she considered herself an Australian and had never felt a sense of British patriotism, ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a global person’. Well settled in Hobart, her secure ‘citizen of the world’ identity was the product of over 30 years of global movement, and illustrated multiple ways that British migration, and British migrants, had changed since the 1960s. Jenny’s migration experience was untypical of the great majority of modern British migrants in her unforeseen dramatic financial fortune in middle age. But in other respects she was representative of a changing generation of nomadic migrants from the 1960s onwards, and brings something different to our understanding of modern migration. Her youthful desire to emigrate alone for ‘adventure’, her entrepreneurial determination to forge ahead, whether in England, Australia, France or California, her simultaneous experience of geographical and social mobility and her casual adoption of a mobile persona and ‘citizen of the world’ identity all point to something new and widespread in late twentieth-century migration experience. At the same time the intermittent impact of family ties on her movements underlines deep continuities with older patterns of family-oriented migration. What seems most unique is the casual attitude of these modern, often ‘serial’ migrants to global mobility, which, not so long before, would have been momentous for most people. While it is particularly striking among single women, it was no less common among single men and couples, with or without children. Rob and Beth Hamson’s travels began with a

6  Introduction one-year teaching exchange contract for Rob to Canada in 1983, which infected them with a degree of ‘restlessness’. After five unsatisfactory years of teaching for Rob and nursing for Beth back in England, Rob upgraded his qualifications deliberately to facilitate mobility: he trained as a teacher of English as a foreign language and they considered expatriate posts in Bahrain, Canada and New Zealand. It was Beth’s nursing qualification which first led to their acceptance in 1989 as migrants to Australia, now with two children, but for Rob it eventually led to a university teaching position in Melbourne. This translated into permanent migration, but it was punctuated by frequent overseas travel, ‘regular round the world trips back to England’ to visit family and an openness to at least a temporary return to England if family circumstances dictated it. Contented with their fulfilling settlement in Melbourne, Rob saw their frequent readiness to enjoy global travel as a product of earlier mobility, something which distinguished them from their less travelled friends in England.2 It also set them apart from their forebears a generation earlier, who could rarely afford to think so casually of their past and future mobility. The scale of modern mobility This book is about people like Jenny Armati and the Hamsons, a new generation of migrants who, from the late 1960s, began to encounter a shifting set of global conditions for their mobility. Some of the new conditions, like tighter visa requirements, were designed to restrict entry in receiving countries to the more highly qualified, but failed to discourage the British from emigrating in numbers below the mid-century peaks but still very substantial. Over the period of a half century, as travel became easier and cheaper and education standards lifted, migrants’ attitudes to their movements shifted too, for many in the casual direction adopted by Jenny and the Hamsons. Easier access to travel could readily translate into greater openness to migration as a temporary or permanent option; even return migration need not mean an end to a life of mobility. The results of this apparent revolution in migration and mobility are evident in most developed countries in the early decades of the twentyfirst century, though in stark contrast to the highly visible desperation of global refugees on the move, with few clear destinations easily available as developed countries erect increasingly severe restrictions. While it is true, still, that most people do not emigrate, there are few who would not have close knowledge of friends or relatives who do. Parents endure long absences from their grown children on overseas backpacking working holidays and longer periods of expatriate employment, for some an opening to permanent migration. Regular visits of parents to their mobile

the modern drive to emigrate  7 children expose them to the realities and promise of living overseas in later life. And return migrants, often wearing the ‘badge’ of expatriate experience, as more worldly wise ‘citizens of the world’, look upon their country of birth with fresh eyes, from critical to admiring, and might remain open to prospects of further movement. While we take this new mobility for granted, the changes over half a century, in both migrant practices and mentalities, have developed gradually, against the background of deeper changes in modern society. Postwar Britain, for example, went through successive stages of austerity up to the early 1960s, and the emigration of the period was itself one of austerity. By contrast, the succeeding decades, with some interruptions, ushered in a relative age of prosperity and affluence, and from the 1970s a decline of income differentials between Britain and receiving countries.3 The changes heralded a gradual shift to a migration of prosperity, best exemplified by the discretionary choices migrants faced when they moved, not just for better employment opportunities but in search of preferred lifestyles, ‘adventure’ or the dictates of family or marital dynamics. The motivations and contexts for this migration are familiar ones that we associate with late twentieth-century modernity more generally, similar in most developed countries. They include intense social mobility, particularly into the middle class, stimulated by the dramatic increase in tertiary education from the 1960s, and rising dominance of educated professional and business migrants; these were often new university graduates in their twenties seeking their first or second job at the time of migration. The rise of mass travel in jumbo jets facilitated their global mobility. Associated with educational expansion and access, the revolution in gender norms enhanced the opportunities for women, especially single women, to pursue migration opportunities independently. From Britain particularly, on the shoulders of its long history of emigration, the early assisted postwar migration projects had established a critical mass of recent, mostly settled migrants, who continued to foster later streams of new family chain migrants, especially to Australia, for the rest of the century and later. The rise of corporate expatriate employment practices fostered the easy transformation from expats to serial migrants. Mass tourism generally, but particularly of the backpacking revolution, served as a catalyst for many to become migrants, often serial migrants moving from one country to another with ease, invariably with an emphasis on the quest for a new ‘lifestyle’ as the driving motivation. Other new motivating factors which came into play included desires for global adventure, long-distance love interests and, among self-styled ‘citizens of the world’ – comprising family as well as single migrants – a realisation of cosmopolitan identities. These might first develop during university years or extended European travel. For some – well-educated,

8  Introduction cosmopolitan and adaptable – the meaning of a migrant identity and cultural difference could become elastic and of diminishing importance, so that old migration stereotypes of persecution and complaint came to have decreasing relevance, particularly for itinerant serial migrants. These are complex motivations and contexts, coexisting with continuities of some traditional migration patterns, although mediated by new restrictions in the receiving countries. The seamless privileged immigration to postwar Australia of unskilled and semi-skilled British workers, for example, was firmly at an end. While this process is common to most developed countries, there are cogent reasons for exploring it through the British experience. Despite the intensity of all global migration since the 1970s, the British remain among the most numerous in their propensity to emigrate voluntarily and to live abroad permanently.4 On numbers alone, therefore, the continuing British diaspora deserves close investigation. The most powerful reasons for the large numbers are historical, stemming from the inheritance of the British Empire, which continued to exert its influence on settlement patterns long after it ceased to exist. The ‘colonial dividend’ bequeathed a global lingua franca of English in former colonies and beyond, making migration in countries of the ‘old Commonwealth’, essentially Australia, Canada and New Zealand, a much simpler process than for those forced to navigate a second language. The privilege of linguistic mobility was shared with citizens of the former colonies, including the United States, but the British have continued to be the most emigration-minded among them. On the global stage the British diaspora, proportionate to its population, remains one of the largest. While emigration statistics are imperfect, for comparative purposes the OECD provides the most reliable and revealing counts of ‘emigrant populations’ – the native-born over 15 years old residing permanently in OECD countries.5 Table 1 indicates the extent of permanent British overseas settlement as well as the high rate of emigration, over 6 per cent of its population.6 Comparisons with foreign settlement from other large emigration countries underline the British position. The slightly higher number of overseas Chinese is small compared to its population, with a tiny emigration rate of less than one per cent. The much larger quantity and proportion of Mexican emigrants stems from the large and controversial numbers living in the United States. Smaller countries, like Ireland and Poland, have high absolute numbers and high rates stemming from special economic and political conditions, in Poland’s case its recent admission to the European Union. The figures for the United States, Canada and Australia suggest that the British are unique among anglophone countries for their high propensity to emigrate; here the Canadian and USA figures are inflated by the substantial rate of cross-border mobility. The figures for tertiary

the modern drive to emigrate  9 educated emigrants underlines the uniquely high rate of professional and business migration from Britain, seen by governments as a problematic ‘brain drain’. Unlike some of the other countries’ emigrant totals listed in Table 1, the high British number and rate are the product of many decades of settlement rather than a recent crisis-ridden mass exodus. Since the Second World War these have fluctuated substantially but have been consistently high compared to most other countries. Table 2 provides an indication of this since the mid-twentieth century, and charts the most significant shifts in destinations.7 While numbers to the traditional main destinations of the ‘old Commonwealth’ countries have diminished somewhat from the 1970s and there has been a modest but stable flow to the United States, the shift to European country destinations since the 1980s has been dramatic; it will be explored more fully in Chapter 8. There have also been continuing fluctuations between migrant flows to the three main ‘old Commonwealth’ countries: Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Table 3 indicates that the longer-term product of migration, British citizens ‘living abroad’ permanently at the time of counting, is a clear majority in Australia, followed closely by the United States and Spain.8 Table 4 shows that the Australian majority, annually, in the postwar years was not always so obvious.9 For most of the 1950s more Britons moved to Canada than Australia, but by 1958 the trend had reversed as the subsidised ‘ten pound Pom’ scheme became more widely known, and Australian numbers continued to exceed the steadily diminishing numbers to Canada. Reasons for this include earlier and more rigorous Canadian entry restrictions and quotas, the cumulative influence of greater numbers of family chain migrants encouraged by earlier settlers and the greater importance of motivating factors like climate and lifestyle, favouring Australia, in a context of a more discretionary migration of prosperity. It would seem appropriate that the large scale and dispersal of this continuing population exodus out of Britain should be called a diaspora, and some historians have taken this application of the label for granted.10 In per capita and absolute terms it has been and remains one of the world’s largest permanent migrations and is truly global in its spread. But among historians, sociologists and demographers the diaspora label has become contentious. The traditional definition confines it exclusively to those who experienced ‘dispersion’, usually forcible but at times voluntary, from their homeland, and who for generations maintained their culture, and degrees of loyalty, grievances and longing to return. The classic model is that of the Jews exiled, reluctantly, from ancient Israel.11 Adherents to this view among modern British migration historians underplay forcible expulsion, tend to focus on sub-national and regional groupings, particularly the Scots, English and Welsh, and look

10  Introduction to evidence of ethnic, national or other group cultural consciousness. This can be shown through ‘associationalism’, meaning commitment to ethnically based clubs and societies like the St George’s societies for the English and Caledonian and Burns clubs for the Scottish. According to Tanja Bueltmann, a strong exponent of this view, these ‘clubbing’ structures support the ‘maintenance of a diaspora’, which is then shaped by ‘continuous orientation’ to the homeland. Most of this work is based on settler colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where evidence of durable cultural cohesion and ethnic identity among the various groups in institutions is strong.12 But consensus remains partial, and the case for a ‘diaspora’, resting on those demonstrating homeland loyalty and cohesion, says little about those who did not subscribe to it, whether from hostility or from indifference.13 Donald Akenson has argued for a looser definition, based largely on the idea of population ‘dispersal’, recognising that ‘most diaspora groups have several rival views of their own history, group consciousness, and political-moral commitments’.14 Collective identities and orientation to the homeland thus become marginal to a diaspora, especially in the modern period. This is particularly appropriate to this book, a study of the literal dispersal of the British to multiple destinations, who, in modern times, are more likely to subscribe to international identities than homeland or national ones. On these grounds the modern British undoubtedly qualify as a diaspora. This is particularly apt since one of the more striking variations on the theme of the modern diaspora is the readiness of many modern migrants not just to engage in a single move to one country but to continue moving as serial migrants. The various statistics noted above provide useful snapshots of numbers moving to and settling in particular countries at particular times, but they cannot capture the more continuous, return and circular movements of the kind we saw in Jenny Armati’s and the Hamsons’ migration stories. These modern ‘nomads’ add richer meaning to the understanding of a British diaspora, their residences including countries as various as Brunei, Saudi Arabia, Papua New Guinea, Zambia, Hong Kong and Tanganyika (later Tanzania) as well as the more mainstream destinations. South Africa played a particularly important role in the serial migration process, partly because of its historical role as a mainstream destination for British migrants since the nineteenth century. Its attraction to potential migrants continued but waned in the later twentieth century, as it left the Commonwealth and violence escalated over apartheid and the struggle for majority rule. By the 1970s many British South Africans were reconsidering their settlement decision, for various reasons, and either returning to Britain or moving on to third countries, with Australia one of the most popular destinations. Racial issues, including the flight from apartheid, fear of black rule and the associated security fears were prime

the modern drive to emigrate  11 motivations. From the 1970s the serial migration conduit from Britain to South Africa and later to Australia became an important element in the wider diaspora experience. Ros Smith’s story echoes others we will see in later chapters. Her single move in 1972 to Cape Town, for an intended ‘little adventure’ became permanent when she married a former South African boyfriend she had met in England, had two children and, after difficult adjustment as a migrant wife, came to enjoy the lifestyle. But within a decade the violent clash between an oppressive apartheid regime and the majority rule campaign began to loom large in their lives. Her husband was a leftist journalist with the Rand Daily Mail, well known to the regime and routinely at risk of arrest; she feared that her son would eventually be conscripted into the army to fight the black insurgency, insisting ‘I didn’t have a son to have him go and kill somebody’; and security fears seemed to loom ever larger. So in 1982 they emigrated to Melbourne, where, years later, she celebrated the personal growth stimulated by her mobility, and the greater marital harmony that followed when both she and her South African husband enjoyed the greater mutual understanding that flowed from a shared migrant identity.15 Her story raises complex questions about motivations for migration, migrant identities, serial migration and even migration and marriage, none of which could be hinted at by her simple appearance in the statistics as a British citizen settling in South Africa in 1972 and Australia in 1982. Life stories and modern mobility This book follows the practice of a growing body of recent migration histories by drawing primarily on individual life stories from direct personal testimony, like those of Jenny Armati, the Hamsons and Ros Smith.16 In Ten pound Poms: Australia’s invisible migrants, co-authored with Alistair Thomson in 2005, we drew on a very large collection of solicited written accounts to select a substantial proportion of volunteers for interview. Similarly, I have drawn here on a collection of 182 written accounts to conduct 121 interviews, including 14 of couples, which provided 135 interviewees. I found volunteers through a range of strategies: responses to public advertising and press releases, appeals during media interviews and on websites aimed at British expatriates and migrants, flyers in goods shops aimed at Britons and a variety of word-of mouth-referrals. As well as a few interviews from earlier projects in Canada and Britain I also drew on stories easily accessible in the public domain, often in the media. Migration stories invite keen public interest, especially when combined with the drama of struggle, and sometimes celebrity. Dr Fiona Wood, a renowned skin and burns specialist in Australia, described in Chapter 5, is a notable example. A migrant to Perth in 1987, she was honoured as

12  Introduction ‘Australian of the year’ in 2005 after work with victims of the 2002 Bali bombings. Her celebrity ensures that her story will be seen to be quite exceptional, but the background of her earlier migration experience has much in common with others who are less famous. The written accounts, mostly submitted before interviews, varied in length from the most cursory of outlines to ambitious autobiographical texts, some written earlier with the interest of children and grandchildren in mind. Many writers were stimulated by awareness of the turbulent changes fuelled by a life of mobility and saw their story as unique in some ways, often connected to a changing sense of identity. Barbara Edwards commented, ‘emigrating … has actually widened our horizons so much it makes us more tolerant and more accepting and actually eager for more’.17 Some built on a lifetime of collecting memorabilia; Ros Smith wrote that ‘I’m a research project waiting to be discovered. From the moment I could stick a bus ticket into a scrapbook to the arrival of digital photography I have been collecting mementoes, … no date too trivial, no occasion too grand’.18 Those mementoes then enriched the written account, and an interview, ranging in length from one to three hours, probed further, to fill in factual blanks and expand on important themes. In other cases the written text was so rich that it seemed little could be gained from an interview, but frequently new and often sensitive themes emerged, especially on private life and social relationships not previously committed to paper. Some writers expressed a sense of selfdiscovery from the interview process, like Barbara Totten in Perth, who began to clarify her conflicted sense of Scottish and Australian identity as we spoke: ‘when I was there, I was the Australian Barbara, I wasn’t the Scottish Barbara, and, and I didn’t want to be the Scottish Barbara, I wanted to get away from it as quickly as possible – you’ve made me see things, actually, by talking about it’.19 Individual life stories, then, often extending to the personal and emotional dimensions of the migration experience, make up the core of this exploration of the history of British nomads. But it is undeniable that the use of life stories from personal testimony, highly reliant on memory of past events, has been controversial for decades now, for migration history and history more generally. It has become routine for oral historians to introduce their work with cogent summaries of the objections and defences of oral testimony and the life story, often with an eye on the critics.20 It is unnecessary to repeat all of them here, but some are of direct relevance to a modern history of migration characterised by individual motivations. Most crucially the stories told here are, overwhelmingly, memory stories, subject to well-known weaknesses and vagaries of misremembering, omission, embellishment and selectiveness. Subsequent events can colour memories of earlier experiences, indeed separate interviews from

the modern drive to emigrate  13 the same person recorded at different times sometimes give different versions of the same events. One or more migration experiences can colour recollections of ‘before and after’ quite vividly, especially when strong preferences develop for one country over another. The conventional reply to this is that the gaps and errors of memory can be corrected by conventional checking against other sources, the stock-in-trade practice of all historians. This is certainly true for publicly recorded events. For example the inaccuracy of a migrant’s claim to have left Britain in 1992 because of anger with Margaret Thatcher’s policies is clearly inconsistent with the simple fact that Thatcher left office in 1990, although it may not negate the wider assertion of political disillusion and motivation. But these simple checks do not address the heart of the matter, since private lives, touching, for example, on family and marital dynamics like tensions over decisions to move, can rarely be checked against other sources for accuracy, unless multiple close family members can be interviewed separately. In this situation it is more important for an interviewer to be alert to silences and contradictions, where clarification can often lead to elaboration of themes otherwise ignored. A more pertinent objection to the use of life history and oral testimony questions the wider historical significance of individual private life. A cautious critic of the value of oral history, Eric Richards, recognises the unique strengths of oral testimony and life history sources, while developing a nuanced view of constructive scepticism. The ‘best use’ of subjective testimonies of interviewees, he suggests, resides in ‘its special capacity to penetrate into the inner recesses of domestic lives’, thus advancing understanding, in particular, of the interior life of the family, a haven for most migrants and otherwise ‘exceptionally difficult to capture’. On the other hand, he suggests that questions remain unresolved about the ‘explanatory possibilities’ of oral history, for generating hypotheses, ‘testing important historical questions’ and working to ‘larger agendas’. He concludes that this could be possible only when personal testimony, presumably large-scale, was ‘gathered programmatically, the evidence shaped to an explicit purpose, and the significance and quality of the data rigorously grouped and evaluated’.21 With a few exceptions,22 oral historians have not pursued this ‘programmatic’ route, opting instead for the illuminating range of revelations which can emerge from an accumulation of diverse individual stories, what others have referred to as the ‘horizon of possibilities’ within the social constraints of the time.23 In the following chapters those diverse stories will be set against the background of the changing social, economic and political contexts influencing migration described earlier: changes in class mobility, standards of education, employment practices, mass travel, immigration regulations and cosmopolitan identities. The book sets out to illuminate how private life reflected those changing

14  Introduction agendas, and, in some cases, helped to shape them. For example, Jenny Armati’s story, at the opening of this Introduction, is, quintessentially, a late twentieth-century story, barely imaginable in earlier periods, as is her proclamation that ‘I’ve always been a global person’. Her proud assertion of the material success she and Douglas achieved through ‘hard work’ in four countries linked their achievement to the challenges of global mobility. Similarly, the stories in Chapter 6 on migration, family and marriage can be understood only in the context of the deep changes in family law which took place from the 1960s and the accompanying changes in social and sexual relationships. By the end of the twentieth century the same social changes that had facilitated a more discretionary form of migration had also helped to bring about a more introspective form of individualism, with an unprecedented focus on the self. Many of the stories in this book were influenced by that late twentieth-century preoccupation with individual gratification and satisfaction, what scholars often refer to as an inward – and unhealthy – focus on the self. It can be seen as a logical consequence of affluence, when material acquisitions might bring diminishing degrees of satisfaction. For some it constitutes a fundamental transformation in Western culture; its most extreme expression suggests a historical shift ‘from the Victorian, sexually restricted self to the post-World War II empty self … soothed and made cohesive by becoming “filled up” with food, consumer products, and celebrities’.24 While this might seem akin to a critique of modern indulgent youth culture and has little relevance to the stories of British nomads, it does point to more general western preoccupations with individual desires and soul-searching, not far removed from the questing urge inspiring serial migration and restless pursuit of the ideal geographical setting for contented settlement and lifestyle change. Effectively, as migration came to embody another form of individual desire, it could begin to resemble a further expression of consumerism, and this may be evident in many of the stories in the book. This rise of introspective individualism, and its association with motivations for migration and travel, make it particularly appropriate to base a history of modern migration on individual life stories. Some of the accounts which follow are family rather than individual stories, some motivated by emphatic drives for career advancement and economic opportunity, with much in common with more traditional forms of migration. But few are free from that modern preoccupation with self-realisation and identity, which in part explains why so much migration history is now built on personal testimony. It is in stark contrast with earlier forms of migration history focused on large population movements, like those across the Atlantic from the seventeenth century. Typically these involved the processes of expulsion by political or economic forces; historians mostly described them in collective terms, of

the modern drive to emigrate  15 whole communities uprooted and displaced, often to face collective encounters with indigenous peoples on colonial frontiers. In such histories the individual experience mostly figured as occasional illustration to the larger mass narrative, although from the early nineteenth century the greater emphasis on the Victorian self-improvement ethos as a migrant motivation began to shift focus back to the individual. As early as 1951 the eminent American historian Oscar Handlin began to change direction with an epic history of American immigration entitled The uprooted, in which the history of immigration ‘from the perspective of the individual received rather than of the receiving society’ became the central theme.25 It took nearly two decades before the increasing turn to oral testimony and individual life histories began to consolidate that shift from the collective to the individual, and this book is in that tradition.26 Profiles of interviewees As noted above, volunteers to the project came from a range of backgrounds, in most cases were ‘self-selected’ and not chosen from any strict representative sampling process. Still, with a few exceptions, the selection of volunteers for interview was based on rough representativeness of the broader British population and its emigrants and across the relevant decades after mid-century. More importantly, the interview collection constitutes a rich diversity of migrant experience, not just in formal profiles of gender, class, regional origins and destinations but in the engaging life stories told by interviewees. The stories, regrettably, are silent on the subject of gay and lesbian migration, an obvious area for further research. One departure from broad representativeness is evident in the gender difference of interviewees, where women are in a clear majority. Including interviews of married couples (14), I interviewed 78 women, about 58 per cent of the total of 135, compared to 57 men, or 42 per cent Among all volunteers for the project 99 were women (54 per cent) and 83 men (46 per cent). These figures compare for the British population in 1996 of 51 per cent females to 49 per cent males.27 Since 1975 male migrants have exceeded women consistently by 52 per cent to 48 per cent, hardly surprising since men are over-represented among those emigrating for work reasons. By contrast, in some countries with older British populations, for example in North America, women are in the majority, perhaps owing to their greater life expectancy.28 The gender differences between this relatively small study and the full population are not statistically significant but the greater female numbers do point to important developments among the modern British diaspora. For the full group of volunteers the female majority may be explained by the apparent greater willingness of women to offer themselves for surveys and

16  Introduction oral history projects.29 This was reinforced by the fact that more women volunteers tended to write longer and reflective stories, a rich foundation for in-depth interviews. More importantly, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed huge changes in women’s position, notably in education, employment, age at marriage and family size, which meant that the transformations in women’s migration experiences were among the most profound and warrant fuller scrutiny. The book draws on men’s and women’s experiences in roughly similar proportions and many of the changes affected both sexes equally.30 But among all the developments working to transform the migration experience in the half century to 2000, those contributing to the appearance of the ‘modern woman migrant’ represented the deepest and most significant. The most obvious selection bias may be seen in the class background of interviewees, based on traditional occupational classifications, particularly when measured in later life at the time of interview. Compared to the traditional UK census occupational classification system, the emigrant population of the later twentieth century has become increasingly elite, or middle-class, effectively a ‘brain drain’ migration, and the occupations of interviewees reflect this. Table 6 illustrates the contrast, for example showing over 52 per cent of unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled interviewees before departure compared to 82 per cent in the total 1951 UK population, 72 per cent in 1981 and 53 per cent in 2001. By contrast 47 per cent of interviewees at departure were in professional, semiprofessional and managerial occupations compared to over 17 per cent in the 1951 census, 28 per cent in 1981 and over 46 per cent in 2001. The contrast is similar in class backgrounds of interviewees for this project and those conducted with earlier postwar migrants to Australia, primarily assisted migrants of the 1950s and 1960s.31 The major explanation for the contrast lies in the increasing occupational restrictions imposed by destination countries from the 1970s, when the era of subsidised migration came to an end and immigrant countries sought those with skills and education attainments in high demand as well as those with capital backing.32 This could be reinforced by social mobility among the UK population during the second half of the century, with an increasing proportion of middle-class or white-collar occupations, illustrated in Table 6; possibly, there is also a greater tendency of people from occupations requiring writing and speaking skills to volunteer for projects which need narrative writing and interviewing. Table 6 also illustrates a marked process of social mobility among interviewees. Comparing occupations prior to first departure to those in later years at the time of interview (or at retirement) the professional, managerial and semi-professional increased from about 47 per cent to 73 per cent. By contrast the skilled and semi-skilled decreased from 52.6 per cent at first departure to 26.8 per cent at interview. These social

the modern drive to emigrate  17 mobility processes were at work to varying degrees in all the countries considered here during the late twentieth century, but the changes are dramatic and contrast sharply, for example, with the postwar generation of mostly skilled and semi-skilled migrants, like the ‘ten pound Poms’ to Australia, who mainly prospered in their existing trades, with minimal social mobility.33 This could suggest that the volunteers for this project constitute an unrepresentative minority of high achievers. But it should not be surprising in what was increasingly a migration of prosperity, and particularly when focused on many in late career. Some of the stories, like those of three high-achieving women in Chapter 8, do indeed appear to be exceptional, but all these women came from more typical middleclass backgrounds and their career trajectories represent fundamental shifts in women’s opportunities which they attributed to their migration.34 Moreover, many of the stories illustrate that career success might follow years of financial struggle where ultimate success was far from certain; for others, like John Whiteside in Chapters 2 and 5, elevation to the ‘semi-professional and intermediate’ ranks involved transition from skilled work to running a small hands-on business, which was typical of the time but rarely guaranteed substantial wealth.35 For some, like John Hunt, a serial migrant to New Zealand, then Australia, in the 1960s and 1970s, a free-wheeling life pursuing opportunities in skilled trades and small business could end badly in lonely casual labour in retirement, especially when combined, in John’s case, with a repeated history of divorce.36 Some later migrants, like Cindy Yelling and her family who moved to New Zealand in 1996, were still in those stages of ‘struggle’ when interviewed, with prospects of stellar success or grim survival still open.37 Crucially though, for many migrants occupational achievement was not the exclusive measure of success. Other factors, such as a fulfilled romantic partnership or family life, or realisation of a quest for a transformation in lifestyle, could be equally important. These stories are explored in Chapters 6 and 7. Taken together, such considerations reinforce the general point that successful migration, like social class, is a far more complex matter than occupational or financial status. The book draws on stories with strong regional diversity as well as diversities of class, age, gender and marital status. The interviewees were drawn from a wide range of British regions and countries, which correspond roughly to the population distribution in the 1991 census, and, with a few variations, to a smaller research survey of British emigrants, Brits abroad, in 2006.38 Table 7 indicates that most interviewees originated in the most heavily urbanised and industrialised areas of London and the South-east, the Midlands and northern England, with smaller numbers from the South-west, East Anglia and Wales. Significantly, the project included a proportionate number from Scotland, and their stories form an indispensable part of the book. In recent years it has

18  Introduction become common practice to abandon research on ‘British’ migration in favour of more focused study of its ethnic or sub-national components, for example of English, Scottish, Welsh or Cornish migration.39 There is ample justification for this, especially if there is a case for underlining the distinctive nature of one group’s migration experience compared to others. It is often assumed, for example, that Scottish migrants have had a more intense and sustained attachment to their ethnic identity than do the English, evident in areas of Scottish concentration like Cape Breton in Canada and Dunedin in New Zealand.40 A recent flurry of histories of Scottish migration and the Scottish diaspora reinforce this assumption, but similar attention is now turning to the uniqueness of the ‘English diaspora’.41 But there remains a strong case for including Scottish migrants in a study of the modern British diaspora. Their motivations for leaving derive from the same British economic and social contexts influencing the English and Welsh, their mostly anglophone destinations are the same, and their dispersal and adaptation to new societies, and to a collective British identity, are not notably different.42 The Scottish stories in the book, like those of the English, exhibit a range of attitudes to their homeland, from deep attachment to heritage to relative indifference, indeed, in one case outright rejection.43 On the other hand the book follows other histories of modern British migration in its exclusion of Northern Ireland.44 Partly this stems from a substantially different migration history, partly from a need to limit the scope of the study, but also from the fact that Northern Irish migration history is now more commonly studied within the larger framework of Irish migration generally.45 A British diaspora denotes a dispersal of population to multiple destinations, which is an underlying theme throughout the book, but it can present little more than one slice of such a huge movement, with substantial focus on some countries and relative neglect of others. Table 8 lists the location of participants at the time of interview. The majority, almost 65 per cent in Australia, are justified by Australia’s sustained popularity as the preferred destination for the British, evident also in the larger total numbers in Tables 3 and 4. The smaller interview numbers in Canada (about 16 per cent) and New Zealand (about 12 per cent) reflect their relative decline in British immigrant numbers. Returnees interviewed in Britain (4 per cent) also reflect a continuing feature of modern migration, return to the homeland. But it will be evident from Table 3 that there is a marked absence of two major streams of British migrants in the later twentieth century: those to the United States and to Western Europe. Their inclusion proportionate to their numbers was beyond the scope of this study, and each of them warrants separate research by historians. However, because many of the life stories in the book are from serial migrants, they encompass substantial prior experience in other countries, including the USA and Europe, and it would be misleading

the modern drive to emigrate  19 to use the place of interview as a simple summary of migrant destinations and experience. In Chapter 8 Charles Eugster’s story describes an early single migration to Canada, followed by return to Britain, further migration, when married, to France, where he was interviewed, and the possibility of another return to Britain. His life in France touches on the frequent presence of Europe in many of the stories in the book, and Chapter 8 discusses the wider significance of modern British migration to Europe, especially Spain and France, which to date has been studied more thoroughly by social anthropologists than by historians. Similarly, many stories do encompass American sojourns as part of the serial experience, especially for those in Canada. Some used their American migration experience as a benchmark for comparisons with other countries, usually more favourable to the current home country or to Britain.46 Others became thoroughly and positively immersed in American life. In the late 1960s, for example, Peter Murphy studied and worked in Ohio and married an American woman before moving to Canada in 1970 for an academic position; years later, in 1997, he moved again to Australia, but he reflected that he could happily have stayed in America. Peter’s positive experience in three countries of migration prompted him to declare his ‘international’ identity, virtually a badge of cosmopolitanism for serial migrants.47 Serial migration practices, like those of Peter Murphy, form one of the underlying themes throughout the book. They are a logical extension of the mass travel that intensified in the later decades of the twentieth century, so it is not surprising that they appear with increasing frequency in the life stories, when they were a much less common feature in the stories of earlier postwar British migrants. Out of the 121 interviews, 68, or over 56 per cent, included some form of serial or return migration. Some of the returnees were what Australians call ‘boomerang migrants’, who returned to Britain only to return again to the same or a different country. Others continued a seamless process of transience across several countries, often with further movement at the time of interview an open question, not exclusively among the young. Even among the other 53 interviewees, or about 44 per cent, who made just one migration move in the traditional pattern, attitudes to mobility were often not so different from those of serial migrants. Frequent trips home and frequent global travel gradually came to be taken for granted by permanent migrants in ways that had been simply inaccessible and too expensive for most migrants of the 1950s. Mindsets of mobility, in effect, were an outcome of changing patterns of migration and travel, regardless of the frequency of continuing movement. If this has now become standard migration practice and mentality, a measure of the way we emigrate now, its slow emergence and development over a generation were not so clear while it was happening. In the mid-1960s, when permanent one-way and

20  Introduction assisted British migration was at its peak, mass travel was in its infancy and intense global mobility was seen as the preserve of young carefree sojourners or the very wealthy. But, as more frequent mobility became democratised, migration as a discretionary choice of continuous movement became more possible. The book attempts to chart that process through life stories and to illustrate how we came to take it all for granted. An autobiographical footnote Some historians cannot evade the close connections between their subject matter and their own background, and this book is no exception. In Ten pound Poms: Australia’s invisible migrants, Alistair Thomson and I summarised our own migration stories in the introduction and stressed the ways in which our pasts influenced how we formed relationships with our respondents.48 The same has been true with interviewees for this book. My first migration at the age of 11 was with my family from Britain to Canada, where I lived through most of my formative years and, like many of the same generation in Britain who were the first in their family to attend university, experienced steep upward social mobility. Twenty years later, after two years in London doing PhD research, I moved, alone, to Melbourne for an academic job, where I have remained, now with two often mobile adult children; successive periods of research in London enhanced the British connection. This serial migrant experience has had a variety of implications for researching and writing the book, and especially for my interaction with interviewees. Most obviously, my English childhood and later life in Canada and Australia enabled a closer understanding and sense of common ground with those from similar geographical backgrounds. On a more subtle level the complicated tug of transnational emotional life and fractured identity often revealed a shared set of experiences and values, ranging from angst and regret to celebration. Often we were able to learn from each other’s stories. My frequent travels to Canada and Britain in recent years for funerals of very close relatives was at times a touchstone for probing similar stories experienced by migrants removed from their closest family members, some of them spread out across the globe. All this enriched the project in immeasurable ways. At the same time I would not wish to overstate the role of this close connection in determining the choice of subject. I have always been, primarily, a British historian, and when I first ventured into migration history some 50 years ago, it was to the nineteenth century, when a study of single middle-class female emigrants emerged as a fruitful way to investigate some themes in the relatively new field of social history, encouraged strongly by my insightful supervisor, Professor James Winter

the modern drive to emigrate  21 at the University of British Columbia. Other subjects, far from migration, such as the history of marriage and family, followed, and when I returned to migration history with the inviting saga of the ten pound Poms, it was a natural progression from other themes in social history like the social mobility of the lower middle class. The later British diaspora was another natural progression. All this has been driven largely by historical curiosity and a desire to pursue useful ways of understanding the past, especially through the social history of ordinary people. My own life story has undoubtedly played some small part in this, and has brought useful historical and personal insights, but it is not a reason for writing the book. A chapter guide The book is divided into two parts, each with four chapters. Part I presents a decade-by-decade chronology of changes in migration patterns and experience, progressing gradually from the postwar migration of austerity to a more discretionary mobility of affluence. Chapter 1 focuses on ‘pioneers of modern mobility’ of the 1940s to 1960s, in which some migrants seized on the opportunities of cheap passages and the ‘colonial dividend’ of anglophone countries to forge adventurous new forms of global movement. Chapter 2 charts the 1970s rise in non-white migration and the decline of British privilege in the old Commonwealth countries of white settlement, as official assistance was phased out and new visa barriers to entry in receiving countries began to change the socioeconomic profiles of immigrants. At the same time migrants seized new opportunities for global mobility like the rise of expatriate employment prospects. Chapter 3, ‘Thatcher’s refugees’, examines the flowering of a more mobile generation’s migration practices against the background of deep political, economic, structural and cultural changes in 1980s Britain. Despite desires to escape from a new wave of mass unemployment, the austerity migration of the early 1980s coexisted with more flexible, ideologically driven quests of sojourning wanderers; this was a new migrant generation intent on adventure and change while questioning old certainties about national identity and patriotic attachment. Chapter 4 explores the emerging tendencies of cosmopolitanism and ‘lifestyle’ migration from the 1990s. Around the turn of the century ideas of ‘global citizenship’ flourished, while still being subject to the pull of more traditional British loyalties, invariably influenced by the ties of family. Part II shifts from a chronological to a thematic focus, by drilling down into some of the more prominent themes encountered but addressed less fully in Part I. Chapter 5, ‘Career stories’, explores the interplay of patterns of change and continuity in the migrant careers of skilled workers, trade unionists, professionals and mobile academics. Chapter 6, ‘The

22  Introduction push and pull of private life’ focuses on ways in which love, marriage and family determined or were affected by migration, often outweighing the conventional motivations of career and opportunity. Chapter 7, ‘The quest for new lifestyles’, explores what may be the most discretionary motivation of all, the ambition to use migration to transform a way of life. While often associated with hedonistic leisure orientations of youth, lifestyle migration also encompassed ecological priorities, rural escapes and the sustained journeying of grey nomad migrants. In the final chapter, ‘Changing faces of modern migration’, I draw on several striking and novel stories of migrant experience to highlight the underlying theme of continuity amidst change in the modern migrant experience. It encompasses stories of return migration, the surge in Britons’ permanent migration to Europe, the role of mobility in women’s lives and their determination to write about it, and the appearance of new faces of British migrants of colour, where themes of continuity were as powerful as the obvious changes. Notes  1 Armati, interview.  2 Hamson, interview.  3 E. Richards, Britannia’s children: emigration from England, Scotland and Ireland since 1600, London, Hambledon and London, 2004, pp. 6–10, 29, 255–6.  4 See Appendix, Table 1.  5 Reliance on OECD data, while useful comparatively, has weaknesses in excluding some other significant destination countries, for example all African countries including South Africa, a significant site of British settlement. Other counts give a larger number of Britons settled abroad permanently, for example, with a total settlement figure of 5.6 million for 2010, T. Finch, with H. Andrew and M. Latorre, Global Brit: making the most of the British diaspora, executive summary and recommendations, London, IPPR, 2010, p. 7.  6 See Appendix, Table 1.  7 See Appendix, Table 2.  8 See Appendix, Table 3.  9 See Appendix, Table 4. 10 Richards, Britannia’s children, pp. 255–77, 303. 11 For discussion see R. Cohen, Global diasporas: an introduction, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997, pp. x, 22–3; A. J. Hammerton, ‘The late twentieth century “British diaspora”: last gasp or robust revival?’, in P. Payton (ed.), Emigrants and historians: essays in honour of Eric Richards, Adelaide, Wakefield, 2016; S. Constantine, ‘British emigration to the empirecommonwealth since 1880: from overseas settlement to diaspora?’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31, 2, May 2003.

the modern drive to emigrate  23 12 T. Bueltmann, Clubbing together: ethnicity, civility and formal sociability in the Scottish diaspora to 1930, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2014, pp. 12–13; T. Bueltmann and D. MacRaild, The English diaspora in North America: migration, ethnicity and association, 1730s–1950s, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017; T. Bueltmann et al., The Scottish diaspora, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2013, pp. 16–33; T. Bueltmann et al. (eds), Locating the English diaspora, 1500–2010, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2012. 13 For discussion see Chapter 8. 14 D, H. Akenson, ‘Diaspora, the Irish and Irish nationalism’, in A. Gal et al. (eds), The call of the homeland: diaspora nationalisms, past and present, Leiden, Brill, 2010. 15 Smith, interview. 16 For example M. Barber, and M. Watson, Invisible immigrants: the English in Canada since 1945, Winnipeg, University of Manitoba Press, 2015; M. Harper, ‘Initiatives, impediments and identities: Scottish emigration in the twentieth century’, in B. S. Glass and J. M. MacKenzie (eds), Scotland, empire and decolonisation in the twentieth century, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015; L. Baldassar, Visits home: migration experiences between Italy and Australia, Melbourne, Melbourne University Publishing, 2001. 17 Edwards, interview. 18 Smith, interview. 19 Totten, interview; see Chapter 6. 20 For example R. Perks and A. Thomson (eds), The oral history reader (3rd edition), London, Routledge, 2016; K. Bartholomew, ‘Women migrants in mind: leaving Wales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in C. G. Pooley, and I. D. Whyte (eds), Migrants, emigrants and immigrants: a social history of migration, London, UCL Press, 1991; A. J. Hammerton, and A. Thomson, Ten pound Poms: Australia’s invisible migrants, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005, pp. 15–22; E. Richards ‘Hearing voices: an introduction’, in A. J. Hammerton, and E. Richards (eds), Speaking to immigrants: oral testimony and the history of Australian immigration, Canberra, Australian National University, 2002. 21 Richards, ‘Hearing voices’. For similar reservations on emigrant letters see E. Richards, ‘Australian colonial mentalities in emigrant letters’, Australian Studies, 2, 2, 2010, p. 3. This could be extended to individual sources more generally, like memoirs and legal submissions, sources rarely subjected to similar scrutiny. 22 For an early example of an ambitious project of ‘programmatic’ oral history based on interviews from representative samples of each social class in British society see P. Thompson, The Edwardians: the remaking of British society, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975. 23 A. Portelli, The battle of Valle Giulia: oral history and the art of dialogue, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1997, quoted in A. Thomson, Moving stories: an intimate history of four women across two countries, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011, p. 183.

24  Introduction 24 P. Cushman, ‘Why the self is empty: toward a historically situated psychology’, American Psychologist, 45, 5, May 1990. 25 O. Handlin, The uprooted (2nd edition), Boston, Little Brown, 1973, p. 4. 26 The tradition includes some ambitious works using biographical sources other than oral history, for example B. S. Elliott, Irish migrants in the Canadas: a new approach, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988, which uses genealogy and biography to trace migrant lives of individuals and families. 27 Appendix, Table 5. In 1958 the population gender difference was 51.8 per cent female to 48.2 per cent male, indicating relative stability. 28 D. Sriskandarajah and C. Drew, Brits abroad: mapping the scale and nature of British emigration, London, IPPR, 2006, pp. 20–2. 29 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, p. 359. 30 Out of the total 135 interviewees the book draws directly on 100 stories, 53 from women, 47 from men. 31 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, p. 362. 32 See Chapters 2 and 5. 33 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, p. 214; J. Jupp, Immigration (2nd edition), Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 94–5. 34 See stories of Dobinson, Stuart and Watts in Chapter 8. 35 See Chapters 3 and 5; Whiteside, interview. 36 Hunt, interview. 37 Yelling, interview. 38 Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, p. 118. 39 Barber and Watson, Invisible immigrants; M. Harper, Scotland no more? The Scots who left Scotland in the twentieth century, Edinburgh, Luath, 2012. 40 A. McCarthy (ed.), A global clan: Scottish migrant networks and identities since the eighteenth century, London, Tauris, 2006; Richards, Britannia’s children, pp. 186–7. 41 J. M. Mackenzie, with N. R. Dalziel, The Scots in South Africa: identity, gender and race, 1772–1914, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007; Bueltmann, Clubbing together, pp. 12–13; see also Bueltmann et al., The Scottish diaspora, pp. 16–33; Bueltmann et al. (eds), Locating the English diaspora. 42 Jupp, Immigration, pp. 50–1. 43 See Barbara Totten’s story in Chapter 6. 44 For example Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 14–15. 45 For example F. Breen, ‘Emigration in the age of electronic media: personal perspectives of Irish migrants to Australia, 1969–2013’, in A. McCarthy (ed.), Ireland in the world: comparative, transnational and personal perspectives, London, Routledge, 2015, pp. 198–234. 46 For example Bassindale, interview; Stewart, interview; Hennessey, interview. 47 Murphy, interview. 48 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 20–2.

Part I

Migration from austerity to prosperity

1

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility: the 1940s to the 1960s

The postwar generation of British emigrants, more than two million of them from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s, constituted one of the largest mass migrations in the country’s history. In some ways this was an unprecedented episode which marked a change in the long history of British migration. The intensity of demand from most receiving countries for urban industrial workers, rather than the old agricultural preferences, brought huge outflows of the skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled from British cities, mostly to cities and towns of Commonwealth countries. Yet when viewed through narratives of the migrant experience this highly urban postwar mass movement also had much in common with its predecessors, even with the mass exodus of the British in the nineteenthcentury days of sail. Particularly in its first phase, up to about the late 1950s, it was a movement driven overwhelmingly by awareness of the forces of postwar austerity, by shortages, chronic housing deficiencies and for many a sense that escape to the ‘new world’, and higher average incomes and living standards, was the only positive alternative to a dismal future in Britain.1 But the bulk of postwar migrants were also acutely conscious of the limits of their brief education, and migration offered the promise of previously unheard-of educational achievement and advancement for the next generation. The classic self-improvement ethos which drove this flight echoed the same ideals which had motivated so many rural and urban workers to emigrate a century or so earlier, not just to escape from poverty but, by improving the family’s welfare, to guarantee its respectability and social advancement. It was the same impulse which had inspired generations of nineteenth-century workers to strive for intellectual and social improvement at home by joining Mechanics’ Institutes and Friendly Societies and participating in chapel activities.2 A similar drive for migrants’ betterment in the postwar years linked expanding economic conditions with opportunities for home ownership and improved educational prospects for children. It is no surprise that so 27

28  Migration from austerity to prosperity many migrant couples justified their move with the timeless reasoning that it would be ‘better for the children’. But we will see in this chapter ways in which the deeply traditional thinking of postwar migrants also left room for a more modern outlook, in which an openness to ‘adventure’ paved the way for new patterns of migrant behaviour in later years. The diversity of migration experience was further widened by the midcentury shadow of British imperialism, and ways in which the middle and upper classes imported old habits of easy mobility to new migration opportunities. Mobile journeys to affluence and self-improvement We can see the self-improvement ethos at work in the stories recalled by postwar working-class migrants. Overwhelmingly this was a generation, growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, who conventionally left school at around 14. With luck the boys might achieve a skilled trade qualification, the girls white-collar or retail work, but they were on the cusp of an educational transformation in Britain which would swell the ranks of the lower middle-classes from below. This is one reason why historians often refer to the 1950s as an ‘age of affluence’, despite the conflicting sense among ordinary people’s memories of a time of austerity.3 The social revolution took place as access to tertiary education expanded rapidly and many children of the working class embarked on a dizzying process of social mobility. But for those whose mobility took them out of Britain their awareness of the combined social and geographical turning point in their lives is particularly striking. Larry Robinson, born in Manchester in 1935, was the youngest of six children of a tailor father and factory weaver mother. The war ended just in time for him to write high-school entrance exams, unlike his siblings who all left school at 14, and Larry was one of the first four students from his primary school to enter high school. It was a local event; the local pub, the Green Dragon, was ‘so pleased they had a party for us’, and his parents ‘were delighted’ at this huge family achievement, seeing the first secondary student in the family’s history, later boosted with top marks for his high-school certificate. University beckoned, but Larry now hit the glass wall of inadequate family income. Instead he obtained a research trainee position in textile technology and combined laboratory work with part-time study at Salford Technical College. But he looked further, forming an ambition to emigrate to Canada; central to his aspiration was rankling resentment at being unable to get to university: ‘I was disillusioned with the fact that I couldn’t afford to go to university, and that was the underlying thing for me.’ Marriage in 1956 to Elizabeth, from a similarly upwardly mobile background, crystallised the ambition, and within a month of

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  29 the wedding they garnered their savings and embarked on what they regarded as a honeymoon trip on the Manchester Mariner for Toronto. Larry recalls his mindset of the time in his reflection that their ambition and migration decision ‘had been formulated during postwar reconstruction, rationing and austerity in Britain. Canada seemed a place we could settle and prosper, and we did.’ Indeed, they prospered well beyond their fondest dreams by dint of the same intense determination that had motivated their success at school. Larry’s laboratory research work promised a fruitful career, but both of them returned to university in Toronto, part-time, and he ultimately graduated from Osgoode Law School with a law degree. This led to a private practice, a Queens’s Counsel in 1984, vice-presidency of a major corporation and several directorships, while Elizabeth worked as the legal secretary and became ‘master’ of a university college. ‘Not bad for two kids from poor families who arrived in Canada with less than two hundred dollars’, he observed. Much later, in the 1990s, after retirement in Canada, these ‘two kids’ were to expand their horizons by taking an opportunity to work for five years in Queensland, where they enjoyed Australian life in a beachside house, a bonus of the striking success of their self-improvement drive.4 Here was the modern social mobility migration story writ large, where the times were right for their determination to seize opportunities outside Britain. The extended family migrations of the Staffords and Hennesseys from the 1950s through to the 1980s illustrate some old and new features characteristic of postwar migration and its capacity to shape lives in diverse ways. John and Leslie Stafford, from working-class Manchester, were in the classic mould of children of the Depression, their father an unskilled municipal street worker before the war and a ‘floor finisher’ afterwards. John’s childhood memories were not of hunger but of regular scrimping and making do under his mother’s tutelage, notably using cardboard to fill the holes in his shoes. But he also reflected that his Scottish mother was the ambitious ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘mover’ in the family; ‘she was constantly on my dad to open a radio store. He never did.’ She influenced the fact, John insisted, that all her sons ultimately ran their own businesses, and his account of his own career owes much to her example, and to a degree guilt for his belated recognition of it: ‘one of the regrets of my life is that while she was alive, I never once thanked her for the sacrifices she made’.5 The middle of three sons, John was born in 1923 and won a highschool scholarship at 14, but family hardship forced him to leave school to contribute to the meagre family finances in a ‘safe’ delivery boy’s job with Manchester Corporation. Five years in the navy during the war ultimately enabled him to be demobilised in Australia, where he thought he would stay; unsettled in Sydney, he changed his mind in time to return home courtesy of the navy. Back in Manchester he nursed an ambition

30  Migration from austerity to prosperity to become a railway station-master, realising, at least, an upward transition from manual to white-collar employment. Moving through the rigid railway ranks, by 1951 he achieved his ambition; he also married Helena, who was pregnant with their first child when frustrations at work caused him again to look further, this time to Canada. Denied a sideways move into an attractive station-master’s house, he decided, ‘with the hot blood of youth’, that he should respond by seeking greener pastures. ‘It [the career disappointment] was sufficient because I still had wanderlust, even though I’d reached this, to me, pinnacle; a class seven boy leaves school at 14. I’d made it, so to speak. I started thinking again about greener fields. I wished I’d never terminated Australia.’ John and Helena’s 1951 move to Canada became an archetypal postwar migrants’ success story, complete with early ‘moments of hardship’, which now underlines their story of achievement. With Helena seven months pregnant, John was initially forced to take whatever work he could find, doing heavy labour in the rail freight yards in Windsor, Ontario. But before long his railway connections yielded a chief clerk’s position in the Toronto offices of British & Irish Railways, an enterprise dedicated to recruiting business from tourists visiting Britain. Within three years John’s connections enabled him to set up a travel agency, initially a partnership, which flourished and on retirement passed to his son. The resulting prosperity, together with discounted travel, enabled regular trips to Australia, and later much holidaying on cruise liners. Tempted at one point by the climatic attractions of living in Australia, the thought of further migration – and their well-established family in Toronto – put him off. ‘I wasn’t going through that again. … No thanks!’ John and Helena’s one-stop migration was indeed a traditional and stable one, but it coincided with and stimulated a further wave of their extended family’s ‘chain migrations’ which boosted the family fortunes and pointed towards more modern patterns of mobility. Helena’s mother had died shortly before they left, and within a few years they brought out her 16-year-old sister, who, like them, settled permanently in Toronto. At about the same time, in 1955, John’s younger brother, Leslie, and his wife Vera, were attracted by John’s glowing accounts of Canadian prosperity, which made Manchester seem ‘dull’ by comparison. Leslie, born in 1930, had suffered as an evacuee during the war, but benefited from staying on at school until 16 and training as a professional photographer. Vera, from a family of ten children, was a trained comptometer operator in high demand so they were confident of travelling with marketable skills; in 1955 they were young enough to think of the move as a temporary working holiday, to ‘see something of the world, the adventure’, albeit for the daunting cost of £100 from two years of saving. In the event, despite the advantage of a brother in Toronto, the move was a difficult one, coinciding with an employment downturn. At one point Leslie sold

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  31 carpets at Eaton’s department store and in 1956 they took a bus west from Toronto and worked briefly in Victoria and Vancouver. Money was tight and when Vera became pregnant in 1957 they resolved to return to England where the birth would be virtually free, but already with thoughts of later re-emigrating to Canada permanently.6 At this point, back in Manchester, Leslie and Vera’s story was complicated by the influence of further family movements. One of Vera’s seven brothers, Vincent Hennessey, had emigrated to Melbourne in 1951. A 25-year-old single butcher, he took to the country with enthusiasm and seemed set for permanent settlement, but the urge to travel further saw him on the move again in 1956, first to visit the family in Manchester, but then onward to Canada, where for a time he stayed with Leslie and Vera. By 1957 he had returned from Vancouver to what he thought of as the greater attractions of Melbourne.7 Just as John had earlier enticed them to Toronto, Vincent now urged a further move to Australia. As Leslie recalls it, the message was simple and convincing: ‘Use the ten pound scheme to come to Oz where you will find it easier to save money than in the UK. Stay the compulsory two years and if you want to return to Canada you can.’ The advice was welcome, as Leslie and Vera struggled to make ends meet in Manchester, and by late 1958, with Vincent’s sponsorship, they embarked for Melbourne. This was their final and most fruitful migration, although Leslie recalls that the decision was prompted by their desire ‘to see some more of the world’. But good work experience changed the outlook. Leslie obtained photographic employment promptly, and later more securely at La Trobe University, Vera gave birth to twins in 1959 and another son in 1969 but ‘was never out of work’, and eventually Leslie set up a photography business in the coastal town of Portland, Victoria, where Vincent also settled. But the family mobility was far from over. Vera’s mother’s illness in Manchester prompted a temporary return in 1964, but the short stay was extended to more than a year when their youngest son became seriously ill and was unable to travel. Their struggle to find work and make do in Manchester marked their deep commitment to their Australian home, and they became staunch public defenders of the benefits of their new country; Vera attracted a newspaper interview and publicity in her response to press criticism of Australia; her sharp rejoinder ‘set things straight’.8 Finally they returned in September 1965 to what Leslie remembers as great relief: ‘were we glad to get back to Oz!’ Leslie and Vera’s growing family finally gave them a persuasive incentive to settle permanently, but Vincent, who remained unmarried (‘it’s just the way it worked out’, he commented), had not yet satisfied his nomadic urge. He too returned to see his ailing mother in 1964, continued to care for his parents until their deaths and stayed on in well-paid employment until 1982, when an older brother and wife set up a business

32  Migration from austerity to prosperity in Texas and invited him to join them. He enjoyed this ‘exciting’ new culture, doing varied work, but there was much about Texas which he found alien, and by 1986 he was back in Manchester thinking of further travel; the urge to return to Australia finally drove him back in 1988. Texas, he recalled, ‘didn’t have the same freedom as far as I’m concerned. … You’ve got to be careful where you go. … Australia was the only place.’ Australia did remain the only place, and his subsequent moves were confined to holiday visits to family abroad, travel in Europe, local shifts from Melbourne to Portland, where he joined Leslie and Vera, and nearby Warrnambool for retirement in 2003. But much of his family had been touched by his movements; one brother remained in Texas, another brother in Australia, and for a time in the late 1950s he had brought with him to Melbourne a younger brother who suffered from homesickness and returned to Manchester, only to move promptly for work to Turkey, where he married an American woman and then emigrated permanently to Toronto. Even by the standard of the huge emigration levels of the postwar years the ‘Stafford–Hennessey diaspora’, spanning nearly half a century, was a remarkable exercise in family mobility for a British migration culture mostly based on individual and nuclear family settlement. It illustrates the wide varieties of strategies and experiences that were becoming available as migration, return and re-migration became practical and easy possibilities for most of the population. The simple one-way move of John and Helena remained the practice of the great majority of postwar migrants intent on that better future ‘for the children’, and was in keeping with long traditions in British emigration history. But for couples like Leslie and Vera their serial migration history, even as the family size grew, could be turned to their advantage and sustain their drive to get ahead, and the return experience reinforced their commitment to Australia; their openness to continuing mobility would become more characteristic of migrant habits in future decades. Vincent’s sojourns around the world marked the new and easy transience of the young and single, and pointed to ways in which the mobility of the backpacker would help to redefine the meaning of migration in the West. And the chain migration experiences of both families, with resulting networks and family visits linking three continents, point to other ways in which migration around the British world and beyond would promise both adventure and advancement. Complex and overlapping themes of change and continuity in migration practice are palpable in these stories. In the following accounts we will see variations on these themes, which would find echoes in the later decades.

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  33 Democratising mobility: the pioneer sojourning of Miles Marshall In 1992, aged 64, Miles Marshall travelled from Waterloo, Ontario, to Switzerland to fulfil a lifetime ambition to climb the Matterhorn. Twothirds of the way up the mountain Miles, exceptionally fit for his age, ‘ran out of gas’, failing to keep up with the cracking pace set by his demanding young guide pushing him on to the sheer mountain face, but his partial success crowned decades of impulsive adventuring during which he had routinely brushed aside obstacles of career prospects, finances and age. Nine years earlier he had run for the second time in the London to Brighton marathon, at 60 he ran in the New York marathon, in his youth he had enjoyed amateur wrestling in New Zealand, and there was no occupation too rough for him to try if it would serve his immediate purpose, including logging, factory, building and railway labour in Canada, heavy work on the Snowy River project in Australia and dock work in New Zealand. His readiness to try anything was symptomatic of his openness to travel and migration, which began at the age of 19 in 1947; he needed little temptation to seize any opportunity to move on, serially, to ‘see a different country’, which for years was a higher priority than any career drive.9 Miles’s eagerness for travel in 1947, living for the next moment at the expense of future security, might seem puzzling when we consider the immediate postwar years of deep austerity and reconstruction and a widespread desire for personal security and improvement. But his experience is a reminder of how the British colonial dividend and the long experience of emigration again opened up a wider world of possibilities abroad. For Miles this had a very particular family resonance. His father owned a milk run and ran cattle and poultry near Southport. But in the early 1920s his parents had emigrated to Canada, first to rural Manitoba, then Ontario, later to Battle Creek, Michigan, and they evidently thrived in farming pursuits. After the birth of Miles’s elder sister in 1926 they returned to England, about a year before Miles’s birth; seared into his memory was his father’s repeated claim that returning to England ‘was the biggest mistake of his life’. His paternal grandfather, too, had spent some years farming in the United States, so there was an established family migration narrative, albeit a temporary one. Miles absorbed this family narrative very early. He was cushioned during his childhood from the Depression and war through his father’s farming business, where he regularly helped with the milk run. He attended a good grammar school but, keen to escape, left at 16, memorably on D-Day, his ‘happiest day’. For three years he worked hard for his father and on other farms, but in his spare time cast fishing lines on the coast near Southport, selling his catch to local hotels. ‘I made more money for two or three years than two workmen together’, he recalled.

34  Migration from austerity to prosperity After three years, a visit to Scotland and a cycling trip through Wales, he was ready to look beyond home; first he joined a two-week tour to Switzerland where he acquired his mountaineering ambitions. The short trip whetted his appetite for further adventure, and crystallised a sense of dissatisfaction with England. ‘I thought: “I’ve had enough of England, I want to get out of here, taste of travel, I want to go some place else.”’ After toying briefly with the idea of joining the army to see the world he responded to a newspaper advertisement from the Ontario government seeking an airlift of seven thousand emigrants. Miles was among the youngest of the applicants, needing his parents’ permission to apply, but the Canadians were still keen to import skilled farm workers with Miles’s experience. So in August 1947 he boarded an old Skymaster plane and joined one of the earliest groups of postwar Canadian immigrants to travel by air. Moreover, this was no subsidised scheme on the cheap; Miles paid his own fare, about £60, out of his fishing money, and boasts that in all his later movements, while others were enjoying subsidised migration, ‘I’ve never had a penny paid anywhere I’ve travelled’. After a brief stopover in Toronto Miles and a companion were sent to London, Ontario, to work for nearby farmers. Their arrival was a local occasion; a reception by farm placement officers, farmers and a reporter from the London Free Press, underlined the local expectations held by employers for a new importation of experienced farm labour; the newspaper reported their arrival on the front page with an article headed ‘Miles Marshall flies to Canada 4,000 miles to eat a porterhouse steak’! But Miles and his friend soon disappointed local expectations; after a week of heavy toil, ‘daylight to dark’, they decided, with the impulsiveness of youth, that they could do better than farm work. So after a brief return to Toronto, where they told new arrivals to ‘steer well clear of farming’, they headed north to Fort William, met with old friends of his parents and began a search for work. A succession of tough, mostly outdoor labouring jobs followed as Miles pursued the classic male sojourner’s pathway, taking any temporary work that would satisfy the moment and facilitate the next move. Painful injuries to his foot while working at a lumber camp and on an ice-breaker were mere irritants to be overcome before moving on again. Outdoor work building a pulp mill on the north shore of Lake Superior, with a crude bunkhouse for communal sleeping, introduced Miles to the rigours of a Canadian winter and the rough drinking and fighting habits of itinerant workers. But in the spring, as the mill was completed, Miles moved again, to the west coast of British Columbia, where for six months he worked in another pulp mill. At this stage Miles was set on a pathway of youthful sojourning which seemed likely to continue indefinitely, a model for countless other young people from Britain and around the world, in the years to come. For many it might be no more than a two-year – or less – ‘working holiday’,

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  35 followed by return home or perhaps detoured by unanticipated romance, marriage and permanent settlement. As Miles recalls it, none of this occupied his thinking at the time; to see another country or region was paramount. His move from Ontario to British Columbia when the work ran out was thus perfectly consistent with his open-ended life plan. But within a few months of arrival in the west a new factor emerged which challenged his carefree mobility. His parents, emboldened by their son’s move, again sold up in Southport and emigrated with the remaining family for a second time; they fulfilled their Canadian dream by buying a farm in Western Ontario and invited Miles to join them. So after six months in the west Miles returned to Ontario and decided to stay ‘while I decided if farm life was for me’. The prospect was tempting as the farm thrived and he stood to inherit, but after three years he decided he was unsuited to it. He found it a ‘lonely life’, began to chafe at the static rural existence and characteristically made a dramatic gesture of his departure: ‘I’d a brother a couple of years younger than me and he seemed to like the farm. I said to him: “You can have it, when the parents die (laugh), it’s all yours, I’m going.”’ Moreover, his experience of a close-knit farming community crystallised some of his unease about his status as a BritishCanadian immigrant. The local community was always supportive and helpful, and his sisters married local men, ‘but being from overseas I always had the feeling that [we] were never really accepted’. This only reinforced what he had encountered soon after his arrival in 1947. ‘I found out in a hurry that people in Canada just did not like British people. I had no personal problems but fifty years ago things were different and the “limeys” as we were then called, were not liked.’ His later experience was to reinforce the feeling that the same anti-British attitude was common to Australia and New Zealand as well, even though he found a greater friendliness among antipodeans. Miles’s response to the anti-British bias, not the most common reaction among new migrants, was to suppress his Englishness, even his accent. It also ‘made me a little wary of mixing with English people, and on my visits to England after long absences I find it hard to believe that I started from Britain so long ago’. So in early 1952, after another brief flirtation with the idea of military enlistment, this time with the Canadian ‘Princess Pats’ bound for the Korean campaign, Miles returned to the west and travelled alone from Vancouver to Sydney. Again he ‘had no idea if it was a permanent move or just a necessary change of scenery’. Arriving during a recession, he walked the streets of Sydney looking for work, finally heading north to join an outdoor gang of mostly immigrant and aboriginal rail-workers near Muswellbrook – ‘like being on a chain-gang’; the work pattern he developed in Canada continued. He warmed to Australia, revelled in the warmer climate and quickly made friends, but when the work finished at the end of the year he joined a Canadian friend and embarked

36  Migration from austerity to prosperity for New Zealand. The lack of any onerous immigration formalities for British subjects like Miles suited his mobile ambitions perfectly, and the trans-Tasman move seemed no more momentous than if he was moving to Melbourne. Two years of hard labour on the Wellington waterfront and rapid bonding with an expanding group of welcoming New Zealand friends endeared him to the country, and in later reflections after many more years of travel he came to regard New Zealand as his ‘second home’. But two years later he and the same Canadian friend were restless and bound again for Australia. After a brief and novel experience as ‘corn flake workers’ with Kellogg’s at Botany Bay, they headed to Cooma where the Snowy River power project was in full development. Once again Miles thrived in the rough conditions, and among a majority of non-English-speaking migrants he was often the only English speaker. By early 1955 their project was completed and they boarded the Otranto for England, with thoughts of a summer of European travel beckoning. When Miles first emigrated to Canada in 1947 he was one of a minority of ‘pioneers’ of young single British sojourners able to manipulate the burgeoning global demand for labour, skilled and unskilled, to their advantage. Eight years later the situation had changed dramatically. Assisted migration schemes to Commonwealth countries and growing Western affluence had begun to elevate international travel to one of the new consumer commodities eagerly desired by the young. Miles witnessed the new atmosphere on the Otranto, with its dominant cargo young single adventurers bound for indefinite open-ended travel, including Britons like himself but a mass of Australians and New Zealanders leaving home for the first time. They were united in aiming to ‘tour through England and then they’d go through Europe and it was almost like a religion then’. Miles and his Canadian friend were already seasoned devotees of the new ‘religion’. On arrival in London they bought an old 1937 London taxicab and escaped England (which still held no attractions for Miles) to tour the Continent on ‘five dollars a day’, mainly spent on petrol, bread, cheese and wine and sleeping in the open air. Returning to London at the end of the summer they stayed just long enough to earn the fare to Canada ‘laying new floors in a Humber Rootes factory’, and by October they boarded the Arosa Star, a ship full mostly of returning German-Canadian migrants bound for Québec City. Miles promptly hitch-hiked to the family farm, where his absence for the past four years ensured that he became ‘an instant celebrity for about two hours’. After nearly a decade of mobility this could well have been the point where he finally settled, but with no intense career ambition anything remained possible. In 1957 he took out Canadian citizenship, although mainly to ensure easy return during future travels; he was near to his family, but still with no interest in farm work, so soon moved on to Toronto. A year’s work in a glass factory brought some stability, but

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  37 an economic recession in 1957 caused a round of lay-offs which, again, brought him to consider other options. Miles recalls the moment of decision. ‘They were laying them off everywhere … and I toured around Toronto and I saw long lines of people all looking for jobs. I said: “Not for me, I’m getting out of here”, three weeks later I’m back in New Zealand.’ Miles’s mindset at this stage was still that of the temporary sojourner, intending to move again after a short stay. As he recalls, ‘I do remember at the time saying: “I’ll put a year in here and see how things go”’. He moved easily back into his old waterfront work in Wellington and enjoyed the more ‘laid back’ antipodean life so that ‘time seemed to slip by unnoticed’ well beyond the first year. But it was marriage, rather than inertia, which changed the story. In 1961 he married Jeanette, a New Zealander, and it seemed that he was finally headed for permanent settlement and a stable family life, marked most emphatically by home ownership. Over the next ten years Jeanette gave birth to three children, but tragically lost one, aged four, to a brain tumour. As prime breadwinner Miles prospered when he formed a partnership with an ex-professional boxer, bought a large truck and won the local council garbage collection contract. This was handson heavy labour for the pair, ‘carrying sacks of garbage on your back’, but the enterprise was profitable and suited Miles, enabling him to play golf in the afternoons and enjoy family life. Still, after ten years the business attraction faded and they sold up, unhappily at the same time that Jeanette became ill with tuberculosis of the kidney and briefly entered a sanatorium. Her mother had died not long before which made it difficult to manage with no other family support. At the same time Miles was keen to visit his ageing parents, so, at Jeannette’s insistence that it should be a family enterprise, they resolved to go together and sold the house, while fully intending to return to New Zealand in a year or so. Jeanette’s tuberculosis condition made for difficulties with Canadian immigration authorities, but with perseverance they were back in Canada in 1971, staying initially with his family while, once again, Miles embarked on a search for work. This was no longer the easy task it had been in his youth when he was a young man willing to take any unskilled labour on offer. But a chance opening for prison guards at the Guelph correctional centre brought a new opportunity. Despite the difficulties involved in supervising prisoners, Miles insisted it was ‘the easiest job I ever had’. More importantly it was stable and permanent employment, which kept him in Canada, and from which he retired after 21 years. Family life, then, finally put an end to Miles’s sojourning, but not to his mobility, which he now enjoyed mostly with his family. His move to Canada in 1971, intended to be a temporary visit, was more an act of return migration, dictated by family dynamics, work and welfare, than a continuation of his earlier pattern of carefree – and single – global wandering. Canada, rather than Britain, had for years been the site of

38  Migration from austerity to prosperity his original and extended family, ‘chain migrants’ who followed his first move in 1948, so Miles was finally ‘coming home’. Yet in later years he never really lost his sojourning mindset, illustrated most dramatically by his return visits to New Zealand and Australia with Jeanette, holidays in Europe and those heroic exploits of marathon running and mountain climbing well into his sixtiess. And as if to continue the tradition, his son, nine years old when they moved to Canada, later settled back in New Zealand, where Miles had continuing connections with old friends. The network encouraged Miles’s sense of himself as an internationalist, although, comfortable to be thought of as a Canadian, especially on visits to Britain. Any trace of a remnant English identity was long gone. This is a product, perhaps, of his eagerness to escape from a homeland which held few attractions for him, or for his parents, in 1947, his sense as a migrant that it was not good to be English, and unwelcoming experiences on return visits to Britain, where on his first encounter he was abused for ‘deserting’ his homeland and in later years felt like a stranger. In this he may stand apart from many of his postwar migrant contemporaries, who generally retain some sense of British identity, national pride or patriotism decades after their departure. But in his sustained and determined sojourning, prompted by circumstance and whim as much as conscious intention, he stands as an early pioneer of the mobile habits of the British, which took off in the 1950s and laid the ground for the backpacking revolution which followed. Traditional motives: migrants of Empire Miles Marshall’s sojourning illustrates some of the novel ways in which the new postwar mobility and wider work opportunities, especially in the British world, were democratising travel and migration. Even unskilled migrants like Miles need not be at the mercy of the dictates of a global labour market when they were free to move on to the next country on a whim. But more traditional patterns of British mobility continued among the chaotic postwar exodus of British migrants. The most persistent of these stemmed from the old but continuing British imperial global presence and the military and administrative establishment it sustained, dominated by, but not exclusive to, upper- and middle-class elites. The history of the British Empire is full of stories of the multiple ways in which it provided employment and diversion for a huge cross-section of the population, from the British Raj in India to District Commissioners in Africa and a military network around the world.10 This far-flung imperial diaspora exposed thousands of Britons of successive generations to diverse people and cultures; despite the well-known ethnocentric arrogance which often accompanied it, it could be a spur to further migratory

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  39 habits, and lead to remigration from the non-white Empire to the white colonies of settlement. By the late 1940s, as the process of decolonisation began, the potential for this process escalated dramatically, when footsoldiers of the Empire, returning to civilian life, sought new ways to sustain a life of adventure, opportunity or stability beyond Britain. For many their old imperial habits might die hard in the new worlds they found, but they too encountered postwar winds of change which would challenge old ways and open them to new possibilities. Elite migrants among a predominant wave of skilled and unskilled workers in postwar years, their mobility would foreshadow the later exodus of educated professionals and technocrats. In the immediate aftermath of the war, despite the rapid decline of British global power, an imperial culture in Britain remained pervasive, and for those middle- and upper-class families traditionally employed in the military and in the running of Empire the assumption that life around the globe would return to ‘business as usual’ went mostly unchallenged. But this psychology among the ‘agents of Empire’ changed rapidly as decolonisation gathered pace. A good exemplar of the process is Hugh Wilmer, whose military and imperial background suited him ideally for service in British possessions overseas. His father was a colonel in the Wilmer ‘family regiment’, the Cameronian Scottish Rifles, with a family connection dating back to the nineteenth century; his mother was the daughter of a tea planter in Ceylon. From the age of seven, when his mother died, he was at boarding school, but during holidays he and his brother were brought up variously in Dorset by his father, housekeepers and an aunt. Aged 17 at the end of the war, his future seemed to be mapped out for him: ‘I suppose my family really … was one of thousands of sort of middle-class Brits who were brought up to serve the Queen. … You went to Imperial Service College.’ So it seemed perfectly natural, when he left Sandhurst Military Academy in 1948, for him to join the family regiment and to be stationed promptly in Gibraltar, followed by Italy, Hong Kong, and three years in the Malayan campaign, climaxed by an appointment as aide-de-camp to the Chief of Staff in Singapore and the rank of major. After civilian life in a postwar Britain still subject to austerity and rationing, the closed world of the officer’s life was a leap into luxury. ‘They had everything there, I mean you could eat as much chocolate as you liked and nothing was rationed.’ At various ports the facilities of local yacht clubs were freely available to British officers, and Hugh took to the life with enthusiasm. ‘It was wonderful. So you toured round the world, on Her Majesty, being paid for it.’11 The pleasures and privileges of army life around the world were beguiling enough for Hugh to contemplate a lifetime career, but even before he joined up the opportunities were contracting sharply, with Indian and Pakistani independence in 1947 and growing expectations

40  Migration from austerity to prosperity that the process of decolonisation would continue. By the early 1950s the future seemed more gloomy. ‘If you looked ahead a bit’, Hugh recalled, ‘you realised that with the downsizing going on with the British Army, that your career chances there weren’t all that good. … All the overseas possessions were being given up, so there was not the fun in being overseas guarding them. It came down to being stationed in Germany and Ireland.’ By 1954 Hugh had married Philippa, a well-travelled colonel’s daughter, or, as he put it, ‘army brat’; with two children by 1957 Hugh was ‘fed up with soldiering’ and frequent family separations, so embarked on a new career search. Fortune came in the shape of what he remembers as the ‘call of Africa’ and an opportunity to farm in Kenya. His father-inlaw, by then retired there with three mixed farms, offered him a partnership. Hugh’s childhood memories were redolent with the paraphernalia of empire, the mementoes of his father’s adventures in Africa: gaming trophies, a lunch gong ‘which hung between elephant tusks’ and game books he had pored over, so the prospect of farming in the Kenyan highlands was exciting, and his nomadic wife was equally enthusiastic. He calculated that the opportunity might stretch to ten years before being compromised by Kenyan independence. In the event independence was set for 1963, prompting a precautionary return to Britain in 1962. But in their five years there his family continued to enjoy the fruits of empire in what Hugh still recalls as ‘God’s own country. … Kenya was the best experience and hard to beat.’ After the freedom of Kenya, return to British urban life in the early 1960s was a culture shock, compounded by the fact that the world of Hugh’s peers, especially the ex-officer class, was becoming less congenial to him. A career shift from farming to financial analysis in Glasgow exposed him to men from similar class backgrounds, but mostly without the same exposure to overseas living outside the military. Moreover, he and Philippa were no longer at ease with the old class rigidities in Britain, which seemed to them to be reviving. In recalling their feelings at the time Hugh underlines the ways in which they had changed as a result of their Kenyan exposure to people from mixed – but white – backgrounds so that they no longer seemed to fit in socially. I was uncomfortable with what my sort of contemporaries and friends were doing. They were practising the traditional country pursuits, such as shooting and fishing … . A lot of them were in the city, making good money. … I suppose another thing which came into play, with my wife and I, was the fact that we were a little disillusioned with [our] fellow beings. The strata we were in was still going back to the old type of social class system. … And I looked round the world and thought: ‘Gosh, this British social class system can’t endure for ever; attitudes have to change’. … And that’s probably because we travelled all over the world with the army, and

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  41 secondly Kenya was always a very multicultural, freewheeling and open society. Kenya was really made for us as a young couple, because there you mixed with everyone. … They came from all walks of life. Whereas, you know, public school, army, officers’ mess, back into the country, where was I going? … Other things were happening in the world … and there was something just unsettling about that. A change was taking place.

Historians mostly agree that old attitudes to empire changed only slowly after the war, but by the early 1960s, under the influence of Suez and decolonisation, more people were becoming detached from the idea of Britain as an imperial power. Andrew Thompson writes of a ‘third implosion of empire’ between 1959 and 1964, when growing numbers of people ‘became disengaged from empire in the sense that they were less likely to hold an opinion about it’.12 Hugh’s peers were perhaps the slowest to register these shifts, but his own example illustrates that they were not impervious to change, and that, even as the opportunities of empire faded, the prospects of life in what had been the former colonies of white settlement again promised a different future, albeit still among an all white ‘multiculturalism’. In Hugh’s case the opportunity came with his successful application for a lucrative financial analyst’s position in Montreal in 1966, a move the family, now with four children, made with only minimal deliberation. For all of them Hugh considers it was the right move. They settled in a pleasant lakeshore suburb, Baie D’Urfé, where the children adapted immediately; ‘since then, in Canada we have never looked back; I think, the whole atmosphere was something we all enjoyed enormously, the kids took to the school, and of course they had, within a week, strong Canadian accents’. Close involvement in the children’s school led Philippa to become a School Board Commissioner, they made good friends with British and, eventually, Canadian neighbours, and Hugh’s career thrived far beyond his previous prospects in Britain. Compared to most postwar British migrants’ experience it was a smooth adjustment, aided by their previous mobility. What Hugh refers to as the ‘thousand dollar cure’, or their return to Britain after two and a half years – originally the ‘five-hundred dollar cure’ and a relative rarity – was little more than a brief desire to renew contact with old friends and Hugh’s regiment, with no intention of remaining. He breathed ‘a sigh of relief when I got on the Air Canada flight’. By 1978, despite developing a strong affection for Montreal, Hugh and Philippa joined the potent ‘Anglo exodus’ from French Canadian pressures for Québec secession, and settled in Toronto, now committed Canadian citizens.13 Their prosperity enabled the purchase of a ‘hobby farm’ near Cobourg, east of Toronto within commuting distance, which became home after retirement. Their local friends were from mixed backgrounds, but still carried a strong flavour of their earlier

42  Migration from austerity to prosperity English and Kenyan life. ‘I think, actually, the life we lead in Cobourg in Northumberland County, as this is (laughter) is probably as near to English country life as you can possibly imagine!’ English country life it might well resemble. But Hugh and Philippa’s thoroughly Canadianised children inherited their parents’ nomadic habits in ways that took them far from the delights of traditional English country living. One married and settled in Hong Kong, another in Washington State married to an American and a third spent more than eight years living in South Africa until returning in 2004. Only one son stayed in Canada. None retain their parents’ British loyalties, especially on the Canadian connection with the monarchy; Hugh stressed ‘I suppose I am a bit of a royalist at heart, … I don’t think my children would value it that much. … But I do, yes I do, really.’ But in their seventies the parents still shared their children’s more tangible habits of global mobility as routinely as they did in their own youth, with regular trips to visit old friends settled in South Africa, to Scotland, to the United States and across Canada. In such ways the old global transience of empire adapted itself to the modern realities of transnational migration and travel. Nomad daughters of the Empire Men were not the sole pioneers of postwar sojourning, although women often experienced global mobility in relational roles as daughters or wives. Philippa Wilmer had, as an ‘army brat’, experienced as much global travel as Hugh before marriage, and so adjusted easily – Hugh thought more easily than he – to his career-driven migrations. Childhood experience in the imperial diaspora undoubtedly predisposed women to future travel and migration. For example Sue Charles-Jones’s disrupted childhood, juggled between India and Britain, opened her to later nomadic possibilities. Before and during the war her father worked in India as a scientific officer for the United Planters Association of Southern India. Her mother travelled back to Wales to give birth to Sue in 1938 and then promptly returned with her to India where they remained until 1946. After Indian independence Sue’s father obtained another research position in India, and so her mother ‘remained while Sue faced a decade of boarding school in Shropshire, punctuated by occasional visits from her parents, English holidays with an uncle’s family and trips to India, the first in 1951 by air, aged 13. Her parents, she thought, did, unwittingly, ‘make me a relatively independent sort of person’ as a result. By 1956, with A-level certificates completed, she did six months of clerical work in Wales, moved to London to complete a law reporter’s course and lived independently, working for the International Wool Secretariat where she met Australians and New Zealanders and learnt much about other countries.

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  43 But by 1961, before any opportunity for travel alone, she married an army officer, Theo, and for the next nine years she moved with him happily to postings in Nigeria, Virginia and Singapore, punctuated by periods back in Britain. Among their global family two children were born in England, one in Virginia and one in Singapore. By 1970, when Theo decided to transfer to the Australian army, and settle in northern Victoria permanently, Sue had thoroughly internalised her sense of herself as a nomad. This was reinforced by local Portsmouth press publicity about the family’s departure. An article headed ‘Nomads on the move again’ noted that Theo was ‘emigrating with his family to satisfy his wanderlust’; ‘my wife Susan was born in India [which was incorrect, as described above] and we are both nomads’, Theo noted.14 Despite the expectation of permanence, Sue regarded the move as cavalierly as she had the earlier ones, and reflected on the easy process: ‘I do not think that either of us ever thought of homesickness as a possibility in our own lives and we never gave it a moment’s consideration.’ Such well-travelled beneficiaries of empire invariably enjoyed the privilege of the easiest adjustments to new countries, like Sue’s family on an idyllic ‘farmlet’ in northern Victoria.15

2  Susan and Theo Charles-Jones before leaving for Australia reported in the News, Portsmouth, October 1970

44  Migration from austerity to prosperity

3  Susan Charles-Jones and family with animals, at home in Yackandandah, Victoria, Australia, 1978

Mobile daughters of the Empire were not simply those who had enjoyed – or endured – childhood experience abroad. Girls of the upper classes were raised in a tradition which could include looking beyond home for at least a part of their education, the Swiss finishing school being the most common example. For those few who ventured further, the comfort of English as the imperial lingua franca across the Empire offered exciting possibilities for adventure for young women, just as it did for men. And by the 1950s and 1960s the infection of that new ‘religion’ of global travel touched the young without regard to class difference, and in practice did much to diminish it. Patricia Macdonald’s youthful travels illustrate the process vividly. Born in 1942 into a titled family, routinely represented in both houses of Parliament, she could reasonably look forward to a promising future in Britain and could expect to marry within aristocratic circles. Her father was a brigadier in the army during the war but subsequently served the Queen as Keeper of the Privy Purse, so the family enjoyed both London and country residences; during the war her mother started a school for young girls in their home at Durnford, Wiltshire, and this prospered for years afterwards. Patricia attended the school as a young girl and enjoyed her home life, but suffered homesickness and loneliness when she was sent away to boarding school at 13; she reflects that despite extensive later travels this was the only homesickness she ever suffered. Eager to escape the tyranny of school she left with O-levels at 16 and, after a period in Paris, suppos-

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  45 edly studying, she returned to London ‘and did all the things that young ladies were supposed to do like learning dressmaking and doing cooking courses’. She also studied a course in ‘civilisation’, and ‘for the first time I actually discovered what fun it was to learn. … It opened my mind to so many different areas about which I’d never learned at school.’ One of the many areas of interest emerging for her was the world beyond Britain, and, after a year of working in an haute couture West End shop alongside a Brazilian friend, she was ready to test the water.16 Patricia’s family, thoroughly grounded in English land ownership and politics, had little of the mobile background that we associate with old imperial and military families, although she acknowledged an important influence in her mother’s earlier youthful adventurousness. In 1937, before marrying, her mother travelled alone around the world ‘when women did not travel by themselves’. Patricia thought she must have inherited a ‘wandering gene’ from her mother, and in later years they shared some of their travelling habits in places like Kashmir and South Africa. ‘It was a lot of fun, because we both liked doing the same sort of thing.’ Aged 19 in 1961, Patricia embarked for Brazil with her Brazilian friend, spent four exciting months there and moved on to Peru after failing to get a visa for Argentina because ‘they had a revolution’. Finally she spent a month in the United States where she found New York stimulating enough to wish to return. After a year working in a London antique shop she earned enough to embark alone on a one-way ticket for New York, assuming it would be a year’s sojourn ‘to experience the American way of life’. Her one year extended seamlessly to two, as she immersed herself in interesting work for an international real estate company. Life was stimulating and congenial, and she began to feel some sense of belonging, especially as she came to know Americans well, including a boyfriend: ‘For a while I had a very nice boyfriend who I liked very much; he had a wonderful family who had sort of adopted me and seemed to love me and I had a great time with them.’ But eventually any notion of staying permanently faded as she decided she would never quite belong: I think I’d come to the conclusion by that time that I was never going to laugh at their jokes and they were never going to laugh at mine. And there was something about the American attitude, their way of looking at things, that was so different to mine that we actually never had a real meeting of minds. So I’d actually come to the conclusion by then that I couldn’t live there forever.

The timing of Patricia’s return in 1965 was also determined by pressure from an uncle to work with him, in his London art gallery, but not before she went to a Wyoming ‘dude ranch’ as a short-order cook (‘I’m a very

46  Migration from austerity to prosperity bad cook’) and visited a genuine working ranch for a week for the annual ‘round up’; ‘we got up at five in the morning and rode all day through the Mesquite bushes wearing chaps. We rounded up the cattle, and it was a great experience.’ Back in London Patricia’s career in the art gallery flourished. She became a director of the company and enjoyed the thrill of London for young singles in the late 1960s, ‘I had … the excitement of Chelsea and swinging London, and night-clubs, and I burned the candle at both ends’. The excitement was enhanced by her social connections in England, ‘I had a hugely wide circle of friends and went away weekends to the most wonderful houses all over England, and I had a lot of fun, a wonderful life’. The job enabled more travel, a return to Texas to run an exhibition, and in 1969 a six-month stint in Kenya to set up a branch gallery. Both the country and the people of Kenya soon intrigued her; she admired the Africans – they were ‘so incredibly tolerant, of the Poms, of the Brits’. And she was bemused by many of the white settler planter class, stuck in an old world of imperial stereotypes and race relations. Like so many British sojourners in Africa Patricia was entranced by the countryside as well as its people and had to return from that ‘total Mecca’ far too soon. In London opportunities for new directions were never far away, but this time her story, like so many migrant stories, was soon to be changed by marriage. This was not the predictable destiny of an aristocratic marriage but rather with an Australian publishing executive, and in 1973 permanent migration to Melbourne after a successful ‘one month’s trial’. In later years Patricia had two children and adopted Australia with enthusiasm; she flourished despite some temporary financial challenges. Her husband’s career took them to a decade-long sojourn in Boston and London but on return to Australia in 2005 she was in no doubt that she was ‘coming home’. Her earlier sojourning made for easy adaptation to continuing mobility. All her travels and migrant journeys had coincided with those of others often leaving the country for the first time in their family’s history, with over two million British emigrants seeking a different future in the 1950s and 1960s, including a generation of British young singles intent on adventure and working holidays. In this context her travels were not unique. But her easy approach to travel owed much to that taken-for-granted elite tradition whereby travel within and beyond the old Empire was a right and a rite of passage, just as her mother had enjoyed her global adventure in 1937. The ease with which the British upper classes had traditionally enjoyed the ‘fruits of empire’ as opportunities for mobility was not gender-neutral, but women took increasing advantage of the new pathways. Patricia’s global sojourns were in a long tradition of mobile women dating back to the nineteenth century, especially of those Victorian ‘lady travellers’ who had claimed the Empire as their natural territory for exploration.17 While the circumstances were

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  47 radically different, the women who claimed independent travel as a right in the later twentieth century had much in common with those pioneers. The empire of the imagination The long shadow of Britain’s imperial history worked its influence on potential emigrants in diverse ways; if direct experience in the formal colonies was not available, and this was true for most of the population, there were more intangible ways through which it could capture the imagination. Before and after the Second World War the teaching of history and geography exposed students to heroic versions of the nation’s imperial past, which easily translated into romantic views of the ‘British world’ abroad. In effect an ‘empire of the imagination’, easily romanticised, persisted long after the dissolution of empire. Migrants often speak with feeling about how their memories of this exposure influenced their later movements. For example two brothers, Peter and Richard Holland, left in the early 1970s, Peter in 1970 to Australia, where he married an Australian nurse, Richard in 1972 to Canada with his English wife. Their father, who had been a school headmaster and afterwards a private tutor in Bournemouth, sent his four sons to English boarding schools during the 1950s and 1960s. Peter reflected on how this triggered his migration thinking: There was a lesson called ‘Current Affairs’ on Monday mornings at my public school, which was most illuminating. There were speakers, some of them former boys at the school. … Many of them spoke about doings in countries overseas. … Looking back with the benefit of hindsight I think that a seed was sown in my subconscious mind that living outside England could be rewarding and exciting. My former school was a strongly Christian school and a large number of boys … became missionaries overseas in Africa or Asia. Again interest was generated in life outside England.

Later, when Peter worked for an engineering company in Manchester, he noted how the school influence was reinforced in ways uniquely attributable to the circulation of population around the British world. ‘There were a number of people from Britain’s former colonies (from Canada, South Africa and Australia) at this company so I learnt something about these countries there.’ This was the final trigger for Peter’s migration decision, and after carefully weighing up the possible destinations from what he had learned about them since childhood, ‘I plumped for Australia’.18 The power of the old pink on the map is palpable here. For the Holland brothers it set off a long process of mobility, as Peter eventually returned

48  Migration from austerity to prosperity with his wife from Australia to England but then planned a retirement migration back again, while Richard’s permanent move to Canada was punctuated by a three-year sojourn working in the Bahamas. For others childhood exposure to compelling images in geography books could sow the imaginative seed which would later yield concrete migration plans. Jan Marechaux’s migration to Canada in 1969 flowed from captivation with the country when she won the high-school geography prize. ‘I just remember learning about the Great Lakes and how fascinated I was with these huge lakes, and the vastness. … I just remember being fascinated by Canada.’19 In primary school Peter Chambers recalled a film night about Victoria, Australia, his later destination in 1969, with exotic and compelling images, notably ‘beautiful fruit, orchards and stuff and people, on the beach and all that kind of thing, and I remember thinking at the time, “Oh gosh, that’s wonderful”’.20 Jan Kerr’s childhood fascination with Australia stemmed from a school prize book she won about a nineteenthcentury convict woman, Sara Dane.21 ‘And I fell in love with Australia. … I kind of set myself a deadline; … most girls were married by the time they were 21. … And it was like: “If I’m not married by the time I’m 21, I’m going to Australia”.’ Australia proved to be only the first of Jan’s later serial migration destinations, but the old imperial images sparked off a mobile future which would persist for two decades.22 These images could be so potent in the 1950s and 1960s because they occurred when migration prospects were more easy and practical than they had ever been, so that imagination was reinforced seamlessly by the everyday propaganda and opportunity of mass migration. Peter Skinner began 15 years of intense serial migration in 1953, inspired directly by childhood reading rich in the adventure and romance of empire. Beginning with Kipling, he soon moved to a lifetime obsession with Rider Haggard, who bequeathed an enduring fascination with Africa. From other reading too, notably Thomas Wood’s 1930s travel memoir, Cobbers, he harboured early desires to move to Australia. Peter’s life story nicely exemplifies the huge upward mobility of young people from working-class origins which took off among the postwar generation, but it also illustrates ways in which this emergent middle class could combine, or even compromise, their career prospects with goals of global adventure. Born in a Norfolk village in 1931 to a bricklayer father and former domestic servant, and with a long family history of ‘artisan farming stock’, Peter’s first break came with a grammar-school scholarship at 11; in 1947 he left with his school certificate, but little ambition for further education. He worked in a bank for two years until he was called up for national service in the air force and promptly applied for an overseas posting. His enthusiasm soon faded when his work as a ground mechanic kept him in England. Still under 21 when he left the air force, he was blocked from a move to Australia when his father

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  49 refused to give consent. So, uninspired by the prospect of a ‘lifetime of money-juggling’ in the bank, he applied for a forestry job, signing up to a two-year Forestry Commission Training course in the Forest of Dean. On completion he was ready again to move on to Australia, but was lured away by an advertisement for Forest Officers in Tanganyika, Rhodesia and Nyasaland; ‘which country was immaterial to me at the time, I just wanted to see Africa’. In August 1953 he embarked for Tanganyika, enthused by his beguiling literary memories, keen to use the opportunity to see what he had read about, but with no thoughts of permanent settlement. Africa, in a sense, was still very much the alien ‘other’, no longer as a source of hunting booty but as an alluring chance for the consumption of exotic difference and adventure. As Peter put it, ‘I wanted to see the wildlife and big game, though never had any ambition to hunt. Africa was a continent of adventure and excitement, but a place to visit, not to emigrate to.’23 Peter fulfilled most of his African dreams with intense fervour. At every opportunity he enjoyed safaris and high-risk encounters with wildlife, climbed Mount Meru, almost reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, and enjoyed good relations with Africans. The adventures were grist to the mill of the heroic preconceptions of Africa he derived from Haggard. But he also made rapid career progress, and at the end of his three-year contract was offered an extended pensionable position. Suddenly the prospect of permanent settlement in Africa seemed real, but after some ‘soul searching’ he decided on the only alternative: ‘I just wanted to travel a bit more’. On the ship voyage back to Britain he formulated a plan to go to Canada for two years, then move on to Australia and New Zealand. The migration plan was systematic: ‘I was contemplating staying in one of those countries, but wanted to see them all first.’ But a chance encounter with a bank teller, who told him of rare cancellations on a ship to New Zealand for subsidised migrants changed the plan again, and within weeks, in April 1958, he was embarked on the Southern Cross. This was his first large migrant ship, and he shared the delights of the voyage through Suez with the other migrants, a vibrant social life and fascinating stops at ports like Aden. But by now Peter was the seasoned traveller, ‘to me my two previous voyages had been far more interesting’. Peter took to New Zealand immediately, ‘a very easy-going and beautiful country’, he found forestry work, hitch-hiked through both islands and enjoyed fishing and hunting opportunities. His planned one-year stay extended to nearly three, especially after he met Jean in his ‘tramping club’. Another chance opportunity for a short-term contract back in Tanganyika in 1961 was too tempting to refuse, and became the basis for an urgent short-notice marriage before they sailed together, a move not entirely welcome to Jean’s parents, who feared the terrors to which this adventurous young man might expose their daughter. Media accounts

50  Migration from austerity to prosperity of the recent Mau-Mau rebellion in nearby Kenya had dominated local knowledge of Africa, and it took some reassurances from Peter, supported by Jean’s own determination, to convince her parents that she would be safe; a ‘very hectic wedding’ proceeded four days before departure. In the event their two-year African stay was an object lesson in the greater difficulty such adventurous sojourns could present for women compared to men. After surviving hair-raising local flights and almost being swept away in their Land Rover in a flooded river, Jean suffered injuries, illness and depression, and lost a prematurely born child, aggravated by poor healthcare and the shock of news of her sister’s untimely death in New Zealand. Despite this Jean began to share Peter’s enthusiasm, joining him on various safaris, notably across the Serengeti, and numerous game parks. They witnessed the beginnings of Tanganyikan independence in 1961, which soon led to the new Tanzania. Peter was impressed by many of the new African leaders like Julius Nyerere, whom he met, but had a critical eye for unreconstructed ‘Empire-inclined’ Europeans. The Tanganyikans, he thought, ‘quickly weigh up the character of any European’ and resented slights and insults, so Peter thought many of the prompt notices to some Europeans to quit were thoroughly justified. His views of Africans were forged as a result of the experience of direct contact rather than the old imperial romances of subjugation he had read in his youth, and this set him apart from a white generation who were unable to adjust to the new conditions. Peter regarded their return to Britain in 1963 as the beginning of the end of his global wandering. They planned to move on soon to New Zealand and to settle permanently, and perhaps that knowledge brought on the first pangs he experienced of anxious ‘homesickness’. ‘We travelled around the British Isles and at the end of the year I was rather reluctant to leave, as a “country boy” knowing I would be leaving behind the traditions and way of life I had experienced for my first 24 years.’ His mother had died while he was away, his father was ill with Paget’s disease and dreaded losing his son, leaving Peter with recurrent pangs of guilt. So the short visit extended to a year while Jean gave birth to the first of two daughters and Peter took work at the Sizewell nuclear power station under construction. Finally, in 1964, they settled in Christchurch, New Zealand, buying a house within a year. Peter’s new approach to his career marked his more settled mentality, working first in a bookseller’s warehouse, then as a postman, which led to advancement to postal clerk. When their second daughter was born in 1966 ‘it seemed the future was assured’. But while living conditions in Christchurch were the best Peter had known, to the well-travelled couple the restrictions of New Zealand life in the 1960s soon led to frustration. Balance-of-payments crises led to severe shortages, best illustrated in Peter’s attempt to obtain four phonograph records, available only in Kenya, for 56 shillings. His required

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  51 application to the Reserve Bank was refused; ‘I got my records by other means’, he recalled, but this completed his disillusion. More crucially, perhaps, ‘not only myself, but also Jean, became disenchanted with the rather boring existence, more so after the excitement of Africa’. A migrant background and mentality can predispose the discontented to use further migration as a solution to fresh dissatisfactions, thus Peter and Jean’s restlessness led to a further move in 1968 with very little angst. Some of Peter’s old Tanganyikan colleagues were now employed by the Western Australian Forest Service, which in the late 1960s was conducting a vigorous recruiting campaign. After briefly considering Canada, they seized the opportunity without hesitation. So Peter left his urban post office occupation for a return to forestry work, eventually in the country town of Harvey close to the coast. Finally Peter had settled into a permanent career from which he retired in 1991. Periodic restlessness prompted him recurrently to consider forestry jobs in Papua New Guinea and Africa, but now the needs of children prompted caution, so that future travel was limited to extended family holidays, back to Britain but including further adventuring in South Africa, Egypt, Israel, Singapore, Majorca and Ireland; a year before his death he was planning a further trip to North Africa. His travels and forestry work reinforced a lifelong preference for rural over urban living, and it was not surprising that throughout his years of mobility his only deep frustration stemmed from a period of urban employment and suburban living in Christchurch. This rural bias he shared with, and perhaps imbibed from, his lifelong literary influence, Rider Haggard, who was a stern propagandist for the virtues of English country life and unspoilt nature. Coincidentally, too, Peter shared with Haggard his origins in rural Norfolk and he was proud of his meeting with Haggard’s novelist daughter, Lilias. Both these men’s passion for the English countryside, paradoxically, led to outwardlooking global obsessions, Haggard for the mysteries of the far corners of empire, Peter for the new opportunities of migration as adventure and consumerism, a process in which he was an unwitting pioneer. Whether generated by fantasies of empire, fashionable self-perceptions of ‘wanderlust’ or deeply traditional desires for self-improvement and family betterment, all the stories recounted here owed their direction and shape to the power of the colonial dividend, which persisted long after Britain’s formal empire had become a thing of the past. Commonwealth links, kinship connections and, most crucially, the spread of English as the lingua franca, made migration and global sojourning an easier proposition for the British – and those in the ‘British World’ – than for non-English-speakers. This advantage was at its height during the 1950s and 1960s, when restrictions on British immigrants entering Commonwealth countries were minimal, and intrepid travellers, often lacking in preferred occupational skills, took advantage of

52  Migration from austerity to prosperity every opportunity to leave the country. From the 1970s the extent of this remarkably unregulated flow of population would begin to diminish, and the overall numbers of the British exodus would decline. But as the global context changed, the opportunities for travel, migration and adventure would continue along similar lines to those pursued by the postwar pioneers while affording opportunities for new forms of mobility. In the following chapter we will see how the paths forged by the postwar pioneers set powerful precedents for the next generation of mobile Britons. Notes   1 On the gradual diminution of income differentials between Britain and old Commonwealth countries from the 1970s see Richards, Britannia’s children, pp. 267, 271, 275–6.   2 Self-improvement has motivated most migrations, both of austerity and rising expectations, but I refer to the more explicit movement, from the early nineteenth century, associated with the striving of workers, beyond economic welfare, for respectability and intellectual and social improvement. See J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and living, 1790–1960: a study in the history of the English adult education movement, London, Routledge, 1961.   3 For example V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds), The age of affluence, 1951– 1964, London, Macmillan, 1970.   4 Robinson, interview and written account.   5 John Stafford, interview and written account.   6 Leslie and Vera Stafford, interview and written account.   7 Hennessey interview, Warrnambool.   8 ‘Job waits after 9 month holiday’, Manchester Evening News (news clipping, undated, early 1965).   9 Marshall, interview. 10 Thompson, The empire strikes back?, pp. 11–29. 11 Wilmer, interview. 12 Thompson, The empire strikes back?, p. 216. See also K. Burk, The British Isles since 1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 4–5. 13 On the anglophone ‘exodus’ from Montreal from the 1970s see M. Radice, Feeling comfortable?: the urban experience of Anglo-Montrealers, Québec, Laval University Press, 2000, pp. 32–41. 14 News clipping, The News, Portsmouth, n.d. (September 1970). 15 Charles-Jones, interview. Sue died in 2006. 16 Macdonald, interview. 17 D. Middleton, Victorian lady travellers, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965; 1965; A. J. Hammerton, Emigrant gentlewomen: genteel poverty and female emigration, 1830–1914, London, Croom Helm, 1979. 18 Peter Holland, interview; Richard Holland, interview. 19 Marechaux, interview. 20 Chambers, interview.

Postwar pioneers of modern mobility  53 21 The novel was by Catherine Gaskin, Sara Dane, later serialised for television in Australia. 22 Kerr, interview. 23 Skinner, interview. Peter died in February 2008.

2

The decline of British privilege: migrants of the 1970s

A migration of rising expectations At first glance the expanding rates of British emigration and mobility, which had marked the immediate postwar generation, seem to have continued with little significant change into the 1970s. Britons were barely less inclined to leave the country after 1970 than in the intense peak years of the later 1960s, especially to those countries like Australia and New Zealand, which continued to offer subsidised fares to eligible families and individuals. In 1966 British permanent emigration peaked at over 263,000, and after fluctuations during the next nine years the numbers remained strong at 169,000 in 1975.1 Indeed, there were no obvious reasons why emigration should subside as the new decade dawned. After a quarter century of economic growth and rising living standards the British might have had fewer reasons to escape the country than in 1945, but British emigration had long ceased to be a movement of austerity; this was most evident during the ‘swinging sixties’, when British youth culture seemed to symbolise much of the new age and excitement at home stimulated an appetite for new experiences abroad. Parallel rising living standards and lower taxes in the most popular countries of settlement, together with the apparent bonus of a superior climate, outdoor life and the continuing promise of ‘adventure’, crystallised for many the possibility of a further improvement in life chances. Emigration in this sense had become normalised, but was also a key measure of a revolution of rising expectations in Britain itself. Stories from emigrants of the early 1970s reflect these trends of continuity. The ‘adventure’ theme in migrant motivation seemed to spread outward from young single sojourners to married couples and young families, who in earlier years had been intent simply on selfimprovement through permanent settlement. For Valerie and Geoffrey Bromfield, struggling young schoolteachers with a new baby, who emi54

The decline of British privilege  55 grated from Bristol to Tasmania on the ten-pound scheme in 1972, the move represented a conventional escape from grim living conditions and limited prospects to opportunities for better pay, and possibly a temporary lift in their fortunes before return. But Valerie’s memories of their decision are framed by a sense of the impulsiveness and excitement of the new adventure ahead. I think back: ‘Oh, it was stupid, we didn’t have a washing machine’, and so it was with I suppose a certain relief that we left the discomfort and the cold and the hard work, and so on, behind and came to Australia for an adventure. … I was quite gleeful, I just, I didn’t hesitate, … I always had this: ‘It’s for two years, it’s an adventure, no matter what it’s like it’s going to be fun, and we’ll come back’.2

For Geoffrey the move offered a further incentive to pursue his birdwatching passions, which had motivated an earlier trip to Canada while single; the same interests possibly explained their later settlement on a remote bush site in Tasmania.3 These aspirations for adventure and lifestyle had emerged progressively as part of the routine discourse around emigration over the previous two decades, but the most mundane migration motives were now more likely to be embroidered with a desire for adventure, or an eagerness to consume one of the new rights of affluence, overseas experience. The growing salience of the adventure motive is underlined by the regularity with which young migrants, like the Bromfields, anticipated a temporary sojourn with an intense period of enjoyment, twinned with opportunities to advance in career and wealth before returning. In 1971 Barry and Sandra Wheeler emigrated to Sydney with another young couple, all with open-ended plans but overriding excitement about the new experience. Barry was a young journalist in the south of England, winning awards but disappointed when told that he could expect only to rise to a ‘senior position’ in ten or fifteen years, so he was readily susceptible to a friend’s urgings to think about an Australian sojourn. In his written memoir he captures the fervour with which, after one publicity film night, he grasped the idea and now recalls the experience through a single motive: ‘I am often asked why I migrated to Australia. The answer to that question is brief. The Adventure. It was as simple as that. … The idea formed just as the “swinging sixties” slid to a hazy halt and the seventies introduced all the liberated flower children to a new era of responsibility and sobriety.’ Prospects of career advancement came as a possible bonus, but were overwhelmed by the thrill of anticipation, all easily rationalised into a conjuncture of rosy prospects. ‘Clearly, it was an opportunity to get some good experience under my belt, work for a major daily and then return to the UK and try to break into Fleet Street,

56  Migration from austerity to prosperity or something like that. … But it was the adventure to enjoy ourselves at an age where a few years out of your life wasn’t going to be terminal in terms of future prospects.’ In the event the move not only fulfilled Barry’s desire for adventure but proved to be a stunning career triumph, not in Britain but in Australia, where he rose to chief executive status in a major press agency.4 His stellar success was a relative rarity among the mass of postwar skilled British emigrants, who mostly achieved a comfortable but modest prosperity in their new country, and in this sense Barry’s move reflects the increasing attractiveness of emigration to the upwardly aspiring middle class after the 1960s.5 But in other respects little had changed in migration motivations. ‘They seemed very different to us’: changing racial contexts Yet in the midst of this continuity there was change, and by the end of the 1970s the British faced a transformed context for their migration ventures, which would begin to make for a different set of experiences. Most importantly, in the Commonwealth countries of primary settlement, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the long era of discrimination, which had privileged white British immigrants, came to a formal end. There was stark evidence of this in the most discriminatory destination, Australia, where the explicit ‘White Australia Policy’ was officially dismantled in 1973, but Canada and New Zealand had made similar moves during the 1960s in the direction of racially non-discriminatory policies, culminating ultimately in complex but officially even-handed ‘points systems’. Two long-term consequences began to follow from this. First, since the entry of British migrants was no longer justified officially on grounds of birth or ethnicity, the new grounds based on skills brought much greater focus on to the most needed qualifications and education, tailored to the demands of the local economy at different stages of the economic cycle. It brought to an end the long era of relative ease of entry of British migrants regardless of background, and over time tended to privilege socio-economic groups from more upwardly mobile and middle-class backgrounds, and increasingly those with tertiary education. It also meant that aspiring British migrants would now have to undergo more searching scrutiny of their qualifications before granting of a visa, which previously had been the non-British experience.6 The second impact of a non-discriminatory policy was the gradual but increasing entry of non-European migrants and refugees to the old countries of white settlement. During the 1970s the growing presence of skilled and educated non-Europeans was barely noticeable to casual observers, and it was easy to argue that the new rules, privileging the educated, in practice continued to favour those with European back-

The decline of British privilege  57 grounds. But the non-European numbers did begin to rise from the mid1970s, particularly with Asian refugee admissions; these were notably from South-east Asia in the shadow of the Vietnam War, but also from Lebanese fleeing military conflict, and in Canada an increasing flow from the Caribbean. After the initial influx the numbers continued to be augmented by family reunion programmes.7 While these changes were taking effect in receiving countries, the place of immigration in British politics and society was itself undergoing significant change. After the 1948 British Nationality Act citizens of the colonies and independent Commonwealth countries had a right to settle in the United Kingdom. The steady influx of non-white citizens which followed, first from the Caribbean, then from the Indian subcontinent and Africa, is well known, as is the racial conflict which followed, fanned by opportunist politicians like Enoch Powell. Restrictive legislation of the 1960s and 1970s changed the immigration regulation landscape significantly, in effect restricting immigrants of colour while the new concept of ‘patriality’ gave those with a British parent or grandparent the right to settle. While the racist intention playing to political sensitivities was blatantly obvious, from the perspective of intending settlers from the white Commonwealth the legislation introduced restrictions on their right to settle in the ‘mother country’ for the first time.8 Thus, just as countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada were granting wider access to non-white immigrants and scrutinising intending British settlers more rigorously, Britain itself began to erect barriers to the entry of its old ‘kith and kin’ from the white Commonwealth. The old days of unrestricted global circulation of a mobile white elite was not coming to a complete end, but would in future encounter increasingly irksome obstacles. It should be no surprise that the intense racial politics stirred by the influx of Commonwealth immigrants in Britain provoked controversy and conflict, and that some emigrants from the 1950s attributed their move to a desire to escape to countries seemingly free from multiracial realities. Among our interviews this was most evident from those from working-class neighbourhoods of London, the West Midlands and northern industrial cities, where immigrant communities were most heavily concentrated, although, not surprisingly perhaps, few admit to racial issues as a motivation for moving. Betty Pargiter, from south London, attributed her move to Canada with her husband in 1966 to the changes wrought in her neighbourhood adjoining Brixton by the influx of Caribbean immigrants. ‘Living in a black ghetto’ she said, ‘was what pushed us out of the country’. She recalled, in both the interview and her autobiography, that ‘it was now a black ghetto, meaning that the blacks were beginning to outnumber the whites, and I’d already learned that it was very hard to be white in a predominantly black neighbourhood’.9 Paul Durham, a carpenter from Pudsey in Yorkshire, expressed

58  Migration from austerity to prosperity similar resentments about the changes he witnessed, particularly in his workplace, as the growing influx of Pakistani immigrants to Pudsey and nearby Bradford left him feeling marginalised. The change was one of several factors which prompted Paul and his wife to emigrate to Australia in 1967. At first, Paul insisted, they enjoyed good relations with the newcomers, but as the numbers increased, he claimed, the Pakistanis formed racially based cliques, and among white workers resentments seethed when they perceived that management gave the immigrants special treatment to avoid public controversy. The culture was alien. … we’d worked with them, we didn’t have too much trouble, but they were always apart. … One bloke said he wouldn’t be satisfied until Bradford was the new Karachi. … Those racial developments rang the warning bells for me, in relation to the type of culture that my children would have to be brought up in.10

These memories drew from the heated stock-in-trade discourse of the time fuelled by anti-immigration sentiment. Grievances against official ‘special treatment’ for minorities, whether immigrant, indigenous or other, have long formed a standard ground or pretext for racial tension and protest. Yet, looking back through the lens of hindsight more than thirty years later, most informants protest that while they may have been victims of official immigration and settlement policies they were not racists at heart. Betty Pargiter acknowledged that her story might give that impression, but insisted that ‘I am not a racist or a bigot’. Rather, she thought unregulated immigration policies had meant that ‘thousands of decent Jamaicans looking for a better life had been allowed into the country together with the dregs of Jamaican society’, alienating local whites like herself.11 Similarly, Paul Durham insisted that mass immigration from Pakistan should never have happened because ‘it wasn’t the will of the people’ and intruded on the local way of life, but that his political judgement was quite unconnected to his equal treatment of individuals. The sharp distinction professed between political and personal attitudes is not always easy to sustain; indeed, it is not uncommon for individuals to insist on separation of their professed equality in personal relations from more ‘objective’ racial judgements. The sensitivity recalls ambivalence over the more extreme anti-immigrant voices of the 1960s and 1970s like Powell and the National Front, and supports the wider argument that much of the hostility was based on local and economic grievances.12 Once transplanted to the new country British migrants confronted a very different – although rapidly evolving – set of racial and cultural realities compared to those experienced in Britain. These varied substantially depending upon their prior experience and chosen country and

The decline of British privilege  59 neighbourhood, and during the 1970s very few registered direct contact with newly arrived non-European migrants. Barbara Edwards emigrated with her family to Sydney in 1974 from a mostly white region of Kent. Settling first in inner Sydney, she was quick to find it ‘too ethnic for us’, and promptly moved to an outer suburb, Hornsby Heights, on the city’s northern rural fringe with a more English, Australian and minority German population. But the alien ethnicity her family had confronted was predominantly Mediterranean rather than non-European, an amalgam particularly of Italian and Greek postwar migrants, and throughout the decade this was the main ‘multicultural’ element experienced by British migrants in Australia.13 Christine Rhodes left Hampshire for Adelaide in 1971 partly because of the ‘little racial tensions beginning to surface’ which clouded her sense of any secure future for her children; but by the late 1970s, when they were living in Hobart, she was quite relaxed with the ‘huge influx’ of over four hundred Vietnamese, and as a schoolteacher she regularly taught migrant children. Like thousands of British migrants she soon came to celebrate the culinary benefits of ethnic mixing; the European influence in particular was a ‘pleasant surprise’: ‘I loved going to the Adelaide market on Friday nights or Saturday mornings and being able to buy food from other ethnic groups; cheeses, sausages, fruits and vegetables’.14 Such benign and positive responses to shifting racial environments undoubtedly do not capture the full spectrum of British migrant attitudes to ethnic difference after arrival. Moreover, the heated debates about multiculturalism that erupted in Australia, Canada and New Zealand following increased intakes of non-European migrants were a phenomenon dating mainly from the mid-1980s, so it is hardly surprising that they were muted in the 1970s. But as the educational and socioeconomic profiles of British emigrants began to change from the 1960s, new dimensions of race relations stimulated a more complex range of racial attitudes. The direct contact experience with new British immigrants in the workplace of the kind described by Paul Durham on the factory floor, or the close living proximity in Brixton which drove Betty Pargiter to leave, remained commonplace. But by the 1970s the children of those immigrants had long been attending school, some were at university, and among young people especially the racial mixing could forge new approaches and new behaviours. It should come as no surprise, then, to find that from the mid-1960s racial politics were at the heart of the generational conflict played out so often between parents and children in countless British homes, especially those where the children attended post-secondary education. Sandra O’Neill’s story makes for an instructive illustration. Her migration from Birmingham to Perth in 1970, with her young husband and children, was preceded by rebellious teenage years, with fierce c­ onflict

60  Migration from austerity to prosperity with her ‘racist’ father, whose attitudes had been forged during his military experience in India. When he saw television footage of black immigrants arriving in the Midlands ‘he went absolutely raving mad’. The young Sandra aggravated his anger by her challenges: ‘They’re human beings’, she admonished him, ‘don’t talk like that’. ‘And he used to say, “Don’t … just don’t ever bring one here”. That’s what he said, “Just don’t ever walk through this door with one,” he said, “because I won’t, I cannot accept it.”’ The stand-off was deepened by Sandra’s close friendship with an Anglo-Indian girl, whom she defended against racist remarks from local youths. Sandra reinforced her views during a stopover at Cape Town on the voyage when she witnessed violent abuse of black Africans by the local police. And her brief memory of Perth in 1970 was that the White Australia Policy was mirrored in local attitudes. Referring to local Chinese she recalled that ‘the overriding … impression was that the Australians despised them. … The flat faces, … that was the derogatory term used by Australians to describe them.’15 When the Vietnam War ended in 1975 migrants slowly began to notice the growing presence of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, at least in the larger cities, where they elicited some hostility. Jan Kerr observed similar responses in both Canada and Australia. Jan emigrated to Sydney in 1966 from Glasgow, with no awareness at all of racial difference or prejudice, but as a Roman Catholic she was acutely conscious of sectarian difference and experienced anti-Catholic discrimination during her first job search. In Australia she lived in rural Dubbo, where again there was no presence of non-white migrants other than one Chinese family who ran the very popular Chinese restaurant. But on later visits to Sydney in the mid-1970s she was ‘very aware’ of the first influx of Vietnamese refugees. ‘They seemed’, she thought, ‘very different to us and were generally not thought well of. I think this may have been caused by the government rather than the people themselves, but it seemed that they got all sorts of assistance and concessions not available to other migrants or the Australian people in general.’ She noticed the same local resentment of special financial treatment accorded Vietnamese refugees after re-emigrating to Hamilton in Canada in 1976. In subsequent years Jan could still see the justice behind such grievances, but they had little ultimate influence on her later attitudes, as she proudly asserted in 2008 that Canada was ‘a very tolerant nation’.16 The opinion that immigrants received special government treatment, alongside insistence that personal relations were unaffected by racial political judgements, actually mirrored attitudes forged in the British cauldron of race relations that we saw earlier, and continued to surface in social and political discourse more generally. In the testimony of a new generation of migrants who grew into adulthood during the 1970s we can see glimpses of how their prior experience

The decline of British privilege  61 of ethnic difference and changing racial attitudes would shape their responses to their new countries. This was in part an upwardly mobile generation whose university attendance in the 1970s was the first in their family’s history, so while any new values around migration and ethnic difference they encountered at university might cause conflict at home, they also offered a heady mixture of political and cultural certainties which they could use to judge new societies abroad. The experience of Brenda Pilott, a Londoner who went to Essex University and worked in London before emigrating to New Zealand with her new husband in 1980, points the way. Brenda had been politicised even before attending university in 1972, and chose Essex University because it was a ‘political hotspot, it was the kind of radical centre, it was the place to go if you were a politico’. She had grown up in a working-class family, instinctively Labour in politics, in an ‘extremely multicultural’ part of south London; she was aware of the waves of Caribbean immigrants and Asians fleeing from east Africa; and she was more prone to celebrate ethnic difference than to condemn it. So she left university with a well-informed knowledge of British racial politics, which she brought to her understanding of the very different conditions in New Zealand in 1980. She recalled: It took quite a while to realise that it was a very different thing, you know, because you bring that kind of emigrant civil rights sort of perspective in your head, because I’d grown up during … that late 1960s …, Enoch Powell and all that ‘rivers of blood’ business, and the American civil rights thing … and anti-Apartheid too, so all that was kind of my framework for that sort of stuff, so coming to New Zealand it took some time to begin to understand the dimensions of the indigenous … issues here, and that you couldn’t just translate in the English context because there’s no indigenous discussion going on in England. There might be in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but not in England.17

For a minority of migrants of these years mixed ethnic friendships in their new countries have now become a matter for unqualified celebration, marking pride in what they often describe as a ‘united nations’ of close networks. To a degree this memory could be exaggerated by events they have lived through since the 1970s, particularly the multicultural campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. But there is no reason to doubt the enthusiastic recall of most of these memories, usually linked to unique personal conditions. Susan Rooke, who first emigrated to Zambia in 1978, then to Melbourne in 1980, enjoyed multicultural friendships in both countries. She grew up in small towns in Lincolnshire, where there was ‘not much awareness of other races coming into the UK’; she described her parents as ‘tolerant and kind people, and their values would not allow them to comment publicly on any misgivings they may have

62  Migration from austerity to prosperity had about immigration so we hardly ever discussed this subject at home’. Their tolerance was put to the test when Susan’s sister went to Zambia, followed soon after by Susan herself; her sister later married an African Zambian, with her parents’ support after initial anxieties. During her two years in Zambia Susan’s friends included a range of locals and expatriates – white and black Zambians, a Kenyan and Malawian, alongside Dutch and Italian men married to Englishwomen; her Australian husband, Andrew, in medical work at the university, had a further network of friends from Asian countries. Susan recalled that although they encountered numbers of expatriate English residents who were openly bigoted against local Africans, ‘we just steered clear of people with those sort of views’. Their expatriate experience made it seem perfectly natural to gravitate towards non-British migrants after their permanent emigration to Melbourne, which for them was ‘a bit like the United Nations really’. Susan soon obtained work at the Victorian College of the Arts where it was easy to meet Europeans, while Andrew, working at a hospital, made friends with recently arrived Asians, Greeks and Italians. Significantly, at a time when non-European numbers were still relatively low in Australia, these educational and health institutions were the very workplaces where they were most likely to encounter highly skilled and educated migrants beyond the British sphere. In later years their ‘United Nations’ networks extended as they settled in a predominantly Asian neighbourhood and developed close friends with migrants from the Philippines, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Russia and Burma, ‘ that’s our close group of friends’.18 By 2016 Susan reported that ‘the multicultural flavour of our family’ had expanded through an Italian son-in-law bringing ‘a large Italian contingent’ to the family.19 In particular cases this celebration of multicultural connections went well beyond the circumstantial. For 20-year old David Tucker it seemed to provide precisely what was missing in his life when he followed his family to Sydney in 1970. David’s family was not close-knit. His mother died during his childhood, he was raised by a stepmother and his father’s work in the air force meant frequent moves within Britain, usually in villages near air bases, which left him with a rootless ‘feeling of isolation’. In 1969 his family emigrated to Australia with the younger children, and his college graduation, followed by travels at sea as a marine electronics officer, seemed to foreshadow an independent break. But despite his lack of closeness to the family he soon followed them ‘not because of a burning desire to emigrate but because there was now no home or family to go to’. His adjustment to Australia was difficult, his homesickness drawn out, aggravated at home by his ‘realisation that it wasn’t a close family’. In David’s reflections on his early years in Australia he connects his cosmopolitanism to these difficulties, which led him to admire the family-centred practices of other cultures.

The decline of British privilege  63 I think I managed to fit into the more multicultural relationships because of several reasons. The first one being that I had already travelled extensively in the British Merchant navy to many a poor country and sympathised as well as empathised with many people. Whilst at College … I mixed with a large number of people from overseas. … I was used to College life, the rough and tumble of the merchant navy and also the engaging nature of village life, i.e. everyone knew everyone. So coming to a large city was a bit isolating. When I first arrived in Sydney I had an Indian girlfriend, which, via relationship osmosis, led me to know people from Singapore and the Middle East. I also happened to occupy a flat in a building full of Latin Americans who are very engaging socially for 20-year-olds. I came to notice via all these contacts that anyone from overseas who also had their extended family here, i.e. cousins, aunts and uncles etc., seemed to have a really good life. The best of both worlds, the vibrancy and opportunities of Australia and the comfort of their families and cultures. This seemed to be missing for most UK immigrants. … Maybe the engaging nature of people with ethnic backgrounds made it easier for me.20

Long after David came to feel at home in Australia he continued to attach importance to the family values and networks he saw in other cultures, culminating in his marriage to a Peruvian woman. Most of her family remained in Peru so the regular family visits there were more frequent than to Britain, and for David the advantages were obvious. ‘Oh I love it, absolutely love it, love the culture, love the, the warmth, the sense of family, yes, the extended family.’ Personal migration histories are never far removed from family dynamics, and in David’s case this stands out in his continuing celebration of the virtues of multiculturalism. When immigrants become emigrants: Michelle Payne and new faces of British migration In the 1970s David’s experiences would have been the exception rather than the rule among those Britons moving to the suburbs of their new countries, where, in the words of Ros Smith in Melbourne, a transmigrant from South Africa, ‘you miss the black faces’ in Australian suburbs.21 And those who noticed a multicultural presence in the cities quickly perceived that it was mainly an inner-urban affair; Renita Barwell, who arrived in Melbourne in 1977, noticed that ‘multiculturalism gave way rapidly to something far more uniform and mono-cultural’ in the suburbs.22 But even among British migrants of the 1970s we can see some striking evidence of changing patterns. Michelle Payne’s story points us to new ways in which the conventional British migrant profile was being unsettled, albeit among a tiny

64  Migration from austerity to prosperity minority. The bare bones of her family’s migration experience were in the classic mould of the postwar narrative of Britons seeking a better life abroad. Her father was a modestly successful bank clerk, an intensely domestic man who revelled in the pleasures of home; her mother was a family-centred Roman Catholic, ambitious for her children, whom she sent to Catholic schools. Michelle was born in the London suburb of Kew Gardens in 1960, and her family later moved to a smaller house in Cobham, Surrey. The family was close-knit; Michelle’s memories recall a happy childhood, followed by a rebellious early adolescence. Like so many lower-middle-class migrants of these years, her parents’ impetus to leave Britain was in part framed in self-improvement aspirations, but driven more by a desire for a warmer climate. The move was not at all welcome to 15-year-old Michelle, who had fallen in love for the first time and threatened to stay behind. In these respects their British migration story, including the ubiquitous reluctant teenage daughter, was a perfectly conventional one.23 But Michelle’s story was also deeply unconventional; her parents were Anglo-Indian migrants who had left Calcutta in 1955 to escape racial discrimination and violence from Hindus against mixed-race Christian Anglo-Indians. All the appearances suggest that their flight to England was a successful migration. Her father obtained respectable middle-class employment, and the children they had feared to conceive in India prospered without damaging discrimination. But after the heat of Calcutta adjustment to the English weather was painful, and within a decade they sought warmer climes in Australia. This enterprise, though, was fraught with difficulty. Their first application, in the early 1960s, met a flat rejection. The immigration authorities gave no reason for their decision, but, not unreasonably, the family concluded that they were victims of the discriminatory White Australia Policy. A decade later, in 1973, they were optimistic enough to try again. Michelle’s mother’s sister had married a white Englishman, and thus had no difficulty emigrating to Adelaide; her stories of a more attractive way of life in Australia steeled their resolve. But again an unexplained rejection followed. By then, however, the political climate had changed. The reformist Whitlam Labor government had been elected in 1972 and in 1973 abandoned the White Australia Policy. Together, the aunt in Adelaide and another Anglo-Indian friend in Melbourne lobbied the Immigration Minister, Al Grassby, and by 1974 the Department had approved their application. The approval, all the same, appeared to be a grudging one, since they were told, again without explanation, that they would not be eligible for the usual subsidy still enjoyed by the British, and would have to pay full fares. Michelle thought many others would have spurned such an offer, but by now her parents were obsessed with their Australian project. ‘My parents weren’t going to argue and you

The decline of British privilege  65 know, it was so hard-won, they tried so long. And interestingly, I think the more it was unattainable the more they wanted it.’ So in 1975, with a heartbroken and resentful adolescent daughter and a slightly older, less reluctant son, Michelle’s parents finally settled in Melbourne. Unlike their English immigration, for her father this was a less successful move. He never attained his former white-collar status in banking and had to remain satisfied with work as a warehouseman. Suspicions of racial discrimination rankled. For Michelle an isolated incident on her first day at school, when a boy in class exclaimed ‘she’s black’, remained vivid in her memory as a marker of the racial prejudice she never suffered in England. But this was not sustained in later years and in other respects the move was transformational for her. She soon forgot her lost love and began to thrive at school, later attending university, pursuing a passion for French literature and culture and enjoying a successful teaching career. Her father wore his career disappointment with dignity and stoicism, regarding it as a necessary sacrifice for his family, whom he settled in outer-suburban Glen Waverley. ‘I’m sure he believes that to this day’, Michelle thought, ‘and he’s proud to believe that, and that’s great that he can say: “That’s what I did for my family”, I think it’s really good that he sees it in that way, because it gives him dignity, yes, so he ended up being a storeman for the rest of his working life in Australia.’ In such ways Michelle’s family’s migration story points to new and contradictory trends in the wider patterns. Their early experience reinforced evidence of continuing racial discrimination in an officially reformed white Australia while showing a new face of British migration. And while the family’s migration story was utterly traditional, including parental sacrifice ‘for the sake of the children’, it also marked new ways in which British migrants, themselves from more diverse backgrounds, would in future settle in increasingly multicultural societies vastly different from those encountered in the 1950s and 1960s. New worlds of family and migration Ethnicity was only one of several areas where the new worlds faced by migrants were marked by deep changes by the 1970s. The stories told by most postwar migrants were invariably stable family stories, but even these now began to be unsettled. In the immediate postwar decades one of the most consistent migrant stories had been preoccupied with a united family quest for improvement. Families struggled and succeeded together, parents travelled across the world and faced tensions and hardships ‘for the sake of the children’. Looking back in later years, the mostly triumphal stories recollected by British migrants were overwhelmingly statements of pride in hard-won family fortunes, often with dramatic

66  Migration from austerity to prosperity narratives of generational upward mobility. Even young single migrants were likely to define the later direction of their migration story through the lens of close family relationships, whether left behind permanently, reunited through chain migration or rejoined back in Britain. While there were many exceptions to this, and painful stories of unhappy marriages and dysfunctional families, the dominant narrative of the first generation of postwar British migrants was a stable family one, in which parents stayed together and fostered generations of children and grandchildren in the new country. It was not uncommon for the offspring of ‘broken families’, in reaction, to place a high valuation on family and marital stability. Tony and June Sharpe both suffered the pain of divorced parents, unloving step-parents and unstable childhoods, and in response held up the virtues of marital fidelity to their daughters. Their migration to Sydney in 1971, a family enterprise, secured stability for their daughters, and much later when one daughter married and settled in Perth they moved there to be near her. June, with an eye on her painful past, was emphatic about the primacy of marital loyalty. ‘Everyone has their ups and downs in marriage but you do not walk away, you try and work out what the problem is. It’s like all these young ones, they’re so in love with somebody and six months later, it’s somebody else.’24 This cornerstone of family stability in migrant lives began to show greater signs of stress from the 1960s; it was illustrated most dramatically in the wider society by rising rates of divorce and liberalisation of divorce laws. The process was common across most Western societies and was evident in Britain as well as in the main Commonwealth immigrant countries. The rising divorce rate throughout the 1960s preceded, and to some extent caused, the rash of contemporary liberalising legislation which created new divorce laws, usually in the direction of no-fault divorce and with widespread support for sentiments of the kind declared by the Canadian prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, that ‘the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation’.25 Among the countries under consideration here, New Zealand was first to reform, in 1963 (and again in 1968 and 1980), followed by Canada in 1968, England and Wales in 1969, Australia in 1975 and Scotland in 1976.26 Social anxieties about apparently new levels of family breakdown therefore form a background to a different kind of migration story stemming from the late 1960s and accelerating up to the present day. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that some 36 per cent of 135 project interviewees from the 1960s onwards had a history of divorce or family breakdown in their own or their parents’ lives. These trends could prompt young migrants to use their travels as a literal escape from family, especially when the family home had been a site of unhappiness. The resulting stories, like all family stories, take quite unique forms, but ultimately point to ways in which migration could

The decline of British privilege  67 be linked to family and marital stress. Phillip Capper’s young years, for example, were scarred by domestic discord, which shaped much of his later life. When he embarked for New Zealand for the first time in 1967 at the age of 23, one of his motivations was emphatically to get away from his family, but by then the tensions had governed his actions for some years. He was born in Liverpool in 1944, an only child, but at the end of the war his father, an American serviceman, deserted his mother; they never saw him again and moved in with Phillip’s grandparents. His mother’s remarriage to a lawyer two years later brought the promise of stability, which brought some prosperity but no family harmony. His stepfather became an alcoholic, his mother suffered serious bouts of mental illness, and Phillip, the lone child, was left virtually to run the household. Far from simply fending for himself he had, as he put it ‘to fend for them’.27 If, as Phillip recalls, these conditions forced him to become the main ‘adult’ in the family from the age of about 10, it did not necessarily yield an entirely unhappy childhood. Reflecting on the inconsistency of a photographic record with childhood memory, he commented that ‘I’m currently scanning all my old photographs and the photographs tell me I had a happy childhood. But I [laugh], but it’s not actually how I remember it! But, but on the other hand, I have to acknowledge that the photographs do in fact generate memories that are real for me.’ Whatever his degree of childhood unhappiness, by the time he finished school he had developed a firm resolve to leave home. An offer to attend Swansea University brought his first escape. ‘I had to go away to university, I knew that’ he recalled. The move offered a wealth of new possibilities outside study time; he hitch-hiked to Iran, worked on trawlers as far as Iceland and soon developed a strong desire to travel. A plan to cross Asia to Australia with student friends fell through but pointed to the future. His early marriage, to Pauline, in 1966, was in part stimulated by his need to be independent of family stresses. Once finished at university they both obtained junior teaching jobs in Glasgow, ‘a miserable existence’, but soon were attracted by promises of global adventure. Because their funds were so limited, a prompt offer of assisted passages to New Zealand was the best passport to their shared goal, ‘an adventure for three years’. Phillip’s admitted wanderlust was bound up with his continuing desire to be free from family. Once the date was set for the New Zealand trip in 1967 he and Pauline stayed with his parents for three months, a testing time, which ‘just made me realise why I needed to be away’. Still, after three years living in the provincial town of New Plymouth, despite career success and a ‘dream run’, with a new baby, six weeks old, Pauline insisted on returning to England for family support. For Phillip the return was reluctant, and thwarted his plans for home ownership. By

68  Migration from austerity to prosperity this time, in 1970, his mother had died and his stepfather had married his former housekeeper. The welcome Phillip received was discouraging, and seemed to complete his alienation from family; the new wife ‘saw me as a threat to her stability, so I had to stay away’. Compared to the better working conditions he had enjoyed in New Zealand, work was a struggle and poorly paid, and he encountered resentment, as a returned migrant, that he had previously turned his back on the country. Even Pauline became disenchanted when the anticipated family support failed to materialise. So an unexpected offer of a second assisted passage for the family to New Zealand seemed too good to refuse and by 1970 they embarked on a new migration phase. In career terms Phillip’s second migration was an unmitigated success, as his teaching career flourished, he moved progressively into the teaching union, social research and a year in the 1990s as an ‘eminent scholar’ at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The family fortunes were more mixed, with accumulating marital tensions leading to a fraught breakup in 1981. ‘As so often happens, when things began to get better is when the marriage fell apart’, Phillip recalled. There is no evidence to suggest that his divorce owed anything to his dysfunctional family background, but tensions of international and domestic mobility could have added to cumulative family pressures. More evident is Phillip’s continuing investment in positive family relationships. There were intermittent periods when he had full custody of his two sons, as Pauline moved back and forth between New Zealand and England, and the father– son relationships were enduring. In 1990 he married Philippa, a New Zealander, whose ‘emotionally close-knit but geographically dispersed family’ embraced him and his sons as their own. Like Phillip, his sons became highly mobile, one in England as a British Airways pilot, the other, after some years of global sojourning, a New Zealand diplomat. During Phillip’s travels in the 1990s he had a rare meeting with both of them in London, which he remembers as a family epiphany moment. ‘I suddenly had this feeling; here are these two, great kids, right? … I suddenly had this feeling of it all, us sitting at the dinner table, of it all coming together to this moment.’ Yet alongside Phillip’s cultivation of family intimacy, his memory of the disruption of his own family background remained painful. During an earlier trip to England with his son, John, who was keen to know something of his father’s past, Phillip yielded to demands to find his stepfather. He was reluctant to meet after 15 years without contact, but sought him out only to find a man living in poverty who had spent time in prison for embezzling clients’ funds. They were greeted with ‘surprise and suspicion’, and leaving after a few awkward hours Phillip remarked, ‘“There you are John, I did that for you [laugh] and, and now you understand why I didn’t want to do it” and he agreed.’

The decline of British privilege  69 The coexistence of high levels of family breakdown with strong commitment to the bonds of marriage and family of the kind shown by Phillip became a commonplace migrant experience in the late twentieth century. But among migrants its forms and expression could be particularly intense, in part because of the greater frequency of permanent family separation compared to conditions among the majority of the population who stayed home. This was most evident in that generation of young single migrants who, from the late 1960s, pursued independence and ‘adventure’, often with little initial regard for those left behind, and, like Phillip, sought some escape or respite from fractured family experiences. In some respects their journeys pioneered new forms of migration and return migration, which would become more common by the end of the century. Renita Barwell was one of those young women with just such incentives in 1977 when she left for an intended ‘working holiday’ in Melbourne. Renita was a middle-class Londoner, born in 1955, brought up in Kensington and south London, and with a passionate attachment to London’s urban and bohemian delights which would later complicate her migration experience. But her growing up was dominated more by the broken marriage of her parents. Her father, a commercial artist and musician, with his own bohemian propensities, was frequently away from home, the marriage was always difficult – ‘they had a very unhappy marriage, all the way through really’ – and her parents divorced in 1971 when Renita, their only child, was 15. This left her, she recalls, with deep scepticism about marriage, so that by the time of her migration, ‘well, having seen my parents divorce, marriage was something I did not even entertain. … serial monogamy, but never ever marriage, no, certainly, no, not at all’. It also left her prone to social rebellion after leaving school soon after the divorce; apart from a useful training period at secretarial college she ‘went a bit feral’, worked with ‘Gypsies’ in a squatting movement in west London, and by 18 was meeting Australians and other expatriates, ‘and that sense of itchy footedness really began to click in in earnest’.28 At the same time Renita had enjoyed emotional closeness with enough family members, her mother especially, to nurture a sense of belonging and obligation which would persist into future years. After her parents’ divorce she and her mother moved in with their closest relative, her father’s sister, and she had warm relations with her father’s brother, her paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother. Moreover, her mother later repartnered with a man who was ‘more like a father to me than my own’. And her devotion to the urban attractions of London continued to grow, so she planned her Australian trip as a temporary global adventure. Her four-month visa was later extended to six months, and she deliberately paid her own way to avoid the assisted ‘forty pound Pom fare’ (by 1977 it had increased from £10 to £40) which still obliged recipients to

70  Migration from austerity to prosperity remain in the country for two years. Renita’s tightly restricted visa conditions illustrated some of the new conditions beginning to circumscribe British circulation around the former Empire, taken for granted for so long. She was quite aware of this at the time and surprised that she was accepted so easily. ‘I thought I’d have to stand on my head or be a tightrope walker or a hydro therapist or something to get in. But no, it was relatively easy for me, and I found that quite strange and I felt almost guilty about that.’ In a long and introspective autobiographical memoir, Renita recalls the mixed emotions she navigated before finally embarking, alone, for Melbourne. Once she booked her flight her ‘distant dream’ began to feel real. ‘I could FEEL the hot sun on my skin, SMELL the warm, salty ocean lapping around my feet, could HEAR the kookaburras chuckling in the trees.’ But then she nearly succumbed to acute consciousness of the attachment to family and place she was leaving behind: By a weird quirk of human nature, the city and country I was about to leave became more beautiful than I had ever remembered it! My heart ached when I thought of leaving family and friends behind. London was unusually busy that summer – 1977 was the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year. … The streets were vibrant with life and as I was about to depart, I felt more like a Londoner than ever before. I had never thought of myself in any nationalistic sense in the past, but somehow the decision to travel far away brought my London-ness and British-ness into sharper focus. There were many occasions when I questioned my decision and nearly called the whole thing off.

Her indecision could have been reinforced by the initial blunt reaction of her unsympathetic father: “‘What d’you want to go and do a STUPID bloody thing like THAT for? Bloody AUSTRALIA? It’s a DUMP!” “Have you ever been there?” … I asked calmly. “NO! I bloody well HAVEN’T! I don’t NEED to go there to KNOW it’s a DUMP,” and on and on he went, a free floor show for our fellow diners.’ Conquering her doubts, Renita finally endured her ‘last tearful, agonising farewells’ in July at Heathrow, with her mother and aunt putting on a brave front, her aunt reassuring them, ‘never mind, you’ll soon be back. It’s not like you’re going to LIVE over there’. For Renita, ‘all I could feel was pain and sadness. It was as if I had set something in motion that was now beyond my control, and my only option was to see it through the best way possible.’ Once in Melbourne, however, Renita set about to ‘see it through’ with a vengeance. She promptly discovered the most multicultural and bohemian inner-urban districts like Carlton and Prahran, joined a communal house, made new friends and immediately found temporary work.

The decline of British privilege  71 Melbourne, she decided, had the attractive style of a European city, and she soon fell in love with it. It was a sojourner’s dream run, enough to inspire her to wish for more. ‘I had been in Australia for barely half my allotted time, and I already had a place to live in a great area, a burgeoning social life and more work than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. As the expiry date of my visa drew closer I decided to try and extend it for a bit longer.’ To her surprise the ‘laid back’ immigration officer who interviewed her suggested that instead she should apply for permanent residence, and within a few months, on the basis that her ‘stenography’ skills were still in demand, this was granted. Almost imperceptibly Renita’s brief sojourn, intended for a few months, was becoming a permanent migration. She obtained permanent secretarial employment at Melbourne University, enjoyed comfortable shared living arrangements in Carlton and began to see other parts of Australia. In 1982 she obtained Australian citizenship and, with a strong commitment to progressive causes, exulted in becoming ‘a more involved citizen of this country, not just a long-term visitor’. She recalled her reflections on her achievement after about ten years in the country: ‘At 21 years of age, I had come to Australia from the other side of the world and made a life for myself. I experienced a sense of space and freedom, of optimism and opportunity here that seemed less apparent in England. I was also free to make decisions to live my life outside the intense family scrutiny that many only children experience.’ There was, though, another side to this carefree sojourner’s enjoyment and gradual adoption of her new country away from ‘intense family scrutiny’. The emotional attachment to London and her family which had nearly prompted her to cancel the 1977 trip continued to exert its power, prompting a routine series of return trips which made her migration feel like unfinished business. She lived, she said, on the cleft stick of this dilemma for ten years, pulled back and forth as if on the end of an elastic band. It was like being torn between two 1overs, in love with both and yet not fully committed to either. I returned here [Melbourne] in late 1986 at the age of 31, feeling very unresolved about everything, daunted suddenly at the prospect of having to re-establish my life here as I had so many times before.

Renita’s ‘elastic band’ had by 1986 prompted four return trips to London, the last one for eight months, and there would be a further six return trips by 2004. But in 1987 a chance meeting with Leon, an Australian ‘old flame’ from her first year in Melbourne brought a sharp change of direction. By the end of the year they were married, and in 1988 Renita gave birth to twins. After a brief period living on the coast they settled into the cultivation of close-knit family life, eventually

72  Migration from austerity to prosperity buying a house in a bayside Melbourne suburb. Still, further challenges lay ahead. Leon’s career as a master mariner in merchant shipping kept him away for long stretches of time, leaving Renita to manage the family. Undaunted, in 1989 she enrolled in part-time study, first for matriculation and then, for seven years, for a degree in Sociology and Literature. And as her family members in England aged, their ill-health stretched that ‘elastic band’ to the limit. Anxiety about her mother after her stepfather’s untimely death in 1996 prompted them to return in 1998 for an indefinite stay with her mother. The venture became a major challenge. Leon was unable to find work and had to return to base himself in Australia, lengthening their separations. Renita’s attempt to enrol for postgraduate studies was rebuffed when she was judged to be a ‘foreign’ student, and was thus required to pay prohibitive fees. To compound matters, the main family house was no longer in London, but in West Wittering on the south coast; for the children especially it was ‘an idyllic environment’ but emphatically not London! Moreover, her mother spent consecutive weeks working in her psychotherapy practice in London and staying in her small apartment. Her ‘intense involvement with work made my own suspended animation all the more unbearable’. Renita’s sense of isolation drew on a frustrated yearning for both Melbourne and London, while suffering the familiar alienation of the returned migrant, as she recalled with feeling: I found myself in the extraordinary situation of being ‘homesick’ for both London and Australia, yearning for the busy, rewarding and sociable life I had given up. My attempts to make friends with the other mothers at my children’s school were largely futile. Women who seemed open and friendly in the mornings behaved as though we’d never met when I saw them again in the afternoons! One said to me, ‘You sound English but there’s something foreign about you. You’re way too friendly to be from around this part of the world’!! I thought of the way in which new mothers were welcomed to my children’s school in Melbourne – greeted with smiles, invited to coffee mornings, introduced to the friendship networks that are so crucial for parents with young children – and my heart ached. … I felt increasingly like a foreigner in my own country of origin, and as the winter closed in and the days shortened I experienced a sadness and loneliness that I could never have foreseen. … I’ve never been one to exhibit what is known as ‘British reserve’, but I never expected to feel so alienated by those who do!

Ultimately these frustrations of the returned migrant and urbanite, the material impossibility of sustaining a normal married and family life and the inability to do much, as she had intended, to support her mother, forced the decision, ‘after weeks of family discussions’, to return

The decline of British privilege  73 to Melbourne. Fortunately they had kept their Melbourne house, which eased the way. But just as these plans materialised Renita received a devastating diagnosis of breast cancer. Early detection enabled a prompt and successful lumpectomy but the shock delayed, though did not change, their plans to return; indeed, the serious illness of two of Leon’s family members strengthened their determination. Finally in November, 1999, they boarded their flight for Melbourne, again with the tearful farewells of Renita’s aunt; her mother by this time had resolved that farewells were too painful and stayed at home. The return experience had lasted 17 months. Their return to Melbourne this time heralded more enduring changes and commitments, suggesting ways in which the return sojourn had been cathartic. They resolved to pull down and rebuild their house, marking a sharp break between past and future. Renita reflected on its meaning for her: In retrospect, I can see clearly that the destruction of one house in order to make way for another was a perfect symbol for the immense ‘sea-change’ affecting our family – the old order giving way to the new. For me, the most profound aspect of this ‘seachange’ has been my new relationship with Australia. For so many years I was ‘loose in the socket’, living as a virtual Gypsy, caught between Australia and England like some rootless ‘accidental tourist’! … For me, [the new millennium] heralded a completely new desire to put down roots at last, to build a home, grow a garden, create a new beginning, to balance the lessons of the past with the hopes and dreams of the future in a dynamic, fully engaged present.

Return migration has always been a significant element of large-scale voluntary migration movements, but Renita’s experience, like Phillip Capper’s, illustrates ways in which it began to take new forms in the late twentieth century, most particularly in becoming an open, more accessible possibility, but still with the potential to be distressing and transformative, framed by the highly variable patterns of ‘modern’ family relationships.29 Later chapters will show how Renita’s dozen or more return trips in 25 years were becoming normal for antipodean migrants, and of course the shorter distance from Canada made return visits easier. Renita’s ‘seachange’ did indeed mark new directions for her, not least in professional training in her enthusiasm for lead lighting and stained glass work, effectively a new career easily balanced with childcare. Even so this did not curtail her ‘elastic band’ movements back to England, one just too late for the death of her father, and others increasing in frequency as her mother’s health deteriorated. At one point her mother vetoed Renita’s carefully planned family trip because she could not face the prospect of another emotional farewell at their departure. But the trips and

74  Migration from austerity to prosperity uncertainty, long dominated by the ailing health of relatives, continued. And as the twins grew, they came to think with enthusiasm of their own future mobility, with the advantage of what Renita called her ‘gift’ of dual nationality. Her son used her gift in an intense period of global employment and adventure, adopting his mother’s passion for London in the process.30 Like so many modern migrants, Renita continued to allow for the possibility that her migration remained unfinished, largely because of that very commitment to her fractured family which had defined her original migration; even as family members died, the pull of old friendships and desire to explore more of Britain sustained regular visits. She concluded her story with the observation that ‘it seems that our migration story is not over yet, and may take some very interesting twists and turns in the years to come!’ Expatriate workers: a new spur to migration By the 1970s a quite different postwar stimulus to global mobility had heightened in intensity, especially among skilled workers and professionals. This emerged rapidly in the increasing demand for Western workers in the developing world, and especially in wealthy oil-rich countries like those of the Middle East. The employers could be local governments or multinational companies, and occupations in demand encompassed the skilled and professional. Newspaper job advertisements for such positions were becoming routine and tempting, since contract incomes were much higher than in Britain, living costs, often in segregated expatriate compounds, were lower and the opportunity to accumulate a ‘nest egg’ of savings could seem too good to refuse. These were the terms in which such opportunities were generally regarded and accepted, essentially a trade-off of short-term inconvenience and discomfort abroad for longterm prosperity at home. In effect this opened up new possibilities for continuing mobility among a much wider cross-section of British society than before. It promised the democratisation of the expatriate experience well beyond the upper- and middle-class footsoldiers of the old Empire, bringing the abbreviated ‘ex-pat’ label into much more common currency. The expatriate option was thus a quite simple, fairly short-term proposition, with no implications for more enduring global mobility after the initial contract period expired. But even the limited experience of compound living abroad, often in company with a heterogeneous mixture of foreign co-workers, could open up global possibilities not dreamt of before. And for valued workers multinational employers could offer subsequent employment prospects in other parts of the world, so that expatriate employment itself could become a kind of serial career, with

The decline of British privilege  75 fairly regular return trips to Britain. Ultimately, as habits of living abroad became routine, these experiences could transform themselves seamlessly into more or less permanent migration, or prepare the ground for more independent serial migration. We usually think of such practices as the monopoly of the lone migrant, invariably single and without commitments. Over the long term this was rarely the case, and not surprisingly the ties of marriage and family were uniquely complex for expatriates, so that what at first appears in their testimony to be a narrative of global work experience emerges in the telling to be a family story. Maurice Bassindale’s global trajectory, first as an expatriate worker in the 1970s, later as a serial migrant, illustrates some of the ways in which habits of continuous movement around the world could come to be taken for granted while remaining subject to the ties of family. Maurice was born in 1935 in a small town in Lincolnshire. His father ran a modest haulage contracting business but was in the army throughout the war and his parents divorced shortly afterwards. ‘I never saw my father again and was told that he had gone to live in Canada.’ Brought up by his mother, he took an apprenticeship at 16 and began work in 1956 in his native Lincolnshire as a trained motor mechanic. He soon graduated to management of the maintenance and operation of large vehicle fleets and seemed set for a successful career at home. In 1956 he married Maureen; both of them worked and struggled to save for a house, initially living in a caravan. By 1960 they had bought their first house in Scunthorpe with two children. Maurice worked long hours, and much of it involved frequent travel around Britain so he was often away from home. As is so often the case, the habits of internal mobility in Britain seemed to prepare the ground for later international travel. By 1977, after several moves dictated by work between Scunthorpe, London and St Helens in Lancashire, buying and selling houses, and with children in private schools, life had become comfortable but was constrained by mortgage debts, so the offer of twice the salary, untaxed, for a contract fleet management position in Saudi Arabia seemed to Maurice an opportunity too good to refuse. After earnest family conferences he left for Riyadh, alone, and Maureen joined him in 1980. The strain of separation and expatriate compound living, though, took a stressful toll, and after a transfer to Jeddah Maureen returned to England in 1982, followed by divorce in 1984. By then Maurice had transferred to Houston, Texas, in 1983, with the same employer. This was the first of several occasions to underline how closely his mobility was bound up with the delicate terrain of marriage and family relationships.31 Throughout this period Maurice never considered himself to be a migrant, rather a transient worker temporarily away from home. His first year in Saudi Arabia provided the opportunity for interesting travel when he went to India to recruit tradesmen. But until Maureen joined him in

76  Migration from austerity to prosperity Riyadh the reminders of his temporary expatriate ‘bachelor status’ were relentless, defined by living in compounds and sharp separation from the local community. Even his later married quarters were in separate compounds for married workers. In either case life was defined overwhelmingly by work. He recalled the single quarters and conditions he endured before improved permanent premises were completed: We all each had a room in a guest-house and with a communal dining room, you had your own bathroom toilet facilities, no social life really…. we went to work, and you got up, you got up in the morning and went to work. … We didn’t have a swimming pool, or anything like that, so we had virtually no recreation at all.

When Maurice transferred to Houston, Texas, in 1983 the compound living ceased and he experienced something of American life and an opportunity to discover a different country, but he continued to regard himself as an expatriate, with frequent visits back to Britain. He was guardedly positive about living in Texas, feeling welcomed by ‘virtually everyone that I came into contact with’. But he felt fortunate to have had only one aggressive confrontation, with a co-worker who ‘wanted to know why a foreigner should be employed in the US, taking an American’s job’. He remembers his three-year American sojourn fondly, but ‘I never felt that I wanted to spend the rest of my life there and I have never regretted leaving’. But those years were most memorable

4  Maurice Bassindale in bachelor quarters at Riyadh compound, 1978

The decline of British privilege  77

5  Communal barbecue at Maurice Bassindale’s Riyadh compound, 1978

for meeting his second wife. During a visit to Britain he met an English woman, who eventually joined him in Houston; when the same company offered a further transfer to Sydney, Maurice accepted with enthusiasm, she joined him, and they married there in 1986. The marriage was, though, unstable, and Maurice’s regular work travels around Australia meant that while they enjoyed several world holidays together there was little home life to nurture the relationship. In 2001 they divorced. As Maurice remembers it, he also came to miss what he had enjoyed of his family life with his first wife. I did miss the family life that Maureen and I had had. … And bearing in mind that Maureen and I, we knew each other two or three years before we married and then we, we were married for 26 years, and when you’ve, when you’ve been that close to someone for that long, you do miss a lot of little intimate things about your partner.

While his second marriage was fragile, in the early years it exercised a critical influence on Maurice’s identity. Soon after marrying the company offered him yet another transfer back to Saudi Arabia, initially, at least, alone, again on ‘bachelor status’. Unwilling to leave his new wife, he declined, and, with plentiful Australian job offers to consider and an application for Australian permanent residency nearing approval, he resigned and found attractive work easily. In Maurice’s narrative this was the crucial moment when he moved from the status of the impermanent

78  Migration from austerity to prosperity

6  Maurice Bassindale on Sydney Harbour, 1986

expatriate to that of the settled migrant, under the impetus of marriage in the new country, an interest in citizenship and a sense since arrival that Australia was a country he could call home. I settled in Australia by choice, … I felt very comfortable there … I remember the day I arrived from Houston and we were collected at the airport and driven into … North Sydney, and immediately I felt very comfortable, I felt as though: ‘This is like home’. It was very green, and little shops, rather than the big … shopping malls that I’d got used to in Houston. … The longer I stayed the more I felt this was home. I enjoyed the warmth and the sort of semi-outdoor life.

The settled migrant, though, remained highly mobile, with numerous job changes over the next 15 years. In regular trips back to England he continued his close contact with his two adult children. But family and mobility again changed Maurice’s story. His daughter had, he thought, inherited his own penchant for travel and adventure, and developed a career working in cruise ship casinos; eventually she married a business partner and they managed the casinos together, travelling around the world. By 1987 they had settled, in Vancouver, where their first child was born. In 2001 they moved to Vancouver Island, and since Maurice had retired recently he offered to help with the move. After return to Sydney and a further offer from Susan to stay with them, the next move ultimately changed to permanent settlement in Victoria. But further

The decline of British privilege  79 changes lay ahead. His first wife, also in the throes of another divorce in England, arrived in Victoria about the same time as Maurice, they renewed contact after many years and by 2002 Maureen had emigrated to Victoria where they again lived together. As Maurice wrote, this was ‘a very large bonus’, Maureen was now ‘enjoying being with me and close to our daughter and her family. We hope to live happily ever after! Is that a happy ending or what!?’ The happy ending was later reinforced with visits from his son and his wife, still in England. As is common, though, a mobile past, even with a happy ending, can lead to an open-ended and potentially unfinished mobile future. At the time of the interview Maurice had been living in Canada for three years, gradually coming to feel settled but still missing Australia, where he had assumed he would settle permanently. After reading the transcript of our interview he wrote an addendum to stress his continuing attachment. ‘I feel very patriotic towards Australia, returning as frequently as possible, and would live there permanently if my family were prepared to relocate there. Some of my best friends are Australians and we keep in touch regularly.’32 But, as his crucial qualifier insists, he was happy for family to dictate the future. Indeed, seven years later he and Maureen were so committed to permanent settlement in Canada that they took out citizenship. A similar response governed his attitude to living in Britain, where there was little doubt about his priorities: ‘I don’t particularly want to go back and live in Britain, but I wouldn’t say never, if the family were there I’d go tomorrow, you know, I don’t see anything wrong with Britain.’ So while Maurice, a classic serial migrant, came to take a mobile persona for granted, he was content for its direction to be shaped by family dynamics, which progressively loomed larger in telling of his life story. Ultimately the intense geographical mobility which sculpted his identity was eclipsed by his prime role as a family man, albeit one whose later migrations were driven by family mobility. He is emphatic that his first national loyalty belongs to Australia, but it is a contingent loyalty, ultimately giving way to the transnational ties of family. By the end of the 1970s the prospects facing British emigrants had undergone significant changes. Some of these, like the new visa restrictions, had the potential to discourage migration, although we have seen how the restrictions could be applied to the British with a light touch. Changing racial profiles of populations in both Britain and receiving countries, and among migrants themselves, could work to encourage some to leave and some to stay. And some developing social changes, like rising divorce rates, could create new motives to leave. Moreover, as old spurs to migration, like postwar austerity, faded, new ones, like prior travel experience, escape from dysfunctional families and expanding opportunities of expatriate employment, came into play. The decade was thus transitional between traditional and modern patterns of migrant

80  Migration from austerity to prosperity motivation and behaviour, with a marked interplay between change and continuity. While fewer Britons were emigrating by the end of the decade, the fall in emigrant numbers was not profound; by 1979, despite some fluctuations from year to year, the annual outflow of British citizens from the United Kingdom had declined from the 1969 figure of 220,000 to 125,000.33 This might have been expected as the ties of the old Empire and Commonwealth gradually weakened and as the non-British proportion of migrants to the old countries of settlement progressively exceeded the British. But few envisaged that the early 1980s would once again see a further surge in numbers under the pressure of rising unemployment in Britain and the profound changes introduced by the Thatcher government after 1979. In the eyes of some migrants of the 1980s, these changes would stimulate their decisions to leave. This would be a new generation of ‘modern’ migrants, mostly with backgrounds and outlooks far distant from those of their postwar forebears. But like those explored in this chapter, they too would mostly view their mobile lives through a lens of family relationships. Notes   1 Appendix, Table 2. On pre-1974 methods of counting which included all Commonwealth as opposed to British citizens counted from 1975, see Introduction and Appendix.   2 Valerie Bromfield, interview and written account.   3 Geoffrey Bromfield, interview and written account.   4 Wheeler, written account and interview.   5 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 70–8; Jupp, Immigration, pp. 95–6.   6 For substantial overviews of an extensive literature see J. Jupp, From white Australia to Woomera: the story of Australian immigration, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 200–2; F. Hawkins, Critical years in immigration: Canada and Australia compared, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989, pp. 39–50, 93–108; V. Knowles, Strangers at our gates: Canadian immigration policy, 1540–2006, Toronto, Dundurn Press, 2007, pp. 179–220; J. Phillips (ed.), Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand: Settler and Migrant Peoples of New Zealand, Auckland, David Bateman, 2006, pp. 56–8.   7 Jupp, White Australia to Woomera, pp. 180–99; Hawkins, Critical years in immigration, pp. 42–111, Knowles, Strangers at our gates, pp. 210–20; Fhillips (ed.), Te Ara: Settler and migrant peoples of New Zealand, pp. 62–3.   8 K. Paul, Whitewashing Britain: race and citizenship in the postwar era, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997, pp. 64–190; P. Ward, Britishness since 1870, London, Routledge, 2004, pp. 130–1; M. Garnett, From anger to apathy: the British experience since 1975, London, Cape, 2007, pp. 78–9; J. Turner, ‘Governors, governance and governed: British politics since 1945’, in K.

The decline of British privilege  81 Burk (ed.), The British Isles since 1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 51–2; P. Mandler, The English national character: the history of an idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, p. 227. For economic reasons the Irish were exempted from the new restrictions.   9 B. Pargiter, Betty Who? A Memoir, Vancouver, Pargiter Publishing, 2001, p. 181; Pargiter, interview, MCP. 10 Durham interview and written account. See also Deed, interview and written account. 11 Pargiter, Betty Who?, p. 182. 12 Thomson, The empire strikes back?, pp. 216–23. 13 Edwards, interview. 14 Rhodes, interview and written account. 15 O’Neill, interview (MO Archive). 16 Communication with author, 13 and 19 December 2008; Kerr, interview and written account. 17 Pilott, interview and written account. 18 Rooke, interview. 19 Communication with author, 16 February 2016. 20 Tucker, interview and written account. 21 Ros Smith communication with author, 19 November 2008; see Introduction. 22 Barwell, written account. 23 Payne, interview and written account. 24 Sharpe, interview. 25 Globe and Mail, Toronto, 22 December 1967, p. 1. 26 There is general agreement that the rising rate of divorce was one factor leading to divorce law reform, but the relationship between rising evidence of marital breakdown and the pace of reforming legislation is a complex one not easily settled; R. Phillips, Putting asunder: a history of divorce in western society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 561–72. 27 Capper, interview and written account. Phillip died in 2011. 28 Barwell, interview and written account. 29 M. Harper (ed.), Emigrant homecomings: the return movement of emigrants, 1600–2000, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2005; Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 264–324. 30 Barwell, communication with author, 16 March 2016. 31 Bassindale, interview and written account. 32 Bassindale, addendum to interview. 33 Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, p. 104; see Appendix below.

3

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries: discretionary migration in the 1980s

A bleak image captured by photographer Barry Pollitt of a long queue in Manchester conveys familiar messages about popular interest in emigration among Britons. The patient crowd of ‘thousands’, we are told in one caption, stood under umbrellas ‘for hours’ hoping to attend an ‘Australian information day’.1 The photograph includes much of what we have come to associate with years of austerity emigration after 1945, with long-suffering Britons gathered on a wet March day in hopes of escape from grim economic prospects and depressing weather to warmer climes and greater opportunity. The surprise is that the photograph was taken in 1981 rather than during the years of shortage and sacrifice in the 1940s and 1950s. To all appearances little had changed over the intervening decades, apart from dress styles. Yet we know that by the 1980s the emigration landscape for the British had changed profoundly towards a global mobility of discretion, rising expectations and upward social mobility. Youthful ‘backpacking’ was increasingly an extension of the years of university education, with travel and serial and return migration showing signs of becoming new forms of consumer commodities for the worldly wise. These were not the desperate would-be migrants who would stand for hours in the winter rain in the hope of an assisted passage. The changes in the migration landscape had indeed been profound, and we will see ways in which they gathered pace and intensity in the 1980s, the ‘Thatcher decade’. But by 1981 other, more mundane, shifts had emerged which remind us that in the midst of change there was continuity, and that migration to traditional Commonwealth locations would continue to offer basic prospects of self-improvement in the ways it had done for centuries. This was brought into sharp focus by the British recession of the 1980s, which saw steep rises in unemployment, peaking at over three million by mid-decade and persisting through booms and busts into the 1990s. It was fertile ground for fostering thoughts of emi82

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  83

7  Aspiring migrants queuing in the rain for an Australian information day, Manchester, March 1981. Image Barry Pollitt

gration across all sectors of the population, not so different from those of the postwar years, thus inspiring those long queues in the rain. Indeed in 1982 the emigration outflow peaked at 188,000, a level recalling the 1950s, and, while numbers would decline slightly during the decade, more than a million would embark as emigrants.2 But the Thatcher years did not simply witness a return of old-fashioned unemployment; they encompassed deep structural changes, including the virtual collapse of traditional industries, especially heavy industry and mining in the North, geographical dislocation and widespread social alienation. Some, though not all, of the changes were fostered deliberately by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, with its ideological commitment to small government, economic rationalism, privatisation, the crippling of trade unions and the closure of inefficient industries; the rapid reforms contributed to deepening political and social polarisation. But while this was accompanied by greater social inequality, markedly a widening gap between higher and lower incomes (extended by tax reform), there was also an unprecedented increase in social mobility, as the ranks of whitecollar, professional and managerial occupations were swelled by the welleducated children of working-class parents.3 The setting was conducive to an increasingly complex and heterogeneous mixture of migrants motivated by shifting incentives and prospects.

84  Migration from austerity to prosperity Thatcher’s refugees Just as there were losers and winners from the profound structural and economic changes of the 1980s, the stories told by migrants of the decade reflect both profound alienation from the new regime and enthusiastic acclaim for reforms which worked to their benefit. Among our young and tertiary-educated interviewees the alienation certainly predominates, marked most dramatically in their self-description as ‘Thatcher’s refugees’, implying both ideological revulsion and economic disadvantage. Both of these needed to be particularly acute to inspire migration, although more traditional motives could also play a part. A young woman who emigrated twice to Australia, in 1982 and 1984, settling permanently in Sydney after her second migration and some internal moves between Sydney and Melbourne, illustrates some of these mixed motives. Viviane King, born in 1959, was the epitome of the young single sojourner of the modern era.4 A middle-class tertiary-educated woman from the South of England who eventually completed a BA and MA in French Studies and Politics at the London School of Economics, she was ambitious, well qualified and politically conscious. She was typical of her middle-class cohort in her family’s routine mobility outside Britain, regular holidays in France, and in her first independent holiday trip to America aged 17. She was untypical in having a French mother, and felt something of an outsider among her childhood peers; significantly, only two other girls in her year group of 140 had a foreign parent. But while her attachment to France and things French was unique (she completed one year of her university studies on exchange in Grenoble), her passion for Europe generally and France in particular was, by the 1980s, increasingly shared by her generation. From this time the proportion of British citizens residing permanently in countries like France, Spain and Italy began to increase significantly, partly an extension of new holiday patterns but also a product of the social consequences of European Union membership. Viviane’s background therefore predisposed her to future mobility, but certainly did not make it inevitable, and she describes her departure for Australia in 1982 as a mere matter of circumstance; underplaying any role of explicit intention, or even ideological motivation, she insisted that ‘I never set out to emigrate to Australia, it happened by stealth’. Graduating with her BA from LSE at the end of 1981, when unemployment was on the rise, her job prospects were dismal. At the suggestion of a friend she embarked on an 18-month working holiday in Sydney and Melbourne, which provided better opportunities. But after she returned to LSE for a year to complete her MA the work prospects in Britain were even worse, and so by 1984 she was back in Melbourne, where she thrived as a research officer, later moved to Sydney, worked for politi-

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  85 cians, married and gave birth to a daughter. In Viviane’s mind the British political driver of these moves, still palpable in her memories of her migration, was the Thatcher regime throughout the 1980s. This led her to describe herself as a ‘refugee from Thatcherism’. As she explained it, I realised that there were far more opportunities here [in Australia], … I’m an economic migrant, there’s no doubt about that. … Because of the unemployment I consider myself as a refugee from Thatcherism, but … I suppose the fact that I’m a refugee stemmed from the fact that there really was nothing for me in England. … Look if there had been something that would have offered a career path in London it would have had to have been very good to compare with the lifestyle that I had in Australia. … Even when I went back for the year to do the Master’s degree … and really, there was nothing. At that point I think unemployment was probably closer towards the four million … . And I just did not see that I could do anything that would be a reward for the skills that I had gained, and that could give me a lifestyle that I figured I should have been able to earn myself.

While Viviane underplayed the ideological factor in driving her migration, she also acknowledged a political motivation, recalling her excitement at arriving in Melbourne. Migrant excitement at arrival is traditionally recalled through impressions of the surrounding environment, the weather, or a friendly reception; Viviane remembered hers through a political lens, albeit one that must have developed partly in retrospect as political events unfolded: It was such a contrast. John Cain [Victorian Premier] had just come in when I arrived, in ’82 and that was after 20-something years of a state Liberal government. Bob Hawke, well Fraser was still in for one more year after I arrived, but the ALP was on the ascendancy federally, and you could just see that, you know, Australia was, was changing, and you could see from the noises that the ALP were going to try and transform Australia and bring it really kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.

A woman who worked in Australia for politicians and in policy development, Viviane might seem to be exceptional in her political motivations. Yet while not all youthful emigrants of the 1980s were so political, and some, as we will see, claimed emphatically to be Thatcher’s beneficiaries, the ‘Thatcher refugee’ theme is a consistent one, across class, down to the early 1990s, encompassing both the high unemployment rate of the early 1980s and an ideological revulsion to the regime. Catherine Taylor and her husband, middle-class Scots, left Edinburgh for Melbourne in 1982 with a sense of a bleak future for Britain. ‘People were suffering, before even we left’, she recalled, ‘and, we thought, “everything’s going

86  Migration from austerity to prosperity to go backwards in Britain”.’5 John Whiteside, a boiler-maker from Barrow-in-Furness, who had struggled financially in the shipbuilding industry, described the Thatcher victory as ‘the last nail in the coffin’ for him, which provoked his family’s migration to Australia in 1981. For John, Thatcher became the ‘wicked witch of the North’, although he also described more traditional economic motives around income and working conditions.6 Adam Salt, from Manchester, completed his tertiary education in the 1980s and became a teacher before he began his migration in 1993, first with an expatriate position in Brunei, later moving to Australia with an Australian wife, but he attributed his departure to political alienation, which began with the Falklands War. ‘I was 16 in 1982 when the Falklands happened and I was disgusted and appalled by it and I still remain to this day. … It turned me against cheap nasty jingoism.’7 In these ways ideological hostility could pave the way for lasting antagonism to Britain, which might stimulate a more mobile future and an ambiguous attitude, at least, to British heritage and identity. It is no surprise that the forthright expression of political and ideological motivations for migration occurred in the early 1980s when, demographically, the proportion of British emigrants classified as ‘professional and managerial’ and tertiary-trained decisively overtook the traditionally largest cohort, the ‘manual and clerical’. That is, the post-1970s emigrant generation became proportionately more middle-class, reflecting a similar middle-class preponderance in the British population.8 The trend is unmistakable, although it is worth noting that, while the class shift has been sustained since the 1990s, at times of financial crisis and recession the ‘professional and managerial’ numbers have declined while the ‘manual and clerical’ numbers have increased.9 But if an anti-Thatcher mindset is far from being the whole story of this 1980s and early 1990s generation, it does provide a hint of the changing profile and mentality of the younger, more professional, politically conscious and in many ways more urban and cosmopolitan migrants which distinguished them from their parents’ generation. Viviane King, for example, was no longer unusual in holding three passports, British, French and Australian, the first two of which she kept for convenience rather than national attachment or patriotism. Her daughter, too, enjoyed British citizenship and a British passport through Viviane, and thus joined a generation of migrants’ children who were able to live and work freely throughout the EU. An explicit lifestyle preference also began to accompany the cosmopolitan outlook from the 1980s. It was significant, that Viviane’s interview took place in her home in a city-centre apartment in Sydney, shared with her Australian husband and daughter, then attending an inner-city French immersion school. This was preceded by some inner suburban living, like Brunswick in Melbourne and Kingsford and St Peters in Sydney, but was an act of firm choice. In Australian cities espe-

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  87 cially, despite its growing popularity, city-centre residence remained a relatively rare choice in the 1980s compared to inner or outer suburban living, especially for those with children. Yet increasing numbers of our interviews for the project were in such inner-city dwellings rather than suburbs, an almost universal option among the previous migrant generation. Viviane’s deliberate choice was partly in opposition to suburban living, but more in reaction to her upbringing in the socially and culturally conservative English town of Maidenhead. She commented that ‘growing up in “white bread” England in the sixties I might as well have come from Mars’, and fled as early as possible to student life in London, an habitual prelude act of migration to international mobility. But her Australian choice was also driven by a choice of lifestyle linked to memories of her cosmopolitan past in London, so that Sydney became for her ‘that opportunity to go back to the lifestyle that I had when I was a student, living in the apartment in central London’. Even after 21 years in Australia, her first return visit to England confirmed her memory of that deep contrast she recalled between provincial England and urban Australia, at a time when the multiculturalism of both English and Australian large cities were obvious and similar. We didn’t realise how homogeneous the population of England was until we got back to Sydney. Where we live there are people of every shape, size and colour and we feel very comfortable in this. I felt like I was in a time warp in England to find it so monocultural, particularly in the home counties.10

It is an irony that Viviane sought and rediscovered her cosmopolitanism in Australia, since the previous generation of urban migrants had commonly expressed horror after arrival at the narrow conservative provincialism of Commonwealth cities like Melbourne, Perth, Toronto, Vancouver, Auckland and Wellington.11 Notably this cosmopolitan theme in migration coexists with a sharp counter-trend among late twentieth-century migrants, what has been called the ‘treechange’ and ‘seachange’ phenomenon. This refers to the use of migration to effect a major lifestyle change by avoiding the city life migrants had known in Britain in favour of movement to rural areas, often with an ecological land care agenda, or to coastal areas with an accent on escape to a beachside lifestyle. We will look more closely at this in Chapter 7, but it too is characteristic of the mindset of the Thatcher generation of young middle-class emigrants whose ideology influenced their migration choices. In these ways 1980s lifestyle choices were coming to be more thoroughly bound up with places of settlement. Western migration had begun to take on characteristics of consumerism, a distinguishing feature, perhaps, of modern migrations of prosperity.

88  Migration from austerity to prosperity The focus here on a young woman to illustrate some of the ways in which British migration was changing in the 1980s is particularly telling, because it has been among women that some of the dramatic social changes of the later twentieth century have impacted most starkly on their profiles as migrants. In the 1950s and 1960s the classic profile of the British single female migrant was of a young woman with a mobile occupation like nursing, physiotherapy, hairdressing or secretarial work, intent on a two-year working holiday, although often ‘hijacked’ in midstream by marriage to a local.12 By contrast, the tertiary-educated Viviane King was pursuing career development and revelled in Australian urban life, while others used the rural hinterland to pursue green agendas.13 Thatcher’s beneficiaries Political alienation and ‘new age’ lifestyle transformations easily complemented each other, but these were far from being the whole story of 1980s emigration. ‘Thatcher’s refugees’, for example, were balanced by quite self-consciously described ‘Thatcher’s beneficiaries’ and supporters, sometimes a simple outcome of conservative background, ingrained political instinct and ideology, but equally a matter of self-interested calculation among budding elites and professionals in emerging industries. Aspiring entrepreneurs, normally part of the Conservative Party’s bedrock support, were likely to feel strongly about Thatcher’s reforms, often fuelled by resentment against a high-taxing welfare state. Michael Whitley, whose stepfather owned a department store, had strong reasons for welcoming Margaret Thatcher’s ascension to power. Michael started his own property development and rental business in the 1960s when he was in his twenties, but felt defeated by the taxation policies and rental legislation under Harold Wilson’s Labour government. Even some short visits in 1965 and 1967 to Sydney, where he set up a similar business, failed to save him from tax debts, so that ‘it took me nine years, to wind up my business and get out of the tax problem’. By 1987, when he was attempting to obtain Chartered Accountancy qualifications, he still nursed powerful grievances against British obstructions to opportunity, and finally emigrated to Sydney, where he obtained a degree without difficulty. In his youth Michael gravitated naturally to the Conservative Party, becoming Chairman of the Young Conservatives in Cambridgeshire. Disillusioned by the centrist policies of Edward Heath’s government in the early 1970s, and feeling a victim of big government, but alienated from the traditional ‘hunting, shooting and fishing side’, Thatcher’s reforms of both the Conservative Party and the nation were for him a breath of fresh air. ‘Well I actually came to Margaret Thatcher … very much, because of

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  89 what happened to my business and because of Harold Wilson’s days. I actually joined the Centre for Policy Studies as a member, … and I used to listen to Margaret Thatcher.’ However predictable Michael’s politics may have been, his emigration had much in common with that of his emigrant peers of other political hues. He faced acutely personal challenges of living with a disability stemming from childhood polio, and of two unsuccessful marriages, but clung to an outlook of sturdy independence and optimism. In a written reflection he treated his migration story as a positive journey of adventure and discovery rather than an outcome of political disenchantment. ‘Would I do it again if I knew what I know now? I love life so life is an adventure, good, bad or indifferent.’14 Stories from a younger generation, without prior political commitment, show some marked contrasts. Mark Waite, for example, was a child of the developing revolution in computer technology, with a sharp eye for opportunities beyond the modest white-collar career of his father. He seized one of the limited prospects for tertiary study of computer science in the early 1980s at Sunderland Polytechnic and, after a number of promising positions with county councils in his native Midlands, pursued fixed-term contracts, by 1987 in London with lucrative work in financial services. The money, he recalled, ‘was just flowing around the place’, and even after the market crash of that year the work ‘just kept going’. So when, quite unexpectedly in 1988, he received an offer of a year’s contract as a computer programmer in Melbourne, this continued a regular succession of challenging job opportunities, albeit an expatriate one. In early 1989 he and his then girlfriend moved to Melbourne. For Mark much of this was attributable to Thatcher’s policies, making him conscious of the huge leap he had made from his origins when his family lived in a rented council flat in Derby. ‘I certainly profited, without a doubt, from Thatcher’, he reflected, ‘Thatcher liberated the financial services sector, and I certainly profited from that.’ But his political endorsement was equivocal. Given his background, and his origins around Derbyshire mining districts, it is not surprising that the intense conflict between Thatcher’s government and striking miners in the early 1980s prompted some misgivings and political doubts. A keen football fan, he was disturbed to find that police tactics towards the miners resembled those used against football supporters. But with an eye to the larger picture, ‘I felt what Thatcher was doing [politically] had to be done because things certainly were atrocious under Callaghan before her’.15 His ambivalence underlines ways in which the popular ‘Thatcherism’ narrative, and its critique, informed the testimony even of Thatcher’s supporters. Mark’s political ambivalence characterised that of a young generation of educated and ambitious migrants in the 1980s, for whom political identity, whatever its colour, was secondary to career ambitions, travel

90  Migration from austerity to prosperity and ‘lifestyle’. Reflecting on his story, Mark traced his mobile instincts to a tendency to ‘wander’ as a young boy, but with a practical purpose. His wandering, while always ‘a bit of a yearning of mine, I’ve always been one that’s travelled a little bit’, was emphatically not wanderlust. Because wanderlust to me is something that you do without a purpose, and my travelling always to me seemed to have a purpose, I was never one that looked at the backpacker trail with any sort of envy. … There’s always been a purpose to the travelling, even if it meant taking myself off to Nottingham as a 12-year-old because I used to do that quite often on a Sunday.

In his migration that ‘purpose’ was largely career-driven, and lacked the impetus to ‘flight’ evident among Thatcher’s refugees, but it also drew on the kind of lifestyle quests that we saw in Viviane King’s devotion to London. By 1995 Mark was married to an Australian, Junette, and became stepfather to her three children. The attractions of family life and domesticity confirmed his growing feeling that Melbourne was now home, but homesickness for England persisted. He retained an enduring attachment for his local origins in Derby. But paradoxically his drive to return stemmed from nostalgia for his time in London. As with Viviane King the memory of a free-wheeling single life in the metropolis exercised a powerful attraction, and, although Junette was not keen to leave home, they were sufficiently well off to undertake the trip for an agreed twelve months. He reflected on the way his nostalgia evolved: What I missed is a certain lifestyle, it wasn’t homesickness per se, although I really missed the lifestyle that I had in London, and I was never homesick, …which was strange, because I’ve never considered myself a Londoner, and yet I missed that lifestyle which London offered, which was hardworking, hard-playing, hard-drinking, single lifestyle, … and it was only when I actually went back that I was able to realise that it was the lifestyle that I missed rather than individuals or places.

In the event Mark left first to arrange housing, and by the time Junette and the children arrived he felt his passion for London had been satiated. After ten months he was relieved to return to Melbourne, although now London had exercised its charms on his wife, so that ‘we had to drag Junette on to the plane back to Melbourne!’ For Mark the return sojourn worked its way in what is a familiar return migrant story, becoming ‘the actual catharsis for me. … I very quickly realised that the lifestyle that I missed, and was feeling homesick for, was very much not the person that I was now, and that London was not necessarily the sort of place to have … a nine year old. … So by the time they arrived, New Year’s Day, 1996, I’d almost decided that London wasn’t home.’

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  91 If Mark’s story began as a successful career narrative driven by opportunities created by government policies, it never took on the strong political flavour evident among ‘Thatcher’s refugees’. Indeed, Thatcher’s ‘revolution’ did nothing to inhibit criticisms of the quality of life in Britain compared to what he enjoyed in Melbourne; ‘I just find the lifestyle a little insular over there’, he remarked. In its greater preoccupation with travel, return experience, lifestyle quests and identity his story resembles those of the young migrants of the 1980s more generally. Dominated by youthful ambition, in the end the story was dictated by family priorities, and Mark attached particular importance to the fact that he married into an existing family, to a mother with three children. ‘I was aware of the fact that I was moving into a family, and so my future was shaped along the family lines.’ Family priorities thus coexisted with an intensely local identity, with sustained Derbyshire football loyalties coexisting with Melbourne sporting teams, but indifference to any larger British identity or patriotism. In this he was part of a wider trend among his British peers, whose global predilections were fostering ambivalence about their native country loyalties, often inspiring local attachments which coexisted more easily with global outlooks than with national ones. Migration on a whim, and bureaucratic hurdles Migrations motivated by high ideals and dreams of new lifestyles seem a world away from the economically driven movements of earlier generations. Even allowing for the mix of career aspirations and financial pressures influencing this generation, we can glimpse a new element of discretion and relative luxury in the easy decisions to relocate, often more than once, made by these mostly young middle-class migrants. Nothing indicates the changing contours of modern migration more than its increasing use as an outlet for ideological or political interests, global adventure and personal quests for transformations in lifestyle, love and spirituality. These are symptomatic of ways in which migration, traditionally an act of self-improvement, was being eclipsed by migration as an act of individual consumerism. At its most extreme this could be migration on a whim, and it is not surprising that it might be accompanied by the waning of attachment to national identities. There is a paradox here, since, as we saw in the last chapter, the ease of entry for the British into old white Commonwealth countries in the years after the Second World War encountered increasing restrictions from the 1970s. All receiving countries now pursued strict selection policies, tailoring immigration intakes to national demands for skills, while maintaining appearances of racial equity. Officially the British were now equal with others in their attempts to become immigrants. Each country

92  Migration from austerity to prosperity erected ever more demanding ‘points systems’ based on education and employment status, devised new categories of business migrants requiring capital backing and imposed costly visa application fees for the treasured ‘permanent residence’ permit.16 From about this time many of the stories told by migrants include complex accounts of their convoluted attempts to meet the demands, proving – and changing – their occupation status, experiencing long delays and occasionally leaving the country to enable conversion of a temporary permit to permanent residence. Catherine Taylor faced most of these hurdles when she and her family applied to emigrate from Scotland to Australia in the early 1980s. The ordeal took two years after the original enquiry and remains a vivid part of her memory. The experience was absolutely terrible, it was a nightmare. …We had to fill in this form, … and we had to reach one hundred points in this questionnaire. … One adult had to have employment in this country, and basically, money, they were looking for money, you needed to have a certain amount of money, I don’t know whether it was twenty thousand Australian dollars or something like that.17

The obstructions seemed to contradict the stream of promotional literature urging them to seize the opportunity for a better life, especially since they were paying full fare and took no part in the rapidly expiring subsidy scheme. But the delays often prompted them to question whether the venture was worthwhile, particularly worrying after they had taken the weighty step of selling their Scottish house. It took so long, between sending it was months and months before anything came back, so you were thinking, you know: ‘What’s, what’s the problem, what’s going on,’ there was always that sort of: ‘Are we not good enough?’ type thing. … A couple of times, we thought: ‘Oh, maybe we shouldn’t bother with this’. And then we had to go for medicals, of course, which we had to pay for, but they chose the clinics that we had to go to, and these, because I’m in the profession I know what decent equipment looks like, we were sent to these private places where it cost us hundreds of pounds for machinery that was about 30 years out of date, … so somebody was making money out of people coming out here, but it wasn’t us!

In retrospect Catherine’s grievances were aggravated through discovery after arrival in Melbourne, in 1982, that many of the alluring prospects in the advertising had been misleading and ill-informed. They found that house prices, for example, averaged about $66,000 rather than the suggested $36,000, and advice to sell their furniture proved to be misguided. Catherine recalls the depressing reflection soon after settling in

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  93 Melbourne: ‘“Oh my God, this is not the dream that we thought we were going to have”, based on the information we were given.’ For those desperate to escape grim prospects at home, bureaucratic obstacles were simply one challenge amongst many to be endured. But Catherine’s family were far from desperate. Catherine herself was a wellpaid nurse educator, her husband, Michael, a senior commercial manager; they owned a house and car, enjoyed most of the trappings of prosperity and their two children were well adjusted at school. It is no wonder that at times they considered that they ‘shouldn’t bother’. But the mixed motivations, more Catherine’s than Michael’s, were powerful enough to keep her resolute. Even before marriage, when her parents briefly flirted with the idea of emigration, she had thought ‘Oh, God, there’s got to be more to the world than Scotland!’ Before settling on Australia they considered Canada – too cold – and South Africa – worries about apartheid – but, once decided, the Australian quest became a single-minded ambition. Asked about her motivations Catherine recalled her restlessness. It was a craving for more. Yes, it was: ‘Is this all there is?’ you know: ‘Okay it’s nice, we’ve got our routine, … we’ve got a pretty decent house, our kids are growing up well, but there’s got to be more to an existence than this small space in Scotland’, so … we both wanted to experience a different country, a different culture.

Craving, curiosity, restlessness, adventure, these were becoming stockin-trade motivations, but here they were entangled with others. Margaret Thatcher’s rule emphatically helped to persuade them that ‘this would be a good time to leave’. More importantly, while the family was settled in Armadale, west of Edinburgh, Michael’s work regularly kept him from home, particularly on trips to Aberdeen. Their daughter, Michelle, always understood from her mother that the move was made to help to keep the family closer together, and in Catherine’s mind emigration to Australia would be far preferable to a move to Aberdeen.18 Reflecting on what most explained their actions at the time, from financial betterment to adventure, she thought that a sense of ‘wanderlust’ drove them more than anything else: That would be more appropriate, because although we hoped, and thought we might do better, it wasn’t the reason for moving. Isn’t this interesting? When I got here, the first year was a nightmare and, oh a nightmare, and I often reflected and thought: ‘Why didn’t I think about what this would be like?’ I didn’t even think about it, was just so focused on: ‘It’s going to be wonderful, it’s going to be a better lifestyle, it’s going to be better weather, it’s going to be different’, and all the stuff I read that coming to Australia emphasised, so I never gave much thought to what I’m actually leaving, losing,

94  Migration from austerity to prosperity whatever. I didn’t even think at that level. And so when we left Scotland we all left with the commitment that this is it, goodbye Scotland, forever.

Catherine’s post-migration story echoed many of her earlier expectations and ambitions, but not without struggles she shared in common with many of her fellow migrants. Her qualifications, rather than Michael’s, had facilitated approval of the family’s application. She had a nurse educator position, similar to that in Scotland, prearranged with the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne upon arrival. Ultimately her career progression was stellar, moving into the university nurse education sector, obtaining a PhD and becoming a Professor and Head of School, at, successively, Deakin and Victoria Universities. Michael, too, eventually obtained comparable work in management training and later ran his own business. But in the short term they encountered a rocky road. On arrival the Alfred Hospital’s twin promises of housing and Catherine’s senior position were broken, leading to a turmoil of house-hunting, stopgap work and job-changing. In the early months they were completely dependent on Catherine’s income, with Michael taking on full-time responsibility for house-hunting, finding schools for the children and household tasks. This, at least, was no shock since their responsibility for childcare, cooking and cleaning had always been shared, dictated in part by Catherine’s long years of shift-work. The material obstacles were mostly surmounted after several months, but for Catherine a familiar migrant malaise of homesickness persisted, more unexpected for them because she had been the prime mover in the venture, although such ‘prime movers’ are generally susceptible to experiencing greater disillusion. While early work tensions played a part in this, much of it stemmed from the classic shock of the new. Ironically, while climate had figured largely in their decision, it was the heat, in the midst of the searing Melbourne summer of 1982–83, beset by bushfires and dust-storms, which unsettled Catherine to the point of mourning for the familiar darkness of home. This is going to sound utterly bizarre, probably. Although I wanted the sunshine I couldn’t stand the light, the brightness, the colours of buildings, the brightness, and milk-bars, things like that were all garish, all horrible, I’m used to steel grey, remember, narrow streets, dark skies. That nearly killed me, the brightness, I could not stand the loudness of the whole place. And I kept thinking about rain (laugh) and, and thinking about darkness. … Just before the bushfires yes, … we had the big dust-storm, oh, that was awful. … And the colours made me really homesick, and the whole nursing, professional thing here was just, shocking. If we’d have had the money, I’d have gone back, I think I might have left the whole family I was so beside myself.

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  95 Catherine considered that she endured two years of depression before she began to feel settled, in part on the basis of greater career stability. But her distress put strains on the family and she experienced an unanticipated role reversal with her children; Michelle, 13, and Kevin, 12, ‘took me by the hand, they became more the parent’. In a classic case of differential adaptation between parents and children, usually associated with foreign-language immigrants, the children began to teach the parent. And yes I’d been a very strong parental influence, you know, it wasn’t like I’m a weak person, but if we went to the city they would take me on the trams and show me how to do everything, because they were jumping on and off trams and they were just … off and running and doing things that I wasn’t doing. I was jumping in the car in the morning, and going to work, coming home at night, making the dinner, feeling horrible, go to bed, crying all night, getting up, doing it all again the next day.

Six years after arrival, well settled in a bayside suburb and with children growing up, Catherine and Michael made a return trip to Scotland. Michael’s mother was ill and the time seemed ripe for a family visit. To their surprise it was ‘lovely, wonderful, fitted straight back in’. The familiar was comforting after years of rapid change; ‘absolutely nothing had changed, everybody was the same’. By the end of the trip Catherine persuaded herself that ‘this is where I really belong’ and they decided to return to Scotland. Michelle and Kevin were unimpressed by the news, and flatly declared their refusal, but tentative enquiries proceeded. Ultimately the relatively trivial and amusing reasons for abandoning the venture might suggest that it was never serious. Devotees of Australian wine, they had accumulated an impressive wine cellar and decided they should drink it up before leaving. ‘By the time we’d drunk the wine we’d changed our mind about going back!’ A case of ‘in vino veritas’? As if to underline the wisdom of the decision to stay, a second return visit for a wedding five years later brought quite different reactions. In a curious twist, the very attractions of the first visit now turned negative. They simply ‘didn’t fit in’. While this may have been reinforced by tensions with Catherine’s sister, she reflected that ‘we had changed too much. Nobody had changed at all, which is what I liked the first time, that sensation of belonging.’ This stemmed in part from their sense of their own openness to new experience, to travel and adventure, compared to a narrower view Catherine now identified with Scotland. ‘Our relatives were unadventurous in everything, including foods, and we realised that we had outgrown our homeland so there was no going back on a permanent basis.’ The visit prompted further reflections about her identity and the migrant experience:

96  Migration from austerity to prosperity It was an eye-opener for me about who I actually was, I didn’t appreciate some of the things I felt so strongly about until I came here and then had them challenged, you know, especially on a religious level. I found myself saying: ‘Who am I’, you know, ‘why do I believe this anyway, why is this something that’s really important to me?’ and it was really, well this is my interpretation of it, indoctrination, you’re brought up in a society, whether it’s religion or whether it’s just culture and when you change that you step out of your comfort zone and your survival depends on re-immersing yourself somewhere else, you can’t sit outside the box.

Catherine’s new comfort zone and cosmopolitan outlook in Australia left little space for strong allegiance to her Scottish heritage beyond a lingering interest in Scottish country dancing. Indeed, she felt a stronger ‘cultural bias’ towards her mother’s Irish background, having learnt the songs and stories and visited Northern Ireland in her childhood. Australia facilitated a continuing interest in adventure and international travel, which she had found to be lacking in Scotland, and her travel itineraries now routinely omitted Scotland. Her daughter, Michelle, shared her sentiments. Married with children, settled in Melbourne, happily owning two passports and drawn to international travel, Michelle ‘found the culture more accepting here than in Scotland … Australia has a culture that embraces exploring other cultures.’ And after a visit to Scotland she was surprised, like her mother, to find ‘how negative and prejudiced the people there are’, bleak, ‘like the weather’; ‘or maybe’, she conceded, ‘just my family’. The triumphal Taylor story shared both traditional and modern features among British migration narratives; traditional for the family’s early struggles against the odds, Catherine’s homesickness, strong work ethic, career success and family solidarity; modern for its steep bureaucratic challenges, lifestyle motivations, casual attitudes to return, a cosmopolitan outlook and waning of national identities. In this it is a characteristic story of the 1980s. For the Taylors their early struggle with bureaucratic obstruction and delay ultimately receded in significance to a memory of irritants ultimately overcome, but these were now standard reminders to the British that the easy days of advantage had receded. Perhaps nothing underlined this more than the final termination of the renowned assisted passage to Australia at the end of 1981. The ‘ten pound passage’, introduced in 1947, was a stark reminder to most European applicants that the British were most favoured, even after some assistance was extended, mostly on less favourable terms, to other groups.19 After the 1960s the passenger contribution to the subsidised fare progressively increased, reaching £75 by its final year, when selection issues had in any case become more weighty matters. But it remained a symbol of preferential status.

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  97 For those intending to emigrate to Australia in late 1981 and 1982 news of the changed regime was a problematic shock. Margaret and Ron Galbraith had no plans to emigrate until the recession of 1981 affected their jobs with the Caterpillar Tractor Company south of Glasgow; both took redundancy packages. Ron’s experience as a skilled electrical technician made him an attractive potential migrant, and after brief explorations of prospects in Canada and South Africa they settled on Australia. Achieving the necessary points was, for Ron at least, a simple task, particularly when he received a firm job offer from BHP to work in Whyalla, South Australia. Margaret’s position was more difficult, for while they had been together for nine years, happily living separately with their own parents while taking holidays together, they remained unmarried. Margaret’s secretarial skills did not qualify her, as a single woman, for a visa to settle in the male-dominated industrial city of Whyalla, and so the immigration imperatives finally dictated marriage. While approval came easily, her recollection of Ron’s prosaic reaction, highlighted during the interview in Edinburgh, was not inspiring: Only one thing wrong – I could not go unless we got married. My romantic boyfriend said to the interviewer ‘we did not want to get tied down here unless we were accepted’. I kicked him. Later he said we both knew we could not afford to set up a home in Scotland but he had assumed we would get married one day. Outside, he tried to calm me down, as we had been told, pending a medical, we had been successful. He said ‘I guess we will have to get married. Do you want to look at wedding dresses?’ I fumed off in a right huff. Where was my romantic proposal after all these years?20

As a married couple approved for residence they now qualified for subsidised passages. With acceptance and assistance confirmed in October, the Australian office suggested they would leave before Christmas, so they shipped their belongings and promptly left their jobs, with ‘meagre’ redundancy payouts but sufficient capital to begin to establish themselves after arrival in Whyalla. Within a week they were told that the assisted passage was ‘no longer available’, but, confusingly, that it might soon be revived. At least that was the impression they were left with, Margaret recalled. The confusing wait was expensive, as they lived off their precious capital into 1982 and the BHP offer deadline of the end of February loomed with announcement of assisted passages returning. A phone call from BHP clarified the confusion, simply suggesting that they pay their own way, a wiser use of the capital that was draining away in Scotland. ‘We were so naive,’ Margaret wrote. ‘No one had suggested this and we had not thought of it either. Instead of going through money like water we could have been there.’ In hindsight the BHP suggestion and their naivety seem obvious, but their indecision was also a product

98  Migration from austerity to prosperity of nearly three decades of taken-for-granted assumptions that migrants to old Commonwealth countries were entitled to government subsidy. By 24 February, after a long, discounted ‘milk run’ flight, the couple arrived in Whyalla, where Margaret too soon found work. Job changes followed, a move to Adelaide, two children by 1988 and for Ron a working life of ‘fly-in-fly-out’ lucrative employment, which saw him at home and away two weeks at a time. Margaret ultimately retrained and became a library technician at Adelaide University, with both children in tertiary education. The achievements put the old troubles with officialdom into perspective. Theirs was a classic migrant success story in the traditional mould, with traditional regrets evoked by Margaret, for family and homeland left behind: My biggest regret is Kylie and Ryan growing up without grandparents … during their younger years. … [But] our trip back to Scotland made us realise we are better off here. … I celebrate and regret my move here …. I am proud to be Scottish but just as proud to have two Australian children and with what I have achieved here. Each year the Christmas card list gets a little smaller and we hear of people no longer with us – that is when the pull and the ties to Scotland are just as strong.

Shrewd adventurers By the late 1980s bureaucratic hurdles and educational demands were coming to be taken for granted by aspiring migrants. But the new regime brought about changed attitudes and practices for those keen to satisfy wanderlust dreams through migration rather than tourism. Global ‘adventure’ now required careful forethought and planning rather than aimless wandering on impulse. Occupations mattered, and quite apart from longer-term goals, whether for career, lifestyle, ideology, romance or family, the most successful young migrants soon learned to seek qualifications best suited to their global mobility. Since the 1940s women in particular had enjoyed such international marketability with occupations like nursing and physiotherapy, and from the 1980s some new industries, like IT, were tailor-made for international flexibility.21 Now, however, training for the ambitious but lightly trained sojourner required a more determined form of advance calculation. A quick course on teaching English as a foreign language could facilitate indefinite working holidays, perhaps evolve into a permanent career.22 Others could take a more systematic approach to their migration project and spend years training in flexible fields like the caring services, and finance, which could still accommodate spontaneous adventuring. Ambitious adventurers now became shrewd and calculating planners, equipping themselves for

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  99 extended travel, ultimately to settle and adapt in whatever country most suited their desires. An illuminating case in point is Debbie Colbourne’s story, which illustrates emerging trends in migration practice.23 Born into a middle-class family in Brighton in 1964, Debbie framed much of her life around travel ambitions. She had two sisters and a brother, but the family was not close, alienated from extended kin because of disapproval of her parents’ marriage, and their own marital tensions affected family life. Whether or not her ‘fractured upbringing’ was responsible, she ‘developed severe wanderlust from an early age’, and, chose a university course ‘farthest from home’, at Sheffield University. She chose her major studies in ancient history and archaeology with an eye to travel prospects, and engaged in digs as far afield as Israel. On graduation she won two archaeology scholarships for digs in Turkey and Italy. At this stage she had no strong drive to escape from England, ‘only the sense that I wanted to travel, as much as I could’. After graduation she tailored her work choices to travel plans. While her family relations had not been close, she traced her interests to the largely frustrated passions of the women in her family, particularly her mother and grandmother. I suspect it came from my grandmother, and my mum, my grandmother travelled a lot, always wanted to travel a lot, although her ambitions were thwarted by having to have kids, which you did in those days, and my mum the same, she always wanted to travel and never could. … When I used to go round to my Nan’s we used to have these exotic things there, these big elephant footstools from Morocco, and things like that around the house, and ‘oh, yes, I’d like some of that’.

While planting an enduring seed for an unencumbered life open to travel – ‘I was always going to do what I wanted to do, and no one was going to stop me from doing that’ – the family experience also taught her not to allow her goals to be frustrated ‘by having to have kids’, a view which matured into conviction as time passed. Debbie’s encounters with Australians during her student travels had inspired a desire to see the country, visit a friend in Sydney and then enjoy some Asian travel. A short-term job at Gatwick airport was her first step, to earn enough to finance the start of a 12-month Australian working holiday. There she met Julian, also English, with similar ambitions, and as a relationship developed the Australian idea advanced to a shared one-year project. As planned, the trip in 1989 and 1990 was a classic backpacking sojourn around Australia, supported by whatever odd jobs arose to keep them solvent, from asparagus picking in Dubbo to jewellery packing in Melbourne. They enjoyed a break in the serenity of Port Lincoln in South Australia with Julian’s aunt and uncle, and

100  Migration from austerity to prosperity became avid birdwatchers during stopovers in memorable attractions like Kakadu, Ayers Rock, Darwin and North Queensland. Along the way their passion grew for the country, enjoying the cities but ‘hooked’ on the space beyond. ‘We fell in love with the Outback, … just beautiful, just all that red dirt and, and blue sky and the Spinifex.’ The experience was powerful enough to build their next project around Australia: ‘we both realised that we wanted to stay here’. When their 12-month visa expired they left Sydney for an open-ended backpacking tour along the Asian ‘hippy trail’. This was cut short after eight months by the serious illness of Julian’s mother in England. For both, their return ‘crystallised the idea of wanting to emigrate’. Then the serious business of how to prepare for it and qualify for a visa began in earnest. Because open-ended Australian and global travel remained central to the plan they now searched for career choices best suited to afford mobility. Julian chose the high-demand option of nursing; Debbie’s first love, archaeology, offered anything but a flexible and mobile career, and so, after much deliberation, she settled on accountancy, a purely pragmatic choice to facilitate migration and travel, with no gesture to career passion. ‘The decision was made 90 per cent on that basis, … we wanted to migrate, and we knew that we needed occupations that would further us doing that.’ Her choice also had short-term advantages; while Julian was in fulltime training with minimal income, Debbie’s learning was on the job with an accountancy firm, providing modest support. ‘Ju wanted to train as a nurse, and I decided to find something that would support us while he was training, because … student nurse pay was so poor.’ The well-laid plan took seven years to realise. During the long preparation neither wavered in their objective, feeling no strong attachment in England to family, career or culture; ‘that’s come later’, Debbie recalled. After marrying in 1993 the quest for a visa required one of them to have 12 months of post-study work experience. Julian was the first to complete his course and so the application relied on his qualifications. It was helped by reliance on his aunt and uncle in Port Lincoln, enabling a ‘family visa’ requiring fewer points to qualify and there was an advantage to their intention to settle with nursing qualifications in a rural area rather than cities. Faced with a long and tortuous ordeal of engagement with officialdom, they opted for the increasingly popular strategy of employing a migration agent, who managed most of the process promptly. From the recent experience of friends they knew they would avoid frustrating delays and evasions. They left, finally, in May 1996 ‘with a backpack each’ and a few belongings stored for later shipment. Leaving was relatively painless; Debbie had no memory of emotional departures, her parents were travelling in Europe and the hardest parting was from her cats. Her emotions were more with what lay ahead. ‘I remember the day we went to the airport,

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  101 I just couldn’t wait to go.’ After holidays in Costa Rica and Mexico they arrived in Sydney at the end of June, stayed with friends and immediately obtained casual work as planned. Debbie thrilled to the symbols of their successful venture, an abiding memory of ‘the realisation standing on the train platform that we’d finally made it, and the exotic thrill of seeing Sulphur-crested Cockatoos and Australian White Ibis whilst walking to work’. Three months of work provided the funds to buy a campervan and embark on a trip around Australia. This extended to three years, with stops to work and replenish funds, a strategy which worked seamlessly. Julian especially ‘could rock up in a city and be offered shifts that afternoon’. Their time in the cities, including eight months in Darwin, was balanced by extensive camping in national parks, along the west coast and from Darwin to Queensland, making enduring friends along the way. After three years, back in Sydney, in 1999, they decided against settling in the city or on the coast and put a deposit on 65 acres of land in northern Victoria. They would build there and work in nearby cities like Benalla and Shepparton. But first they resolved on a short visit to England to confirm that ‘this is the right thing that we’ve done’ and to see family and friends. Any residual doubts about their project were quickly put to rest. While renewal with English friends at ‘old haunts’ and local travel was satisfying, it was less easy to find casual work, and they realised quickly ‘how shockingly expensive it all was’. After barely two months, shorter than planned, they were ready to return, but with a further visit to India, fully convinced that they had indeed ‘made the right decision’. England’s deficiencies were now seen through a lens of Australia’s virtues and opportunities, and Australia more than a congenial launching pad for travel. ‘It didn’t take long to realise that nowhere in England were we going to find the peace and quiet or the opportunities that we enjoyed so much in Australia.’ Living in northern Victoria in that peace and quiet brought further changes. The house-building project became too expensive, so they bought a semi-finished mud-brick building on 174 acres near Violet Town; both house and land offered fruitful prospects for pet projects of renovation and revegetation. But now, as relatively settled migrants rather than restless sojourners, their shrewdly chosen mobile occupations began to pall, and new passions for the land pointed in changed directions. Gradually Debbie’s accountancy and Julian’s nursing gave way to growing interests in environmental pursuits, on their own land and professionally. Debbie found work with the State Environment Department, which eventually led to retraining with a Master’s degree in Environmental Management and rapid promotion, and Julian found ‘hands on’ work in environmental projects. At home their relatively degraded land provided endless opportunities to put their ecological passions into practice.

102  Migration from austerity to prosperity Debbie and Julian’s project had evolved into a treechange migration with all the attendant transformations in careers and lifestyle. Facilitated by scrupulous and systematic planning, it was still shaped in unexpected ways by passions learnt from their experience of travel and exposure to the Australian environment, which probably ran deeper than those of the average Australian. With such fervour it came as something of a surprise to Debbie in later years to begin to feel so emotional about aspects of her English heritage. This built in part on deep roots from childhood memories and academic interests in history and archaeology, but was stimulated too by her Australian experience on the land. The more I’ve been here the more I understand the depth of where you come from. … Because I grew up in such a lovely, very old area, and I was very tied to that sense of history, of where I lived, because I grew up playing on a Norman motte and bailey castle. I had Roman remains, we had Neolithic remains that I used to play on in the summer, so there was that real sense of continuity. … And I went to a school that was founded in 1644, so all of that history I grew up with.

But if this translated into periodic bouts of homesickness for ‘small things such as spring in woods full of bluebells and long summer evenings and a decent English pub with decent English beer’, it never threatened their commitment to their life project or ambitions for long-term travel; ‘The wanderlust is still there, I’m afraid’. And nostalgia implied no patriotic equivalent beyond the convenient possession of British and Australian passports. By the time of the interview in 2007, Debbie’s commitment to Australia encompassed support for a republic, anxieties about ‘creeping Americanisation’ and, in an echo of earlier political stances in Britain, fears of ‘the Thatcher experiment all over again’. But she remained sceptical on issues of national identity, Australian or English: What is Australian? No, I find, I find all this values debate a real furphy and so difficult to tie down, this whole: ‘You should live like an Australian.’ Well, we live out here, and some things are very differently Australian to what they would be if you lived in [the city], so I don’t know what Australian is. Once you could have said: ‘I know what English is’, but I don’t think that’s the case, any more either.

Between the traditional self-improvement story of Margaret and Ron Galbraith and the open-ended, sometime ideologically driven accounts of sojourning wanderers intent on lifestyle changes like Viviane King, Mark Waite and Debbie Colbourne, there was a world of difference. But most of these stories betray a complex and shifting mix of migrant desires over time, which are not fully encompassed by either the ‘Thatcher refugee’

Thatcher’s refugees and Thatcher’s beneficiaries  103 identity or the image of those aspiring migrants we saw queuing in the rain in Manchester in 1981. Mark Waite’s youthful lifestyle and career motivations gave way to family bonds; Catherine Taylor’s mixed motives for moving her family yielded to pride in her own career, a growing cosmopolitanism and waning of her Scottish attachments; and Debbie Colbourne’s enduring wanderlust and pragmatic approach to migration ultimately coexisted with ecological living and passion for the Australian landscape. All of them came to profess varying degrees of ambivalence about national identity, and they illustrate the coexistence of the old with the new in migration practice and experience. The Thatcher years had placed new economic, social and political pressures on the British which caused many to emigrate who would otherwise have stayed home. Despite this, the numbers leaving in the 1980s were still down on those of the previous decade, by over half a million.24 In subsequent years the migrant outflow from Britain would gradually surge again to levels similar to those of the early 1970s. These new nomads of the 1990s and beyond, increasingly styling themselves ‘citizens of the world’, would take the features we have seen in this chapter, like cosmopolitanism, waning national identity and an inclination to treat their migration like an act of consumerism, to new levels. Notes   1 Reproduced from R. Appleyard et al., The ten pound immigrants, London, Boxtree, 1988, p. 56.   2 Appendix 2; Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, p. 104.   3 Burk, British Isles since 1945, pp. 72–4, 114–16.   4 Viviane King, interview and written accounts.   5 Catherine Taylor, interview and written account; see Chapter 4.   6 Whiteside, interview and written account; see Chapter 5.   7 Salt, Interview; see Chapter 4.   8 Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, pp. 22–5.   9 Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, figure 3.8, p. 22. 10 Viviane King, written account. 11 For example Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 132, 139–41. 12 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 248–63. 13 See Chapter 7. 14 Whitley, interview and written account. 15 Waite, interview and written account. 16 Jupp, White Australia to Woomera, pp. 200–2; Hawkins, Critical years in immigration, pp. 39–50, 93–108; Knowles, Strangers at our gates, pp. 179– 220; Phillips (ed.), Te Ara: Settler and migrant peoples of New Zealand, pp. 56–8. 17 Catherine Taylor, interview and written account. 18 Michelle Taylor, interview and written account.

104  Migration from austerity to prosperity 19 Jupp, Immigration, p. 109, notes that the assistance declined in value with movement further south on the continent, with least assistance to southern Europeans. 20 Galbraith, interview and written account. 21 Mark Waite, discussed in this chapter, exemplifies the new opportunities in IT. 22 See Toni Dobinson’s story in Chapter 8. 23 Colbourne, interview and written account. 24 See Appendix. The 1980s totals of approximately 1,045,000 contrasted to about 1,600,000 in the 1970s. Calculated from Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, p. 104, and United Kingdom, ONS, International Migration Ref Vol., 2004 (Series MN 31).

4

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’ from the 1990s

The quest for ‘lifestyle’ in two generations I exist now in a state of limbo. I’ve lived in New Zealand for nearly four years, which my Wellington friends assure me is no time at all. I still have an English accent and gravitate without intention to other English people. But I don’t feel English any more. I don’t read the English news or support England against New Zealand in sport. I knew more about the All Blacks than I did about the British Lions on their recent tour, but I’m still not a Kiwi. My friends mention cultural icons they’ve known since childhood and I have no idea who or what they are. I haven’t acquired the deep cultural understanding that goes with growing up in a particular place. … I’m a citizen of both countries and a native of neither, but it doesn’t matter to me at all. I finally feel like I belong somewhere.1

These reflections were written by a young British woman, Tanya Piejus, who emigrated to New Zealand in 2001. Tanya was a transmigrant through Australia, who as a late teenager in 1989 joined her mother and stepfather briefly on their migration to Italy. They had moved, in her mother’s words, to ‘get away from Thatcher’.2 While her mother’s Italian sojourn lasted only two years, and for Tanya was cut short by university years in Sheffield and Stirling, both mother’s and daughter’s restlessness persisted. Her mother, Barbara Ingram-Monk, and stepfather, Graham, also moved to New Zealand in 2001, where, within two years, they were farming alpacas near Masterton. For Barbara the move to New Zealand, although demanding some difficult ‘emotional adjustments’, was deeply satisfying, but a return trip to England in 2006 prompted a different set of conflicting emotions about the country she had left: Yes just, just seeing it, you know, just seeing the lovely country, it’s one of those things, you’re sort of bittersweet, you’re very nostalgic for something

105

106  Migration from austerity to prosperity and when you see it you can’t bear it, it’s too emotional, too bittersweet, and you don’t want to be there but you do, and you miss it and, you miss it and hate it all in the same thing and it’s, oh, I found it quite emotional, yes, yes.

There is an immediacy to these conflicted reflections which reminds us that the experience for Tanya and Barbara was recalled less than a decade since their settlement in New Zealand. So compared to migrants from earlier decades their memories are likely to be relatively more vivid, still bound up with issues of early adaptation, identity and emotions of regret and celebration. And while it is a distinguishing feature of modern migrants to remain open to further mobility, these recent settlers, especially the more youthful generation, might more readily think of their migration journey as an incomplete one, one that might well continue. Any changes that did occur in British migrant mentalities after the 1980s must have owed something to the creeping effects of globalisation, but we know little about how globalisation has influenced individual identities and mentalities, among migrants and the population generally. Academic and media analysis of globalisation has focused overwhelmingly on the macro tendencies of geopolitics and economics: the hegemony of the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union from 1990, the breakdown of trade barriers, technological innovation in communications and transport, intensification of electronic media and the spread of consumerism.3 Few individuals can escape the influence of some of these tendencies, but our understanding of globalised mentalities among ordinary people remains limited. Changes in migrant practices and identities, not least in the way they tell their stories, might shed some light on how the changing world has impacted upon the wider population and migrants themselves. Changes in migrant stories are useful to keep in mind with the most recent migrants since 1990, but it is equally important to notice ways in which their accounts have much in common with those from the previous decades. Moreover, emerging tendencies like cosmopolitanism and ‘lifestyle’ migration ambitions are part of a longer continuity of patterns in modern migration which developed and intensified only very gradually; and in the ways they recall their longer pre-migration life histories, reaching back to their childhood, there is little to distinguish this more recent group from their predecessors. Social commentators, however, are increasingly critical of the ‘middle-aged’ generation, mainly discussed in this chapter, for what they interpret as their narcissism, or ‘epic sense of self’. One journalist, for example, described them as a generation ‘which threw off the notion of a higher authority than itself and was schooled in the art of self-expression rather than the acquisition of knowledge’. Social networking sites like

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  107 Facebook, which invite obsession with the self, are commonly blamed for enhancing this process.4 Such a view is not so obvious in most stories recollected here. All migrant stories, mostly provided on request from researchers, necessarily focus on the individual’s life history, expressed in a myriad of different ways, so it is no easy task to distinguish those of the 1990s and later from their predecessors. A greater focus on personal adventure, on lifestyle, on the consumption of international experience and transnational identities, compared to earlier emphases on work and family, might provide some clues, but the changes are subtle. The stories of Tanya and her mother provide useful insights into this process. Each came to find a new home in New Zealand, but after taking parallel though separate journeys, with distinct motivations. Their stories point us to different ways in which the profiles of two separate generations of British migrants were shifting by the late twentieth century. From the mid-1990s the dire economic pressures of the 1980s, which drove many Britons to leave the country permanently, became relatively less pressing. Yet from about 1992 the numbers again began to rise, peaking in 2004 at over 185,000, a level experienced only once (in 1982) since 1970.5 Similar push and pull motivations to those we saw in earlier decades continued to drive migration decisions, but the stories told by Tanya and Barbara and their contemporaries reflect broader patterns in British migration habits, especially among different age profiles. Tanya, aged 29 when she left for Australia in 2001, was among the majority cohort, above 40 per cent of the total; these were young early-career migrants aged between 25 and 44, whose proportion had increased slightly since the 1970s and peaked at about 58 per cent in 1997. But Barbara, aged 52 in 2001, was among those between 45 and 59 who had rarely constituted more than 10 per cent of migrants before 1997 and soared to about 25 per cent by 2004. The increase was in part influenced by new waves of ‘retirement migration’ to European countries like Spain, but it reflected more general willingness of middle-aged migrants to seek new lives in more traditional countries of British settlement.6 By this time the quest for transformations in ‘lifestyle’ quality was becoming more commonplace and a recurrent theme in migrants’ stories. Explanations for sharp increases in emigration outflows commonly stress broad economic factors; for the late twentieth century these relate particularly to economic prosperity rather than decline, low unemployment, rising house prices and a favourable exchange rate. But Barbara’s and Tanya’s stories suggest how less tangible motivations could drive migration decisions; they also illustrate ways in which women’s global thinking has influenced and articulated their migration practice. Both mother’s and daughter’s migration stories had been preceded by prior histories of mobility. Barbara’s life began as a virtual migrant, born in Auckland in 1948, the daughter of middle-class migrant parents from

108  Migration from austerity to prosperity Nottingham and Wimbledon, who had fled ‘the poverty and misery of postwar Britain’ in 1946. While Barbara and her sister had fond childhood memories of New Zealand’s ‘sub-tropical paradise’, their parents never adapted; her father, a mechanical engineer, missed cultural icons like the London Proms and Wimbledon, ‘was a lost figure in his tweed jackets and brogues’, and they fled back to England in 1955. From arrival Barbara’s identity became subject to the unpredictable fortunes of child migrants. Luton, where her father found work, became Barbara’s home for the next nine years, a comfortable return to the familiar for her parents, but a place of dismal frustration for Barbara, even after she ‘became a Lutonian kid … speaking Lutonian’. Possibly her memories of a carefree childhood in New Zealand continued to exercise a hold, heightened by negative memories of their gloomy arrival at St Pancras Station in December, where, ‘to my disgust [I] ate a plate of scrambled eggs made from dried eggs. I was six years old and had never experienced rationing or seriously cold weather.’ Barbara’s frustrations in Luton were aggravated by her father’s ‘very Victorian, very traditional’, relations with his children and the resulting tense family life; her story begins with a quest to break free from its influence, counterpointed with a rosy image of early childhood in New Zealand. More rebellious than her younger sister – ‘I just couldn’t get out fast enough … I was searching for something, and I didn’t know what it was, I knew there was a world out there’ – she left school and her family at the age of 16, finding her feet with a congenial commune of young people in ‘a magical place’ in Gloucestershire. There, for about three years, she combined a seemingly hippy life with work for an adventure holiday firm, camping, kayaking and sailing, ‘and I was really happy, and I suppose a lot of that was because I was in a similar environment to what I’d left behind in New Zealand’. There followed several years of movement in work and location, as an au pair, a graphic artist and a pub cook around southern England, and meeting and marrying her first husband while they worked for a Hertfordshire country inn in 1970. Tanya was born in 1971 from the short-lived marriage, soon followed by separation. For more than a decade Barbara threw herself into single motherhood, working as a graphic artist, as a bank teller and, returning to her adventure holiday passions, as a campsite cook which took her with Tanya in 1978 to a French site on the Mediterranean. Tanya recalled those carefree and mobile years of her childhood with pleasure, occasionally removed from school before the end of the school year. But parenthood and education demanded some degree of stability, and eventually Barbara settled in an apartment in Sevenoaks, Kent, as housekeeper in a private school, Tanya enjoyed the local school and Barbara’s social life thrived. By 1982 Barbara had met and was living with Graham, a Kent native on the threshold of a successful career in IT. Their marriage in 1984

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  109 preceded a dramatic rise in fortune and status on the heels of Graham’s achievement and, ‘very hardworking’, buying, renovating and selling houses. For 20 years up to their departure in 2001, Barbara recounted, ‘we went from being quite poor, went up the ladder, lived the whole yuppie bit, my husband’s work just went up in leaps and bounds’. The conspicuous affluence of themselves and their friends later became a key factor in Tanya’s disillusion with English life, but for Barbara and Graham it coexisted with distaste for the very political regime which sustained the boom in middle-class prosperity. Fed up with the politics of Thatcher’s Conservatives by 1989, they were open to any opportunity to join the ranks of those ‘Thatcher’s refugees’ we saw in the previous chapter. An invitation from a colleague who had settled in Italy for Graham to join him required little hesitation and their move to Padua followed promptly, evidently driven more by the push than the pull. ‘We just wanted to get away from England, and get away from Thatcher, and (laugh) we wanted to just go out, you know, go somewhere different. … We couldn’t stand the woman. And I mean it was that bad, you know, we just wanted to get away from her. … It could have been anywhere, yes.’ Their planning included an agreement to try the move for two years; ‘if we really loved it, if we learnt the language and were quite happy we’d stay’. Tanya joined them briefly but soon returned to England for her ‘gap year’ working full-time and doing voluntary work on an organic farm before going to Sheffield University. Life in Padua proceeded mostly as anticipated, with an attractive income and much to enjoy in the ancient, relatively small city. But entering into the social life of Italians was a different matter, and they experienced the familiar isolation and loneliness of foreign migrants who struggle to assimilate into an alien culture. Barbara thought this arose from the deeply family-orientated – and possibly small-town – inward culture of Italians; ‘they keep you at, at arm’s length, they stick to their little family groups, and you are an outsider. And they never invite you into their homes, … so it’s very difficult to actually feel a part of them.’ In Padua, too, there was little opportunity to compensate for their feeling of isolation by joining like-minded expatriates, an option available to other permanent settlers in close-knit British communities like the Spanish Costa del Sol.7 It seemed to be a fortuitous coincidence that after two years, when they were ready to declare their Italian venture at an end, the Thatcher regime, although not the Conservative government, also ended abruptly. Barbara recalls the moment in 1990 she heard the news on the radio, immediately phoning Graham, ‘I shrieked! And I phoned Graham at work and I said: “Never guess what, Thatcher’s gone, yes!” We can go back now.’ While Graham readily found lucrative work, the ‘very different England’ to which they returned was in deep recession and the days

110  Migration from austerity to prosperity of windfall profits from house renovations now replaced by plummeting property values. Their house in Kent, bought before leaving for Italy, they eventually sold in 1993 at a substantial loss, although they later bought a large house with seven bedrooms, where Barbara operated a bed and breakfast business until 2001. By 1997, comfortably prosperous again, Barbara developed a new sense of restlessness and a dawning realisation that ‘I had never felt British’. Her parents’ deaths became the catalyst for change of direction, as she and her sister combed through family souvenirs from the New Zealand venture and pondered their parents’ resolve never to return, or even to discuss the experience, despite leaving behind friends and distant relatives. A holiday in New Zealand followed, Barbara with Graham and Tanya in December, some months after her sister returned with glowing reports of the experience. After an exhaustive tour of both islands all three echoed the enthusiasm. For Barbara the country had changed dramatically. ‘It was no longer the cultural backwater; there was TV, the internet, the Auckland Harbour Bridge, Japanese cars, cappuccinos, bungee-jumping and a full cosmopolitan society. We all thought it the most beautiful country in the world and my sister and I knew we had to return to live.’ Graham shared Barbara’s enthusiasm, but insisted that his diminished earning prospects in New Zealand dictated caution, so he insisted on a five-year wait, ‘to work and get some serious money behind us before we go’. A slow planning process followed for a move in 2002 or 2003. This was eased by the surprise discovery that their New Zealand birth entitled Barbara and her sister, and by inheritance Tanya, to New Zealand passports and automatic citizenship, enabling both husbands to apply for less challenging spouse visas. The long wait began, but, with a tempting goal in sight, Barbara now became increasingly disenchanted with life in England. Now that they were living in Kent, close to the M25 motorway around London – ‘the orbital car-park’ – the traffic and population density magnified everything in England that had driven her New Zealand desires since the 1997 trip. For Graham, too, the daily motorway commute to Hemel Hempstead was stressful, but he remained intent on accumulating the nest egg. Barbara felt no corresponding restraint, and she recalls a jumble of frustrations, alongside the traffic, which intensified her desire to move. ‘It’s just everything about England, it was just getting worse on a yearly basis. … It was the traffic, the rudeness, … it was this lack of friendliness, it was the fear of, of crime, oh, just the weather, the weather for me was a big issue.’ Often these familiar antipathies, reflecting fears of social breakdown, are associated with racist judgements about immigrant minorities in Britain. Barbara insisted, unprompted, that this was no part of her frustration. Acutely conscious of common prejudices, which continued to

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  111 echo among some British immigrants in New Zealand, she spoke of the difference she perceived between public and private statements: People say it’s for the quality of life of New Zealand that they want to come here. When you speak to them, actually speak to them, do you know the first thing they say? It makes me feel very uncomfortable, but they always say: ‘Oh it’s this bloody immigration problem we’ve got in, in England, it’s all these immigrants’, they say, always. Now that wasn’t one of the reasons that we wanted to go, for me it was the traffic … just a nightmare.

By 2000 she had reached a point where she had ‘had enough with England, I mean I’d really, really had enough. … I can’t hold out five years’. For months difficult negotiations followed. One option was for Barbara to go first and wait for Graham; another, his suggestion, was a temporary move to less populated regions of Devon or Cornwall, despite the extensive commuting still involved. And then a new catalyst changed the prospects dramatically. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 struck Barbara with fear and both of them saw New Zealand as a comparative refuge from threats seemingly focused on the northern hemisphere. ‘That awful day made me feel vulnerable and unsafe. With my sister almost on her way across to the safe side of the world I wanted to escape too.’ Barbara was not alone among migrants affected powerfully by the New York terrorist attacks, to the point of being ‘close to having a nervous breakdown’. Her instinct was to escape to apparent relative safety. Others, at later stages of their migration, could feel trapped and cut off from families left behind.8 As a driving force it had much in common with earlier episodes, like the Cold War nuclear threat and the Suez crisis of 1956, which swelled the numbers of migrants’ applications.9 In 2001 the notion of any ‘flight to safety’ in the southern hemisphere was indeed relative, as later terrorist attacks in Bali in 2002 and 2003 demonstrated. But perceptions can be far more potent in shaping decisions already more grounded in emotion than rational calculation. For Barbara and Graham the event sped up a decision previously in train and put an end to canvassing of temporary expedients. Barbara later felt it was a cruel irony that, during a return trip in 2006, their August flight from London to New York was one of ten targeted by terrorists to be blown up over the Atlantic. It became the ‘nail in the coffin’ for any thoughts of return to the northern hemisphere. Within two weeks of 11 September the New Zealand project moved at a frenetic pace, and a planned holiday there in December now shaped as a permanent move. A property advertisement in the Sunday Times seized Barbara’s and Graham’s imagination. It was a huge house on 25 acres at Blairlogie, near Masterton and north of Wellington, ideal for the kind of ‘homestay’ bed and breakfast project Barbara hoped to manage.

112  Migration from austerity to prosperity But, significantly, it was isolated from life in Wellington. On the same night, after a late dinner with friends, who urged them on, and ‘lots of wine’, Barbara ‘phoned these people at one o’clock in the morning’. The owners promptly accepted the offer, ‘sight unseen’, with a deposit, and by mid-December they were in New Zealand, inspecting the house and finalising the purchase. In the short term the Blairlogie venture became all that Barbara desired. She found the serenity she longed for away from the M25, and Tanya joined them for a time, interrupting a sojourn in Australia. Graham returned to England to work out three months’ notice, and Barbara returned briefly in April 2002 to prepare the house for sale. But then, after substantial renovations, the homestay enterprise flourished, albeit with modest financial returns. Graham, ‘always adaptable’, revelled in the radically new life, first working with the sheep that came with the property and later starting an alpaca farming business; ‘he loved being at Blairlogie, he learned to be a farmer, he had never done anything like that in his life’. Barbara’s adjustment was less straightforward. While she found much of what she was seeking, and was welcomed by friendly New Zealanders, she confessed that she ‘actually found it harder to settle than he did’. The homestay business, for all its pleasures, was relentless in its demands, ‘the whole place was bigger than both of us. … We made a success of it, but in the end I just couldn’t cope.’ Ironically, too, the very attraction, a small-scale population compared to high-density pressure in England, became a source of culture shock. ‘It was a really extreme situation we went from, this fully populated, sophisticated, South England

8  Barbara Ingram-Monk’s husband, Graham, at Blairlogie, New Zealand feeding alpacas, March 2003

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  113

9  Barbara Ingram-Monk at Blairlogie, New Zealand, painting house, April 2003

10  Barbara Ingram-Monk at Kina, near Nelson, New Zealand, with alpacas, December 2004

114  Migration from austerity to prosperity life, with shops down the road and we went to the back of beyond in New Zealand, so it was a big, big culture shock.’ Alongside her isolation, in a classic drive for a seachange experience, Barbara came to recognise that a key to her New Zealand yearning, an echo of childhood memories, had been a desire to be close to the sea, a glaring absence from the landlocked Blairlogie landscape: Both of us had always hankered after a view that was both mountains and water, and because my childhood was in Auckland I was always in view of water, and I said: ‘I want this, I have this image inside my head of a sort of subtropical – on water and mountains and that’s what I want’, and that’s what we went in search for.

The Blairlogie adventure lasted for about 18 months, but it cemented their quest for a site that would feed their ongoing hunger for a transformation in lifestyle and setting. Glowing reports from friends of the north coast of the South Island around Nelson directed their search, and again a spontaneous decision soon followed after two weekends of inspections. A small farm to support the alpaca enterprise was one condition, but beyond that their goals were dominated by those lifestyle considerations never far from Barbara’s thinking. We decided that there was one we liked very much, because we were looking for a lifestyle property, with acres of land so we could take the alpacas, … but we were thinking about growing flowers as well, as a business, and we wanted to do a bit of homestay and a bit of flower growing and a bit of alpacas and a bit of this, bit of that, so we were looking for a lifestyle property. … We found one, … and so we put Blairlogie on the market, and that was sold within six weeks.

The four-hectare ‘lifestyle’ block, with sea inlet and mountain views, supported their alpacas and a few sheep and cattle, and a ‘sleepout’ brought in a few paying holiday guests, on a lesser scale than the former homestay. Plantings of an olive grove and fruit and nut trees completed the lifestyle picture, supplemented by Graham’s income from part-time computer programming, all of which yielded a modest income. This was a huge contrast to their former affluent living in England, all traded for the elusive lifestyle goal, which, by 2006, they considered won. ‘We’ll take the future as it comes, but for now it’s much more than okay.’ Whether through choice or necessity, migrants have often combined their shift of country with radical changes in occupation and way of life. But the ‘treechange’ and ‘seachange’ experiences described here, embodying a move from urban to rural pursuits without preparatory background, were very much a product of the later twentieth century.

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  115 For some sociologists the notion of lifestyle choice has become particularly significant in modern social life, crucial to ‘the constitution of self identity and daily activity’ in a world of conflicting alternatives.10 Barbara’s struggles to adjust were magnified by her need to adapt not just to migration but, simultaneously, to her much-desired ‘lifestyle’ revolution. Lingering memories of her New Zealand childhood played a part in her determination to persist, even though she admits that 45 years in England left its mark on her, particularly in her attachment to the English countryside and British culture and history. Pulling in the opposing direction, her alienation from the political culture, which prompted her flight from Thatcher’s Britain in 1989, nourished an enduring hostility to the country left behind. Discussing her identity she returned routinely to an abiding ‘bad Britain’ image, a view encountered more commonly among expatriate British migrants in Spain than in New Zealand, Australia and Canada.11 Referring, for example, to her distaste for expatriate organisations, which celebrate the homeland, she gave them short shrift: I would avoid them like the plague anyway, because I haven’t come here to be English. … I think English people and also, yes European, particularly English people who come out now, come out not to be a part of a little ex-pat community … it’s not like that, people come here because they want to get away from England.

The anti-English mindset was balanced by an increasing sense of belonging to New Zealand – ‘I’m a Kiwi’ – which sat comfortably with the importance she placed on her birthplace and childhood. But, conscious of her mobile background, Barbara admitted that further movements remained possible if not likely. ‘We’re the kind of people who like to move on, we get bored easily, which is why we’ve made so many changes in our lives.’ Here, more than Britain, and recalling her two years in Italy, the pull of Europe’s culture and diversity exercised a continuing influence. ‘In fact I still miss it. … I miss Europe but I don’t miss England.’ Barbara’s daughter, Tanya, enjoyed a quite different migration journey to her mother’s, but arrived in a similar place, particularly in the sense of belonging she expressed in the passage at the opening of this chapter. Her migration, like Barbara’s, stemmed from deep disillusion with England, but paradoxically the disillusion had its origins in the very values and goals her mother had struggled to attain in her years before migration. Her written description of her departure for Australia in 2001, ‘bidding a teary farewell to my parents’, captures both her hunger for adventure and a quest for a new life outside an England which no longer appealed: I was 29 then. Your thirties are the best decade for a woman, I’d been told, and I was determined to make it so. My life in London had always felt

116  Migration from austerity to prosperity temporary; I wanted to find a place I wouldn’t constantly feel like I wanted to leave. I was bored with work, bored with society, bored with the aspirations of middle England that are so unimaginative: get a good education, go to university, get a ‘proper job’ in a recognised profession, buy a house, get married, have kids, drive a Volvo, retire at 60, play golf, die. I’d got as far as the ‘buy a house’ part, realised I was turning into my parents and ran away screaming.12

Tanya’s generational revolt against middle-class values was not uncommon in the 1980s and 1990s, by no means new, but it might sit uneasily as a motivation for migration more often associated with status improvement and realisation of the very values which drove her away. She associated the emptiness of the middle-class ideal with the worst of England; ‘it was just the whole middle-class thing I found very bland and superficial and I didn’t like that at all, I didn’t feel that I really wanted to be part of that’. With those sentiments, the convenience of a New Zealand passport granting free entry to Australia and financial backing from the sale of her London flat, she left on a one-way ticket. She had no clear plan beyond Outback travel, possibly Australian settlement and a New Zealand holiday. The future was an ‘open book’, with ‘a definite view that I might not come back’. Tanya’s Australian adventure provided an opportunity to evaluate possibilities for permanent settlement while indulging strong interests she could never pursue based in London. These had an ecological accent, leading to voluntary work in Arnhem Land with Conservation Volunteers Australia, sojourns in the Daintree rainforest, and diving in the Great Barrier Reef. After celebrating her thirtieth birthday at Ayers Rock I would eat kangaroo steaks, jump out of an aeroplane, discover the rainforest, and make my acquaintance with the Outback I’d fallen in love with after watching Mad Max. … Covering almost the entire country, I experienced the life I’d been craving since I was a teenager – traveller, writer, wearer of an Akubra hat. Australia presented a real possibility for finding a place to live and call my home. My New Zealand passport granted me automatic residency.

After about ten months Tanya considered her settlement options. Sydney was a real prospect but recalled too much of her past; it ‘reminded me too much of London and I knew I’d grow to hate it’. Briefly she pondered the prospect of running an internet café in Byron Bay on the northern New South Wales coast, a haven of alternative lifestyles, but soon judged that it was ‘a dream that seemed more real than it was’. This soon became her verdict on her entire Australian project as she sought a

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  117 permanent home. ‘After ten months I’d made up my mind that Australia wasn’t the place for me. It was hard to put my finger on why. I’d had the time of my life there and met wonderful people, but it didn’t feel like a home, a place to put down roots.’ New Zealand, the obvious alternative, beckoned. She had loved her earlier holiday there, and her mother’s plans for a 2001 holiday, as we saw, had morphed dramatically into permanent migration. So her Christmas visit extended to several months, with a base on the Blairlogie property, where she wrote about her Australian travels. Before deciding she returned to London for six months in 2002, partly to earn some money with her old employer, the BBC, partly to see friends, and partly to reassure herself that leaving would be right. A booked trip to Mozambique kept her to a firm commitment not to stay on beyond the planned six months. In the event she satisfied all her aims. London ‘was much the same, though more bearable for knowing I’d be leaving before the onset of another dismal English winter. Like a migrating tern, I flew south again.’ With her parents now settled across Cook Strait near Nelson, Tanya decided to ‘give Wellington a try’. She had earlier been tempted by its harbour and hills, its compact size and wind-blown air, a tonic for her persistent cough. As the capital it promised access to art and culture and to government employment as a writer and editor. Again her plans fell into place seamlessly. Within two years she was thriving at work, had bought a house and was thoroughly engaged with Wellington social life. She was acutely conscious of the obvious irony this posed alongside the ideological distaste for middle-class values which spurred her migration: I’m apparently living the English middle-class ideal again. I own a house in a fashionable suburb of the capital city of a First World nation. I have a cat from the SPCA. I play softball every summer and dabble in amateur theatre. I work in the same profession I did in the UK, now for a government department where I’m considering joining the pension scheme. I should hate myself for this lack of progression, of innovation, of doing something different with my life. But I don’t. I’m happy in a way I never was in England.

Tanya’s explanation for the difference rested on the material benefits of a smaller-scale society compared to London: a ‘world class city’ with ‘small town connections’ giving her the best of both worlds, a brief, pleasant journey to work on her motorbike compared to overcrowded Tube travel, a low-cost house and garden with open views and beach access. This compared to her London flat’s view of ‘a graffiti-ridden park with a few tired plane trees, and the edge of a vast estate of council flats full of heavy hearts and light fingers’. Even her friends had changed, affording the benefits of a light cosmopolitanism: ‘Samoan, Tongan, Niuean,

118  Migration from austerity to prosperity Māori, Canadian, Chinese, Iraqi, Irish, English, American, Australian and other shades of the ethnic rainbow. My British friends were almost without exception white. Now I enjoy a cultural richness in my everyday life that adds a critical third dimension to my English middle-class upbringing,’ Tanya echoes the sentiments of the permanent, well-adjusted migrant rather than the serially unsettled nomad. Comfortable closeness to her mother across the Strait enabled regular communication and contact, with congenial visits three or four times a year. Yet, as with her mother, her thoughts about the future still encompassed the possibility of further migration; acknowledging the power of her attachment to Wellington, she was ‘still open to further moves, probably less so than I used to be’. Consistently, she gave short shrift to national belonging – ‘I’m a citizen of both countries and a native of neither, but it doesn’t matter to me at all’ – while being devoted to the local. Apart from an interest in British history, her birthplace held no strong attraction, she had ‘never felt particularly English’, never experienced homesickness. For explanation she looked to her mobile past: ‘I’ve spent most of my life on the move, so I’ve never been particularly settled anywhere, so I don’t feel any yearning to be anywhere.’ The quest for a transformation in lifestyle, which was so important to Barbara, played little explicit part in Tanya’s thoughts of migration, yet ultimately it was the change in lifestyle afforded by Wellington which captured her local loyalty. In other respects the stark differences between these two generations of migrants were overshadowed by the similarities. Both had mobile and unstable years of growing up, both were driven powerfully by ideological distastes as well as material discomforts and both professed a cosmopolitan outlook which was beginning to characterise British migrants of the late twentieth century. And while Barbara experienced some emotional conflict during a return to Britain, and was susceptible to homesickness, neither ultimately entertained strong British loyalties. These had been eclipsed by an amalgam of global outlooks and local loyalties which transcended generations, shifting markers of British migrant identities at the end of the century. Global citizens In 1993 Adam Salt, a single 27-year-old from a Staffordshire village, arrived in Brunei on a two-year contract to teach English as a foreign language. Adam, from a middle-class background – his father was a teacher – was one of the many beneficiaries of free postwar tertiary education; in the mid-1980s at Manchester University he enjoyed studying physiology and then a teaching diploma. Teaching employment followed promptly,

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  119 as did European travel, and he witnessed the exciting afterglow of the East European revolutions. After that, he recalled, ‘I was just ready to see more’. Any destination with teaching work would have satisfied him, the more exotic the better, and he flirted with prospects in Jordan and Syria. But the question was settled fortuitously with a timely advertisement for the teaching position in Brunei.13 Adam’s desires echoed very familiar motivations of young, single ‘sojourner migrants’ in the postwar decades: adventure, the exotic, even a lucrative working holiday, in effect travel as consumerism. And temporary contracts for expatriate work around the world were becoming increasingly attractive as a vehicle for fulfilling wider goals, often, as in Adam’s case, a stepping-stone for further travel and migration. We encountered Adam briefly in the previous chapter when his coming of age in the 1980s was coloured powerfully by the ideological spur of Thatcher’s refugees; ‘my reaction was to get out, … I just didn’t see that there was any particular way back for Britain by that point.’ Indeed, he described the re-election of the Conservatives under John Major in 1992 as the ‘final straw’, which drove him to leave. On the day of the election he was pondering the Brunei job offer and was affected by the sight of young, vulnerable beggars and prostitutes on Manchester streets. ‘By the time I got home I knew I couldn’t stay in Britain any more. These social problems had been exacerbated by Conservative policies and there was going to be five more years of it. … I firmly decided to accept [the Brunei job] and go.’ Travel and adventure, Adam’s underlying motivations, were facilitated by well-paid expatriate employment, but the immediate spark for leaving was ideological and political. Adam’s Brunei sojourn extended from two to five years as events, he admitted, ‘sort of guided me’. The experience induced strong feelings about expatriate life and a lifelong distaste for the bad habits of British expatriates. While Brunei was ‘a very easy place to live’ it was emphatically not something he considered to be a migration experience. He arrived with about 35 other teachers, all on two-year contracts, and most made shared living arrangements and employed an ‘amah’ (housemaid) at cheap rates. It was quiet, peaceful and safe, but artificial. ‘You didn’t have much to do with the locals; your life was in this expat goldfish bowl.’ While he had ample time for recreation, and enjoyed yachting, scuba diving and amateur dramatics, the expat circle was less congenial. It was dominated by rootless ‘desperadoes’ of all ages, ‘buccaneering around from one place to the other, from one contract to the next’; many were addicted to heavy drinking, the males often full of talk about their ‘girlfriends over the border in Malaysia, their prostitutes basically’. The frequency of ‘moving on’ made it difficult to make friends, and the experience left Adam with a profound distaste for expat life. He recalled reading Olivia Manning’s two fictional trilogies about the expat life of

120  Migration from austerity to prosperity British Council ‘weirdoes’ in Europe during the Second World War; after six months ‘I knew exactly what she was talking about’.14 Adam’s cynicism about his colleagues might have spurred him to leave at the first opportunity, but one of the ‘events’ which guided him in a different direction was meeting Denise, an Australian, who arrived at the same time on an identical contract. At the end of their contracts they travelled to England, where they married, but then returned on 12-month contracts, renewed annually until the end of 1997. Neither had strong views about where to go next, but settled on a temporary move to Denise’s home town of Melbourne. They had ‘no real plans’, and Denise, rather than Adam, hoped that they might return to England indefinitely after a few months. But again events overtook them when Denise’s father became ill, dictating a longer stay. Eight years later they were comfortably settled in a Melbourne beachside suburb; Adam found congenial primary teaching and Denise was a librarian. Their further migration plans remained on hold apart from frequent visits to England. So in mid-career, with no children so far, other destinations, like America, and England again, still beckoned, but were hedged about with the temptations of comfortable settlement; ‘we still talk about those things – at the moment we have jobs that we quite like, so that’s what’s keeping us here and we know we have a lifestyle that we like at the moment’. But even with the onset of middle age further migration remained a strong possibility for us. I call it getting itchy feet and both of us suffer from it. We joke that when it hits us at the same time we will go. Teaching is an in-demand profession around the world and I can see a time when we will go. I would not rule out a return to the UK. … There are places in the world I would like to go and experience, and having done it twice now I know how easy it is to do it.

Adam’s casual linking of his mobile teaching profession with a desire to continue his migration gives a clue to the ways he thought of his identity as a global one, but without overstating its wider significance. His experience had brought him to think of himself as a ‘citizen of the world’, likening himself to the itinerant workers of past centuries plying their labour across borders. ‘I read once you know, somebody said we live in the age of the genuine teacher, that idea that you’re able to go from place to place to place, [like] I suppose even medieval stone masons used to do … carrying your tools on your back, you know.’ But this was not without its contradictions. His celebration of the virtues of the cosmopolitan teacher coexisted with a profound cynicism about national loyalties and the evils of patriotism; ‘that sort of flag-waving, stuff really does give me the irrits’. Local loyalties were different. During holiday travels he was always pleased to get ‘home’ to Melbourne, but then, still identifying primarily

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  121 as British, ‘I still call Britain home’. And his experience of expatriate life left him with a deep suspicion of the supposed personal benefits of global mobility. ‘It doesn’t guarantee wisdom in the slightest and it gives you, as far as I can see, it gives you a very warped view of the world. … So I don’t see travel as in any way giving you some sort of deep insight into the world or giving you, you know, superiority.’ Adam’s youthful sojourning of the early 1990s, driven by a quest for adventure and cultural experience, and sharpened by political convictions, had evolved into relatively relaxed and comfortable settlement in Melbourne. At the same time, his identity as a global citizen, suspicious of patriotism and open to further migration, had also evolved into a casually held set of values, mediated by scepticism about the wider virtues of international travel. In effect it was an expression of light cosmopolitanism, an attachment to global over national values but without exaggerating its political significance, or sacrificing local loyalties. It was a more measured stance, symptomatic of the evolution of migrant attitudes at the end of the twentieth century.15 While measured, Adam’s cosmopolitanism drew on a lifetime of sophisticated political consciousness, which was probably outside the norm for most British migrants. More common were various degrees of political indifference, in a few cases outright apathy, which still coexisted with deeper reflection on the impact of migration on their identity. This, paradoxically, could still have political or ideological implications. Andrew Mackie was firm about his enduring political detachment in both Britain and Australia, and his preoccupation with ‘independence’, which he hoped would free him from the routine frustrations of modern urban life. Leaving with his wife, Nicky, for Melbourne in 1992, he admitted to memories of conservative sympathies and support for Margaret Thatcher’s anti-union policies. But then he happily acknowledged some confusion about any political motivation he might have had for leaving. Thinking they had left at the end of Conservative rule, he recalled entertaining some anxiety about prospects of a British future under Labour. But, reminded that Britain in 1992 then had five further years of Conservative rule under John Major, he light-heartedly put this down to his apolitical thinking. ‘Yes, yes, I’m demonstrating how concerned that I am with politics. (laugh) … Yes, yes, oh well, you can fool yourself, can’t you? Obviously, and politics had nothing to do with me coming out here.’16 Andrew came to his migration after a mobile and unorthodox middleclass background. Andrew was born in 1962 in Surrey; his parents were musicians, his father a conductor and his mother a cellist, so they were often away from home. He was seven when his father died. His mother, with two sons to support, sacrificed a promising musical career for more steady and lucrative work as an Alexander technique teacher (a system

122  Migration from austerity to prosperity promoting body posture co-ordination for general health) and moved frequently to maximise her income, particularly between Edinburgh and London; later Andrew would move to Chelmsford and Northampton for work. He developed an enduring distaste for Edinburgh, particularly the cold, and his school memories there, dominated by loneliness and bullying, were entirely negative. But in what was to become another enduring influence, in Edinburgh his mother pushed him to learn sailing in dinghies on the Firth of Forth – ‘one minute’s survival time in the winter’! A welcome break came at 14 when, with the aid of some family money, his mother sent him, alone, to visit relatives in British Columbia. There he indulged the camping and outdoors activities he had never enjoyed with his father, and which would later dominate much of his life. The spectacular coast and Vancouver Island offered ‘what I always dreamed about, having this access to the natural world in Canada that everybody seemed to have’. With little interest or talent in his parents’ musical profession, Andrew pursued a long boyhood interest in electronics and studied electronic engineering at the City of London University, still living with his mother. Promising employment followed, then a close relationship with Nicky, a palliative care nurse, and by 1984 they were living together comfortably in Northampton. But before long, inspired by reports from friends of a better place than Britain to live, they began to discuss migration possibilities. This was a slow process, with mutual enjoyment of their current jobs restraining hasty decisions. In the meantime they pursued shared passions for the outdoors, for camping and exploring English rivers in their dinghy. This was where Andrew encountered his first disillusion with life in England, finding numerous pathways on water and land blocked by private owners, with stone throwing and threats of shooting quickly sapping their enthusiasm. The experience reinforced Andrew’s belief, despite his comfortable background, that the English class system was inherently evil, and seems to have sustained his enduring restlessness. Their shared passion for adventure could be pursued elsewhere, and they joined another couple in boating explorations in New Caledonia and Venezuela, a highlight being a trip to the Angel Falls. With both of them now intrepid adventurers, the attractions of migration intensified, but prudence dictated that they combine a careful interlude of investigation with further travel and adventure. Two brief trips to Canada and Australia followed. Nicky had relatives in Ontario, enabling a summer holiday in the Guelph area, and their initial responses, abetted by family persuasion and Andrew’s memories of his British Columbia sojourn, were positive. But anxieties about freezing cold winters were a strong deterrent, and Andrew recalls a deeper reason working against Canada, one not normally encountered in migrants’ calculations of prospective destinations:

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  123 The other thing was their work ethic, you know, they seemed to have picked up on what America do, when you join a company you’re lucky in your first year to get two weeks’ holiday. … [This] has always confused me, why does everybody work so hard? … How long do we have to work to provide the necessary, and the rest should be spent doing other things? Yes, so there’s that element in my character! (laugh)

This was far removed from the self-improvement ethos common to generations of migrants around the world, and while not explicitly political it does carry a potent ideological message. It also provides some clues to the shifting range of impulses driving migrant journeys by the end of the twentieth century. For Andrew and Nicky it would intensify in their future life in Australia. Canada was now eliminated, so Australia seemed a certainty, but, with Andrew’s mother temporarily resident in Melbourne and offering free accommodation, they persisted with their short inspection trip. ‘Our minds had pretty well been made up, we just sort of: “Better have a look just in case”.’ Arriving in Sydney, they promptly bought a campervan, enjoyed an intense camping tour of Victoria, visited Melbourne and promptly confirmed their Australian plan. Andrew’s occupation, listed by the government as an area of skills shortage, together with Nicky’s nursing, facilitated a relatively easy bureaucratic process, which confirmed Andrew’s sense of the mobile quality of his training. ‘I considered the world my oyster, you know, I mean an electronic engineer, and I’m never going to be short of work, but … I can pick wherever I want in the world to live, so that’s effectively what we did.’ By 1992, back in Melbourne, Andrew’s rosy work prospects initially were dashed; job demand had been exaggerated and the Institute of Engineers proved to be obstructive and unhelpful. But within a year both were working, earning well and saving while they lived rent-free with his mother until she returned to England. Then their accommodation decision took a radical turn, far removed from the conventional options for house or apartment living. Still fired by a desire for outdoor life, they bought a yacht large enough to live in and berthed it locally, convenient for short commuting to work and the city. In fact they acquired the yacht through a ‘swap’ with a Jaguar car they had intentionally bought and shipped out, realising a decent profit. The yacht proved to be home for eight years, and in time its functions expanded. Initially it was essentially ‘somewhere to live’. Indeed, in 1995 Nicky gave birth to their first child and after some 12 hours in hospital she returned to the yacht with the baby, ‘down the steps on South Wharf, a ten-foot vertical ladder, on to the boat. And they sent out the child maternity nurse every so often.’ Gradually, what had begun as a cheap and pleasant way to live expanded into a more adventurous way of life.

124  Migration from austerity to prosperity After a few trips around Port Philip Bay, Andrew recalls thinking: ‘Oh well, let’s do something a bit more adventurous, this boat can go round the world, let’s see what we can do with it.’ Cheap living on board enabled them to save rapidly, and Andrew arranged with a congenial employer to adjust his contract to six months in twelve, leaving six months for cruising. It was a pattern following the text of his life philosophy almost to the letter. After shorter trips to develop their seagoing and navigation capacities they sailed to Cairns in north Queensland, and their taste for the life deepened. Apart from the joys of sailing it was economical, and they enjoyed an ever-expanding network of friends among the cruising fraternity around the coast. It was not all rosy, with occasional seasickness, cold and windy conditions to endure, but the attraction simply grew. ‘Once you’ve done it, yes, you’d never go back, honestly. … I reckon that it would be in anybody’s blood, you pick a man out of the street, stick him on a boat, send him cruising for a year, and he realises you can live like this, he’d do it for the rest of his life.’ By 2000 they had traded up to a larger boat, and savings enabled them to buy a house in Bundoora, a Melbourne suburb. Initially, at least, they continued to live on the boat, but after another cruise north they berthed it on the Gold Coast in Queensland, their new cruising outlet, while using the house in Melbourne as a stable base for children and work. A second child in 2005 failed to inhibit continued cruising. Between jobs Andrew decided to enrol, first for a Master’s degree and then for a PhD programme, with a scholarship, in engineering at La Trobe University in Melbourne. This accommodated flexible time for both occasional contract work as well as sailing; ‘that’s one of the things doing a PhD, you take a few months off here and there, and nobody misses you!’ At the time of the interview in 2007 they were planning the next cruise to Vanuatu. Even with the demands of children they had no intention to make radical changes to their established pattern, which included two journeys to New Caledonia. The eldest daughter, who enjoyed periods of distance education while cruising, had taken to sailing effortlessly, and at age 12, Andrew considered, was ‘up for standing a night-watch soon’. Longer-term ambitions remained focused on a seamless transition to retirement at sea. ‘The beauty of it is, apart from it being fun and everything, you need hardly any money, so, if you’re planning to retire on a boat, you can afford to have a patchy career, or, at least not work, you know, like most people do, at the grindstone … five days a week.’ For migrants and others this is a rare lifestyle choice, especially with young families. Andrew admitted that the original motivation stemmed from his own passion for outdoors, that Nicky ‘sort of follows along with me’, but that over time ‘we’ve discovered together it’s a wonderful thing to do’. Sailing, along with the flexible work patterns that accommodated it, was an obvious pathway for realising Andrew’s highly valued

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  125 independence, and migration to Australia, he was certain, had made it all possible. ‘I don’t think we would have been able to afford to do it in England because you can’t keep your boat anywhere.’ Moreover, the independence theme in his identity was bound up with his ideas on citizenship, patriotism and belonging. Within days of becoming eligible for Australian citizenship he and Nicky applied for it for quite pragmatic reasons; ‘we strongly wanted to be citizens of the country, so we could never get chucked out!’ Recalling earlier patriotic sentiments in England when he had been willing to fight ‘for a reasonable cause’ like the Second World War, he added a qualification: ‘but really I consider myself a citizen of the world above a British, person. Why wouldn’t you?’ This seems not to have been simply a product of his migration. ‘I think that patriotism is really pretty bad, it causes a lot of trouble, and I think I thought of myself, as a citizen of the world, before … living in England, even before I thought about emigrating, yes.’ Andrew’s version of global citizenship differs markedly from the more politically charged versions we saw earlier, but, while the cruising lifestyle is a rarity, his understated form of apolitical cosmopolitanism perhaps became more common among British migrants by the end of the twentieth century. Cosmopolitanism and global citizenship identities, of course, are not an inevitable outcome of frequent mobility, and serial migration has not always sprung from global consciousness. While there was a pronounced surge in declarations of cosmopolitanism and global citizenship in later decades of the century, setting in markedly from the 1980s, intense mobility could still be uninfluenced by these more modern identities. Jan Kerr from Glasgow, who insisted that ‘some of us Scots are definitely born with the wanderlust in us’, moved from Glasgow to London after school, then, at 22, on to Melbourne in 1966 where she married and had children, returned to Glasgow in 1975 to a sick mother, emigrated again in 1976 to Hamilton, Canada, returned to Australia in 1983 for a family working holiday for 13 months and finally settled back in Hamilton. Yet Jan’s attitude to her intense serial migration could not have been more casual. Happily settled in Hamilton, but with an openness to further travel, she had no time for patriotism or national pride in any of her countries of residence, and when pressed about her identity she resisted any national or even global label, stressing rather that ‘my identity is wife, mother, grandmother’.17 Jan’s attitude is a reminder of the ambiguities we face in trying to discern shifting mentalities from migrant testimony, and that, alongside the striking emergence of global identities and waning national commitments, many migrants, primarily committed to family, remained unaffected by either side of the issue. ‘Reluctant migrants’ have been a highly visible presence in the migration stories of family groups. In the late twentieth century these became particularly well known among the ‘trailing spouses’, invariably wives, of

126  Migration from austerity to prosperity expatriate professional and managerial workers. Their travel has rarely been self-motivated; as ‘expatriate wives’ they often lacked their own friendship networks and suffered isolation during long periods of separation from hard-working husbands, conditions which dated back to the earlier twentieth century.18 When Caroline Streeter married in 1982 she had an intransigent conviction that travel was not to be part of the arrangement. Born in 1960 in Surrey, she had been used to her father’s absence on business. He worked for Pan American Airways as a project finance manager and moved in expatriate circles. She attributed her parents’ separation, when she was 12, to the pressures of his travel. For her this meant frequent travel for paternal visits, which she came to take for granted. ‘When my parents split I think he was living in Berlin, so I used to go to the airport on a Friday after school with my passport and go off and spend the weekends with him, so I suppose I did an awful lot of travelling as a child.’ Cities from Europe to West Africa were ‘great fun to go and visit’ but ultimately prejudiced her against travelling as an adult. ‘When I saw the kind of expatriate life he lived, that didn’t appeal to me at all, I didn’t like it. … It did very much prejudice me against travelling, as an adult, and I was absolutely determined that I didn’t want to live overseas! (laugh).;19 Caroline’s determination was slow to soften, only under the pressure of long experience. A degree from Reading University led to a promising banking career in London. Soon after marriage to Christopher in 1982, his job changes in marketing dictated several moves in England, but within commuting distance of London. In 1991 both moved to better jobs; Caroline became a head office manager and Chris joined a multinational company. Soon after Caroline began, Chris phoned her at work: ‘“Guess what, the company are posting me to South Africa.” … I was singularly unimpressed.’ Quickly it emerged that he had no alternative short of resignation; the company presented it as a splendid opportunity, with expanding prospects. But Caroline was adamant, refusing to leave her new job. ‘I wanted to give mine some time.’ After long discussion they agreed that Chris would initially go alone, with an assumption that Caroline would join him after an unspecified period. I suppose in a way I was very much digging my heels in. … I only saw him, once in that time I think, for a weekend, when he came to the UK. I quite liked it, it was quite nice being single again actually (laugh) … there were quite a lot of things that appealed about it.

It seemed that each was waiting for the other to break the impasse. Caroline recalls: ‘After six months, I think it was a bit of a stand-off, he cracked and said: “Oh, this is ridiculous, I’ll come home then”, at which point I said: (with mock-resignation) “Tch, oh all right!” (laughter) “I’ll come!”’

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  127 By late 1991 Caroline was in Johannesburg, and at first all her worst fears were realised, as she lost the status and stimulation she had enjoyed in her position in the bank. Her grievances and anxieties offered a textbook illustration of how not to treat expatriate wives. I was very heavy of heart, very, very much, as I said I think this life of my father’s that I’d seen, very much mixing with the ‘Embassy crowd’, gin and tonics at five, lots of alcohol, lots of parties, not me at all, had definitely coloured my vision about what kind of life I was going to be expected to lead. I wasn’t the most outgoing of people and quite introverted, and I was, I suppose troubled about how I was going to make a new life for myself. I didn’t feel the company really paid any heed to me, they hadn’t thought about me, or my role, there was no spouse assistance at all. I was just extra baggage, and of course we got there and he was expected to go straight into work as soon as I arrived and there I was left in a huge house with a flash car, flash house, maid and a gardener thinking: ‘What on earth do I do now?’ It was probably the hardest year of my life, I think it took me a year to settle, and then I got into work.

Eventually the ‘hardest year’ gave way to the characteristic kind of adjustment experienced by so many reluctant migrants, as Caroline warmed to the climate and lifestyle, made good friends and enjoyed stunning travels, including safaris, with Chris across southern Africa. She immersed herself in South African history, and watched with fascination, and some apprehension, the politics of transition to majority rule. A more relaxed lifestyle enabled her to shake off her long aversion to travel, ‘because I realised that it was up to me, … well I wasn’t going to be part of the Embassy set like my father was, so once I realised that I wasn’t going to have to put a cocktail dress on every weekend and drink gin and tonics on the dot of six, yes (laughter), I came round’. Anxieties remained, particularly around safety, with hijackings and assaults common among their acquaintances. In later years, after they had had children, that became the central reason for not taking up the option of another South African job offer. Still, when Chris was transferred in 1993, this time to Brussels, she was ‘devastated’, leaving the ‘astounding lifestyle’ far too soon. ‘There’s no pleasing me by then! … I knew we would have to go at some stage but I was hoping we might get three, four, five years out of it. So yes I was very disappointed.’ Caroline was pregnant with her first baby when they arrived in Brussels, so she could expect big changes, but her life there could not have been more different. Simple taken-for granted activities like the freedom to move around alone without danger, even for shopping, and going cycling, became new luxuries. But the major difference was the large and welcoming expatriate network ready to provide a smooth

128  Migration from austerity to prosperity i­ntroduction and ensure that the isolation she suffered during her first year in South Africa would not recur. With an expatriate population of some 30 per cent of over a million in metropolitan Brussels the opportunities for social contacts were ubiquitous. She promptly discovered ‘networks, clubs, all kinds of systems, run by expats, to draw you in as soon as you get there, look after you’. Socially ‘it was just a piece of cake’, she was welcomed ‘with open arms. I found strangers all around who were willing to share their experiences, invite us over and impart all the information needed to make day to day living easier.’ The birth of her child there, too, became a social asset for making friends with other women and families. Her experience in Belgium worked on her in other ways. The congenial Brussels sojourn lasted about two and a half years, ending when Chris was transferred back to Britain in 1996, by which time Caroline was expecting her second child. This involved setting up house near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, and she was warned by seasoned expats that she would find relocation difficult after five years away. But in both prospect and action she now handled the change easily. ‘Fine, not a problem, used to it by now, … and I’m an expert at moving.’ She reengaged with old friends and enjoyed village life. But that too was shortlived; within a year, in 1997, they faced a further transfer to Madrid. Again, Caroline accepted the ‘very interesting experience’, now with two children, with equanimity. Of course with each move I’m becoming older and wiser about what to plan for, and there was a bit more planning to do with children, … one started school. And not quite as easy on the expatriate front in terms of social integration, we actually lived about 30 kilometres out of Madrid, but in an area with a fair number of expatriates. But it wasn’t quite the all-embracing community that exists in Brussels, and there was less of an international culture and policy, more hard-core Spanish.

Even the ‘hard-core Spanish’ experience did not detract from Caroline’s enjoyment, consumed often by children and school – the eldest started school, the Spanish norm, at three, and began to approach fluency in Spanish. Her main regret was that she did not hone her own Spanish language skills as much as she had hoped. Again, though, the sojourn was brief, but for more ominous reasons. Within a year Chris’s company made him redundant, and they faced a prompt return to Britain in 1998 with no job in prospect. For Chris it was a devastating change, not easily surmounted in Britain, where, after seven years with the same company, many of his old networks and contacts had evaporated, and prospective employers paid little heed to his overseas experience. They could see where the logic was heading. Caroline recalled that ‘we knew that it would be a battle to stay in the UK and we’d have to head overseas’. Crucially

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  129 her attitude eased the way, for she was no longer a reluctant migrant or expatriate. When a job offer came from an Australian company, willing to sponsor their migration, Caroline ‘was more than happy’. While in South Africa they had made a ‘city hop’ trip to Australia, ‘so we’d seen all the major centres and I knew I could live here very happily’. Settlement in Melbourne in 1999, living in the inner beachside suburb of Port Melbourne, promised to be a smooth transition. Caroline, the seasoned traveller, anticipated that Australia’s English-language culture would simplify her adaptation in comparison to Belgium and Spain, with children easing her entry into school and childcare networks. The reality was quite different. There was nothing to compare with the welcomes previously enjoyed among the European ‘expatriate community’, and an early Melbourne experience of being frozen out of a mothers’ playgroup left her feeling isolated and wary, an echo in some ways of her early experience in Johannesburg. For the first couple of years after my arrival I felt like a ‘hidden’ immigrant. … I felt almost invisible in that no one knew me, no one cared and no one wanted to know me. The assumption seemed to be that if you can speak the lingo then you must be okay! (I have read in some expatriate relocation studies that the hardest postings to deal with on a social level are those where there is no change of language, e.g. Ireland to Canada, New Zealand to Scotland, London to Melbourne!) … A matter of weeks after arriving I was shunned by a group of young mothers who clearly did not want a new member in their playgroup.

Salvation came slowly, partly through her immersion in schools and childcare, partly through the resilience she had learned from the expatriate experience, and which she could share with Chris. We always used to say during our moves there are definite peaks and troughs, psychological peaks and troughs. When you first get told you’re moving, you start going down, … physically, but also in terms of your emotions. But once you’ve settled, you’ve made a few contacts and you’ve established yourself locally, that’s when, say three to six months into the assignment, you can start really enjoying it. … So there are big peaks, but there are big troughs too. All of it comes at a price. And we’ve seen a lot of families split up over this kind of lifestyle, there is I believe a pretty high expatriate divorce rate.

Six years after arrival Caroline had become the archetypal well-adjusted migrant and Australian citizen, no longer anticipating the next expatriate posting, despite Chris experiencing two further redundancies. She was conscious of how much her serial migration experience had shaped her.

130  Migration from austerity to prosperity I’ve changed, as well, you know, I’ve learned, I’ve had to adapt to change so many times, I think I’ve become quite an expert at that. I’ve had to learn how to make approaches, how to make friends, rather than letting them come to me. … And I’m much more proactive in that way, … my confidence has grown I think, hugely, over this whole ex, travel experience.

The South African experience especially, where she had joined Amnesty International, had ‘awakened a passion’ for human rights, which in Australia translated into severe criticism of its ‘disgusting’ policies on treatment of refugees. That, and her own painful experience in Melbourne, prompted her to go out of her way to approach new migrants with offers of help and empathy. It stemmed too from a gradual recognition of a ‘huge difference’ in mentality between those with and without a migration background, whether in Australia, Britain, indeed anywhere. Her mobile past, on balance, seemed preferable to an alternative of a settled life in Britain. ‘Yes, I would rather have what I’ve had – I think I’ve had a very rich life, and it would have been all too easy, if … he’d come back from South Africa, I guess, yes, life would have been quite different.’ Yet Caroline’s global mentality no longer translated into her earlier ‘citizen of the world’ identity, so important to others with similar mobile histories. ‘I did, but I think I just see myself as a Brit at heart living in Australia now. That sense is gone.’ The ‘Brit at heart’ identity, based on closeness to family and love for the English countryside and cultural icons like the BBC, had if anything come to loom larger alongside her firm commitment to stay in Australia, her support for a republic and local loyalty to the Port Melbourne district. Despite trips back to Britain every second year, she was acutely conscious of the absence of grandparents for her children, and of the ‘depth of friendships’ that are commonly stronger for those with permanent residence in their place of birth; ‘a lot of it comes with history, with time, with common experiences’. These have been the dilemmas traditionally felt by one-way migrants, very much a stock-in-trade inheritance of migration. Caroline came to these views through a quite different journey, characteristic of the late twentieth century, but her experience is a reminder that the ‘global citizenship’ of modern migration could take various shapes, which recalled the past while pointing to the future. Notes   1 Piejus, written account.   2 Ingram-Monk, interview and written account.   3 For example T. C. Lewellen, The anthropology of globalization: cultural

Migration, cosmopolitanism and ‘global citizenship’  131 anthropology enters the 21st century, Westport, Greenwood, 2002, especially. pp. 16–17.   4 R. Liddle, Spectator, 15 July 2009: ‘It is the narcissistic middle-aged, not the young, who love Facebook and Twitter.’ There is a more extensive literature on narcissism in the United States, dating particularly from C. Lasch, The culture of narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing expectations, New York, Norton, 1979.   5 See Appendix, Table 2. A higher figure of 207,600, accounting for various adjustments, was reached by Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, p. 104.   6 Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, pp. 20–2.   7 K. O’Reilly, The British on the Costa del Sol: transnational identities and local communities, London, Routledge, 2000.   8 For example, Hayward, interview and written account: ‘I think we all felt very isolated. I know I felt it very badly, I knew no one and no one to talk to about it all.’ Her family arrived six days before the 9/11 event.   9 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 18, 68, 79. 10 A. Giddens, Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age, Cambridge, Polity, 1991, pp. 5, 80–7. 11 O’Reilly, The British on the Costa del Sol, pp. 98–100. 12 Piejus, written account. 13 Salt, interview and written account. 14 The Olivia Manning reference is to her six-volume ‘Fortunes of war’ autobiographical novels, the ‘Balkan trilogy’ and the ‘Levant trilogy’, 1960 to 1980, set mainly in Romania, Greece and Egypt from the outbreak of war. The expat community she describes was comprised mainly of British Council teachers and administrators. A BBC television series based on the novels was produced in 1987. 15 See K. A, Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: ethics in a world of strangers, New York, Norton, 2006. 16 Mackie, interview and written account. 17 Kerr, written account. For a parallel analysis see S. Constantine, ‘“Dear Grace … love Maidie”: interpreting a migrant’s letters from Australia’, in K. Fedorowich and A. S. Thompson (eds), Empire, migration and identity in the British world, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013. 18 The dilemmas were well known in expatriate circles; see, for example, D. Young, Working abroad: the expatriate’s guide (3rd edition), London, Financial Times Business Information Ltd, 1987, a regular publication from the Financial Times. Note the section on ‘the expatriate wife’, pp. 101–2. 19 Streeter, interview and written account.

Part II

Life stories of modern migration

5

Migration and career stories: work in an age of mobility

‘I think it was just a challenge to try and get a job that would probably give us a better life financially’ (David Spencer, emigrated to Sydney 1970, returned to England, 1975).1

One of the newer trends driving British migration patterns of the last four decades, evident in previous chapters, has been a quest for adventure, for global experience and the forging of new lifestyles. Migrants frequently say that this stemmed from dissatisfaction with less material elements of life in Britain, from restlessness and desires for something different. At its most extreme it could be a form of alienation from British life, which mirrors characteristics often ascribed to British society by historians of the period: anger, fear, apathy and a loss of certainty, for the English especially, in the meaning of national identity.2 Without psychologising an entire generation of migrants, one could suggest that this national disaffection did much to contribute to the resurgence of emigration in the latter years of the century. But this is not the whole story. In the long history of voluntary migration the dominant impulse has been for self-improvement and the need for financial security. It was as central to the twentieth as it was to preceding centuries. With the growth of prosperity in developed countries a greater element of discretion became common, so that, as with postwar British migrants, the quest for more attractive opportunities abroad was part of a more generalised revolution of rising expectations, and this has done much to complicate the traditional dichotomy in migration between the relativities of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors. For British skilled migrants from the 1940s to the 1960s, mostly male and already in employment, the overwhelming goal had been to find fulfilment through better rewards – a ‘better life financially’ – in their established trades; their goals were widely realised in countries undergoing rapid development.3 These motivations persisted in later decades, whether among 135

136  Life stories of modern migration skilled workers, students, professionals or entrepreneurs. For all but a few the search for the better job or career remained central, but increasingly it was mediated by less tangible themes we have seen, like adventure, together with industrial transformations and decline of the ‘job for life’ mentality in new industries like IT. Skilled migrants in a changing landscape At first glance there seems little to distinguish the fortunes of skilled migrants of the 1970s and after from their forebears of the immediate postwar decades. John and Ann Whiteside and their family of three children, for example, left Barrow-in-Furness in 1981 for Australia. Like many others they were disillusioned about prospects at home, hopeful of material improvement in the new country. John, a boilermaker-welder, born in 1953, worked, for meagre wages, in local naval shipyards ‘in the most dangerous, dirty and above all hazardous conditions imaginable’, but had still experienced some upward working-class mobility. He never knew his biological father; he and his three siblings each had different fathers and were mostly brought up by the last of them – not John’s – with their mother never at home. His stepfather, Bob, a ‘coal-bagger’, ‘brought us up single-handed’, with some help from the eldest sister, and guided John’s work choices. He left school at 14, worked for a butcher, hoping this would be his future career, but, against his own preference, took Bob’s advice to enter a boilermaker apprenticeship in the shipyards. ‘I never really wanted to do it as a trade to start with, I just did it because my dad said “It’s a good job, get yourself in the yard”.’4 John benefited from his trade, but the rough work nurtured his resentment, about working conditions and the associated narrow attitudes he thought prevailed among his workmates and neighbours in the North-west. They do tend to have an ostrich attitude. A lot of the reason is … you’re working all the hours you can possibly do, but the money’s never enough to go around, to have holidays and to do things. … Back then everybody was in the same boat. … I was working night shift, seven days a week, and trying to feed the kids. We had a below-average mortgage, and you’re just knocking your head on the wall all the time. But the attitude with everybody is, they don’t go anywhere, they don’t do anything. … Because all they did was work in the yard, and go up the pub, the nearest pub, work, the nearest pub, all their life, they’d never been anywhere.

John’s reference to a mortgage suggests that, despite his disenchantment, his living standards, home ownership especially, were an improve-

Migration and career stories  137 ment on those of his forebears two decades earlier. Together with his trade this owed something to his marriage to Ann Clemens in 1974. Her family, on Walney Island off the Barrow coast, came from strict, respectable working-class backgrounds. Her father, a fitter and turner, and her mother, a shop assistant, imbued Ann, the eldest of three children, with strong educational ideals, to be a ‘good role model for the rest of the family’. Soon after completing O-levels at school she worked as a typist in the Civil Service. To her parents this would have pointed to a future of security and respectability, all of which must have seemed threatened when, aged 19, she wished to marry John, with his ‘wild bringing-up’. They resisted the marriage fiercely, but in vain, and only at the last minute did her parents relent and attend the wedding. The inauspicious beginning was eventually forgotten, as John became part of the family, the ‘favourite son’. Moreover, her parents facilitated the crucial passage to home ownership. John’s father had lent them enough for a deposit, but soon afterwards Ann’s grandmother died and her parents, who inherited her semi-detached house, let them buy it cheaply, on a low mortgage. John managed to upset Ann’s father by renovating extensively what had been his childhood home, and then upset the neighbours by growing vegetables in the front garden. ‘They went “you’re lowering the value of the area”, … I said “grass doesn’t pay me rates, mate, I’m putting potatoes in. When they’re ready come down and I’ll give you a few.” It was like Richard Briers, you know, with the snobs.’5 John’s class-consciousness, played out in the neighbourhood, was aggravated by the Thatcher regime from 1979. Much of his work was on nuclear submarines, in his view inherently dangerous, giving Barrow the unsavoury reputation of ‘the nuclear dumping ground of Europe’. Even before Thatcher he was already pondering ways to give his children ‘a better start than they would have had in Barrow’. But by 1981 rumours were rife that the shipbuilding industry ‘was in her sights’. As he recalls it she was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back, that was it, she was going to close up the shipyards, the mines and everything, right, and I just went: “I’m working seven days a week, not getting anywhere”.’ By this time they had two children, a third on the way, and family and friends greeted John’s proposals to emigrate with strong discouragement. The idea was originally John’s, with Ann warming to prospects of an adventure. Both anticipated better ‘opportunities for the kids’, despite the loss of intimate family links. The destination was more difficult. A tentative application brought a job offer from Johannesburg, but news of a massacre of blacks and a white exodus from South Africa promptly put them off. Ann vetoed his interest in the United States for ‘too much violence’, and an attractive offer of a ‘three months on, one month off’ job in the Netherlands would have made John an absentee father without the family benefits of migration. A local advertisement for boilermaker-welders in Adelaide,

138  Life stories of modern migration a­ssembling power-station components for shipment to the Northern Territory, pointed to resolution. John was accepted quickly, facilitating prompt visa approval. By late 1981, following heart-wrenching farewells, they were on an eventful flight to Adelaide, full of traumatic technical breakdowns in Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and Singapore; this extended the journey to four days, in Ann’s view an unsavoury ‘introduction to Australia’. There were further challenging introductions awaiting in Adelaide. They settled in the northern suburb of Para Hills, with a dense, reasonably congenial British population, but met few Australians. Their capital enabled them to buy a house, but Ann suffered bouts of homesickness and depression for three years, but doggedly refused to contemplate return, convinced ‘it was good for the kids because it was healthy’. John’s workplace experience was a shock. Despite grim conditions at Barrow, he had found the work discipline there ‘very lackadaisical’, but encountered a more rigid and oppressive atmosphere in his first Adelaide job, which he nicknamed ‘Stalag Luft Seven’. Two tyrannical and intrusive foremen apparently drove John and many of his workmates out to other employment within 11 months, but it was a significant inversion of the traditional British workmen’s postwar experience of a much more laidback workplace in Australia.6 Possibly it was a hint of developing changes in industrial relations. But it may also have pointed to John’s increasing disillusion with his trade, which Australia seemed to nurture. After three years two events occurred which were to shape much of the family’s future. The first originated with Ann when new interests in Bible study led her to become a Jehovah’s Witness, initially with extreme hostility from John. Eventually he followed her into the fold, a commitment lasting some 20 years, embracing baptism and rearing of their children. John’s brother, who had joined them in Adelaide, abruptly broke off relations. Their commitment ended only when their eldest child, just before her marriage, became disillusioned and left, resulting in her ‘excommunication’ and the elders’ insistence that John and Ann should sever relations with both her and her baby daughter. After intense agonising they made a clean break, moving from commitment to bitter hostility, even to close textual analysis of the Bible to disprove Witnesses’ interpretations. John estimated that it took him two years to recover from ‘23 years of brainwashing’. On the surface the entire experience seems to have had little to do with their migration, but Ann was convinced that the isolation from extended family of her early years in Adelaide made her vulnerable and susceptible to the propaganda, which she had always resisted in England as a matter of course. In effect, she thought ‘it actually replaced family’, albeit with strong discipline which deprived their children of a social life and varied extracurricular activities at school. Soon after joining the Witnesses John made a further radical move by

Migration and career stories  139 leaving his trade – ‘I was actually hating it’ – to start his own windowcleaning business. He explained this by recalling his long-sustained childhood dream of working for himself. From the age of seven, employed by a butcher, sweeping and cleaning early in the mornings before school, he had formed ideas about running his own business. ‘I can remember, from that early age, thinking: “I’m going to be a butcher, I’m going to have my own shop one day”.’ John worked for the same butcher after leaving school at 14, but his ambition was derailed two years later when the owner abruptly closed the business. Despite the setback his goal remained, ‘that idea of being your own boss you see?’ But his windowcleaning business struggled in Adelaide, never equalling his previous income. A chance postcard from a Witness friend, also a window-cleaner, now in Wollongong in New South Wales, attracted him to another move. There were more multi-storey buildings in Wollongong, unlike the single-storeys in Para Hills, and his friend insisted that ‘window-cleaners are sought’. So over Ann’s protests – ‘we’ve just come all this way and now you want to move again?’ – the family sold their house and moved on. Wollongong brought further hardships. It took a year to establish the business and begin turning a profit, by which time the capital from their house was gone. For some time they lived off the dole, spending five years in a caravan park, then 13 years in public housing in a ‘bad area for drugs’. To a degree the pleasures of being ‘right on the beach front’ made up for some of the privations. Eventually, as his customer network expanded, the profits improved, and later Ann helped by cleaning interiors while John did the outside ‘ladder work’. Success bred further ambition; in another spontaneous decision in 2000 he left window-cleaning and turned to roof and gutter repairs, cleaning and leaf screening. He already had experience in the work and his wait for success was much shorter, the new venture quickly yielding more income than in the best years of window-cleaning. It also became a family affair, Ann doing the ‘back office’ work, with their son, Mark, working alongside John. ‘What more could I ask for?’, John wondered. For John and Ann their migration was a clear success, the main regrets being lost years with the Witnesses and decades without extended family, grandparents especially. Ann insisted that, as they intended, life for their children ‘has been markedly different to what it would have been in England – we came to give them a better future and I think that has been accomplished’. Their eldest, Jayne, was completing a PhD in history, unimaginable in Barrow. For John the freedom of running a successful business was a profound marker of the difference migration had made. Yet successes came with other costs, the most emphatic being their loss of home ownership, a reversal of the usual pattern of postwar British skilled migrants, for whom it was a treasured goal. Together with sacrificing a skilled trade for the risks of an uncertain business, it underlines

140  Life stories of modern migration ways in which conditions of the late twentieth century were changing the experience and meaning of migration. De-industrialisation was putting traditional trades at risk in developed countries, and changing ideas of work led skilled employees to aspire to entrepreneurship, ironically for John a refrain of Margaret Thatcher. Migration had the potential to speed up these processes when life was thrown into uncertain flux alongside new opportunities. The Whitesides’ patriotism, extending to soccer World Cup loyalties, eventually shifted emphatically from Britain to Australia, with no thoughts of moving on or returning, although Ann retained a wariness from past experience of the influence of even holiday travel on John’s impulsiveness. She thought ‘he must be from the Gypsies’; her response to holiday plans in Queensland was to insist, ‘we’re not going, because you’ll want to move!’. Travel loomed in the imagination as a continuing, if ironic, presence in their migration story. Their success story was a traditional postwar one, modified in palpable ways by changing circumstances of the later twentieth century. A militant, bitter attitude towards class, politics and labour relations in Britain, so powerful in John’s emigration, had a long history among working-class migrants, and remained relatively constant throughout the later twentieth century. In popular and media consciousness in Australia and New Zealand this was commonly associated with the notion of the ‘English disease’ (alternatively the ‘British disease’, more accurate since it was not confined to the English), referring to militant immigrant trade union leaders and their readiness to import industrial and class conflict.7 It is true that trade union leadership provided a career pathway for some skilled British migrants, even when the strength and size of trade union membership was in decline. Paul Durham’s experience is instructive. His migration story was dominated by family themes as well as work. His wife was the prime mover in their three moves, encompassing the original migration to Brisbane with three children in 1967, return to Yorkshire in 1971 and then return to Brisbane in 1972. Both their flight back to England and return migration were prompted by a desire to escape the destructive intrusion of Paul’s recently widowed father, who always had a bad relationship with Paul, worsened when he followed to live with them in Brisbane. Paul suggested that the first move to Australia was motivated by his wife’s desire to salvage their fragile marriage, and in later years his life was shaped by the need to care for her when she developed earlyonset dementia in the 1990s. But his story was driven just as powerfully by the career trajectory he enjoyed, from carpenter in Pudsey, Yorkshire, to union organiser in the National Union of Workers in Brisbane.8 Paul’s carpentry skills were in high demand in Brisbane when they first arrived in 1967, and he promptly found work on a shopping centre building site. Despite brief setbacks they prospered, enabling purchase of their

Migration and career stories  141 first house, followed by a block of land with a view to building a larger house. But the classic migrant success story was terminated abruptly with their unanticipated return to England in 1971 to escape Paul’s father, dictating urgent sales ‘at the bottom of the market’ and heavy losses. The price of return was high, ‘we were back living in a council house, driving an old motor, four years of hard work in Australia went down the drain, cold dreary winters, driving on frozen roads, holiday venues jam-packed with people’. Still, when they returned to Queensland nine months later Paul already had a job offer as a storeman, less skilled and well paid than in his trade, but enough to enable them to buy land and build a house within six months. Paul thrived in the workplace, was well liked by his workmates, mostly Australians, and was soon elected as the union delegate. This, he thought, had little to do with his English origins, though he had been a staunch union and Labour Party member in England and the commitment transferred easily to the Australian working environment. Over time he developed negotiating skills and by the early 1980s was noticed by the National Union of Workers executive, again with all Australian-born membership. Membership of the state branch executive committee soon followed, then a provisional union management role and by 1983 he was elected as state organiser. The shift catapulted Paul into a new world of national and international travel, expense accounts and the hurly-burly of tough negotiations. For his family it brought a welcome lift in their standard of living. ‘We had a good family life, because … we could afford things we’d never been able to afford before.’ A gregarious and persuasive conversationalist, Paul flourished in his new role, enjoying contacts with senior politicians, the Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, and leaders from major companies like BHP. He relished the hard work, vindicated when he was regularly re-elected to the position. He was active in Labor Party campaigning and by the late 1980s his colleagues began to suggest a move into state politics; ‘I was pencilled in as being a future politician’. The future looked more and more promising, but then health and family issues intervened, bringing a dramatic change of direction. In 1991 Paul suffered a heart attack. ‘That just switched it off’ and led to complete retirement. While he received prompt and excellent treatment, and felt drawn back to the work, he told his children that he knew he would throw himself into it, and inevitably ‘get the heart racing’.9 He remained obsessively interested in politics, writing letters to newspapers in both Australia and Britain, but family matters consumed more of his time. During the 1980s the Durhams’ family life had prospered, with children marrying and producing grandchildren, but around the time of Paul’s heart attack their fortunes reversed abruptly. All the marriages broke down, creating anxieties about the welfare of grandchildren. One daughter suffered health problems and depression, leading to her

142  Life stories of modern migration later suicide. And within a year of Paul’s retirement his wife developed Alzheimer’s disease, requiring increasing amounts of care, what he called ‘a full-time job’, until her death in 2007. Despite accumulating misfortunes Paul retained pride in his industrial contribution. He was acutely conscious of the ‘English disease’ slur, insisting that it was a resentful response to ‘sticking up for yourself. Yes, you’ve got to stick up for yourself.’ His gruff assertiveness, he thought, was a Yorkshire characteristic, well suited to union leadership. Indeed, pride in his origins was expressly local rather than national, ‘my Yorkshire-ness is, is something I’m very attached to. … You can’t throw that away. It’s too precious’. Beyond that he celebrated the class-free values he discovered in Australia in the course of his union work: I’ve sat with Prime Ministers, Premiers, industrialists, and, you know, I’ve drunk more of your Chardonnay and that bloody caviar and all of that load of rubbish, you know. … The one thing that I like about here is there’s virtually no class distinction, you’re just who you are. … that’s the Australian attitude.

Pride in local Yorkshire origins and appreciation of a more open Australian culture perhaps fed Paul’s ongoing interest in Britain and his bitterness about the changes he observed during his last visit in 2007, a year before his death. We saw in Chapter 2 his hostility towards the influx of Pakistani immigrants in his Yorkshire workplace, part of the inspiration for his migration. Forty years later his resentment was deepened by a range of familiar grievances under the general heading of the ‘demise of the English way of life’. Immigration had progressed to the point where ‘newcomers’ outnumbered some ‘English minority populations’, bringing new job competition.10 Paul admitted that his criticisms drew on the popular press as well as his personal observations, but they reflected routine media complaints of a malaise in British society which had motivated some British emigrants for decades.11 He rekindled his grievances during his return visit, and used them to reinforce his celebration of the family’s migration. ‘Looking back I can honestly say I have made many decisions in my life, lots of them bad, but coming to Australia was the best I ever made. We have had a good life in sunny Queensland, and as an English comedian once remarked when asked his opinion of Australia, “it’s the world’s best kept secret”.’ Migration as career advancement John Whiteside and Paul Durham were beneficiaries of the huge expansion in economies of developed countries during the late twentieth

Migration and career stories  143 century, which, with expansion in educational opportunities, swelled the ranks of the educated middle classes.12 By the 1970s the process was well established; as receiving countries demanded enhanced skills and education from their immigrants, the presence of professionals and entrepreneurs among migrant populations increased. While some of these might emigrate in successful mid-career, most viewed their migration as a passport to greater career success, although other motivations, like adventure and disenchantment, could complement ambition. For women migrants, especially, some traditional mobile occupations became more professionalised from the 1970s, bringing new opportunities for advancement at home and overseas. Nursing was an obvious example. As nurse training gradually moved to the university environment new opportunities emerged for ‘nurse educators’, now researchers as well as teachers, administrators and practitioners, increasingly with PhD qualifications. In Chapter 4 we saw how Catherine Taylor achieved professorial status in nursing in Melbourne after arrival in 1982.13 Over two decades later, in 2005, Elaine Jefford, already a Senior Lecturer in midwifery at Anglia Ruskin University, followed a similar pathway, moving with her family to Canberra University as she sought for ‘something more out there’. Her husband, an IT expert, was between jobs in 2005, so it was her career move which drove their migration and became a measure of the family’s successful migration as her career progressed. Despite difficult adjustments and bureaucratic hurdles she achieved Senior Lecturer status within a year. A little more than a year after arrival she was wondering ‘if Canberra will hold me for ever, whether my wings will be spreading a bit further?’ So it was no great surprise that she moved to Central Queensland University as head of the midwifery programme.14 She later earned a PhD, settling in coastal Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, where she ran the midwifery course. As Dr Jefford from 2012, she provides a vivid example of the combined process of geographical mobility alongside career and social mobility. With enhanced educational and skills profiles, it is not surprising that many British migrants achieved stellar success in elite professions. Professor Fiona Wood, a renowned skin and burns specialist, from a working-class family in a Yorkshire mining village, is one of the most eminent of these in recent times in Australia. She rose to national fame for her work with burns victims of the 2002 Bali bombings, and, among other honours, was named ‘Australian of the year’ in 2005. When she emigrated to Perth in 1987, with her Australian-born surgeon husband and two children, she had been practising for six years while training in plastic surgery. By 1991 she was a consultant plastic surgeon, and had four more children.15 Her profile is exceptional, and, while it illustrates dramatic upward mobility, her career progress, alongside stunning capacity to combine it with demanding motherhood, was well in train

144  Life stories of modern migration before migration. This was not uncommon in the professions, medicine in particular, but careers could take dramatically new directions after migration, often prompting migrants to ponder whether the changes flowed from new opportunities unavailable to them in Britain. The story of Robin Higgs, trained as a surgeon in England in the 1960s, illustrates how this process could play out. When he emigrated to Australia in 1974, with his wife, Judith, and four children, he had already experienced upward mobility from the Buckinghamshire village of his childhood. His father, a building contractor before moving into tenant farming, died when Robin, the only child, was three, so his boardingschool education was dependent upon his mother’s determination, the support of his father’s masonic network and his uncles. His university and medical training was managed mostly with support of the army through a cadetship, so when he graduated in 1968 he was contracted as an army surgeon. At St Bartholomew’s Hospital he met Judith, during nurse training, and they married in 1967. Their first child was born at Reading, their first posting, but after a year they were sent to Malaya, and a succession of posts including Singapore, Hong Kong, Colchester, London and Aldershot.16 We have seen how such expatriate mobility might be alienating,

11  Judy Higgs (left) with children, meeting Queen Mother at the Royal Herbert hospital, London, in 1972

Migration and career stories  145 especially for spouses, and discourage migration. For Robin and Judith the experience was quite contrary. Judith saw it as a continuum from her childhood, when she accompanied her father, a naval diplomat, on postings in Canada, Malta and Gibraltar, punctuated by various places in Britain. She attended 12 schools and went to university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She then accommodated the birth of her four children to routine mobility in the army. For Robin frequent postings provided training and congenial working conditions and, for both of them, comfortable circumstances with multiple servants and a sense of living in ‘the last days of the Raj’, particularly in Malaya. Neither felt the familiar alienation of expatriate living or hungered for radical change. But by the early 1970s Robin began to think differently; ‘I would have stayed in the army’, he recalled, ‘if not for a number of unfortunate events’. One of these arose from ambition. The army provided valuable training in his general surgical qualifications. But his passion, to become an orthopaedic surgeon, was blocked repeatedly. In some disillusion he volunteered for the parachute regiment, and was soon after appointed surgeon in charge of an airborne surgical team. It was challenging work but came with higher risks. A crucial event in Germany, while they were stationed at Aldershot, brought to a head reservations which, unknown to each other, both had been worrying about. Judith recalled in her written account: My husband, a regimental medical officer, was reported missing, possibly dead, in a parachuting exercise in Germany. With four children under five years old, during the next 24 hours I thought a lot about the future. Unknown to me my husband, alive, but dropped by parachute miles from his unit, was also thinking seriously about our future. We would have to move to a safer environment. Only three months before my husband escaped being killed when the officers’ mess in Aldershot was bombed by the IRA. Routinely we checked under our car for devices … . Many times we were asked to leave buildings as a bomb was reported on the premises.

Security anxieties, fuelled by routine alerts of IRA threats, together with Robin’s career frustration, drove them to consider emigration. No particular location dominated the quest, and initially Canada was a possibility, until in 1974 Robin saw a rare advertisement in the British Medical Journal, from the Australian Orthopaedic Association, for an orthpaedic surgical training programme. After some deliberations about whether to choose between Perth and Sydney – conscious that they knew nothing of Australian geography, ‘we thought Sydney was about as far in the Outback as we wanted to go’ – Robin applied and was promptly accepted. The family even qualified for the ten-pound passage on the Greek liner Ellinis. Neither entertained reservations, even with four

146  Life stories of modern migration children, Judith supremely confident that ‘it was no different to … taking them to Malaya’. At heart this went to the expatriate mindset they now took for granted, distinguishing them from most fellow passengers. Like previous postings Australia was to be a temporary sojourn, now with an explicit objective of gaining a new qualification. Ignoring UK security threats, Robin recalls having ‘every intention’ of returning to England newly qualified, ‘and I would then have reapplied to join the Services’. Despite their resilience, early weeks in Australia were deeply unsettling, ‘very shaky’, including the shock of initial housing in the Marrickville migrant hostel in the January heat of 1975. For the first time Judith suffered acute homesickness and Robin scoured the area looking for a used car and a rental house, signing a lease on the spot for a house in Five Dock, cutting deeply into their $5,000 of savings. Both recall their desperation vividly, feeling that if they had more capital they would have returned immediately, pondering the question together, ‘what have we done?’ For Robin there was something deeper in awareness of loss of status he suffered in the transition: Six weeks ago I had a car, a driver, we had an allowance for a maid, and living in style, and all the bad things disappeared, you know, this looking under the cars … so it all disappeared. …And suddenly, this sounds awful as well, suddenly I’d lost my place in society, see … my identity.

The means for Robin to resolve his identity crisis, though, were at hand. Within a week he had a job to go to, which incorporated his much desired orthopaedic training for three years. Once he was qualified this was followed by the offer of a rare consultant’s post at the Repatriation Hospital, coinciding with their planned intention to return to England. The offer was too good to refuse and equivalent positions in England were ‘few and far between, with some doctors almost 40 and still holding junior posts’, so they deferred the return. His experience with the military served him well at the Repatriation Hospital, since most of his patients were veterans comfortable with an ex-officer, usually with the refrain ‘could we see the army doctor please?’. His career flourished, with dramatic publicity in 1977 when he assisted in a helicopter rescue from a burning yacht during the Sydney to Hobart race. Ultimately he became director of orthopaedic surgery at the Repatriation Hospital. In the mid1980s he was recommended for an OBE award, thwarted when it was discovered he had not yet obtained Australian citizenship.17 An injury to his hands in the early 1990s prompted ‘redirection of our thinking’, and he moved into innovation in orthopaedic product design; this engaged him in forensic engineering and commercial and consumer law as well as surgery. Further prestigious awards followed, alongside professorial appointments in three universities, frequent consultancies abroad and

Migration and career stories  147 international recognition.18 Success brought prosperity, best symbolised by purchase of a harbourside house in the inner suburb of Kirribilli. Ultimately this stellar progress stimulated Robin and Judith’s strong attachment to Australia, but commitment was a slow process. From the beginning each retained a sense that this was another temporary move, only shifted marginally a few years later when their three surviving parents joined them in Sydney. But soon afterwards they were still ruminating about return to England, only to be warned by Judith’s thoroughly acculturated mother, now an Australian ‘grey nomad’, ‘oh well, if you’re going back don’t think we are’. Twelve years after arrival they ‘still kept thinking of going back’, avoiding expensive purchases which might commit them. ‘We were still, nomadic, Robin reflected. Eventually commitments of their growing children tilted the balance, and annual trips to England, usually connected to Robin’s work, eased the longing for connection, for pubs, friends, relatives and the countryside. In later years, after more visits, their attitude changed, ‘we come back and we think: “oh God we’re pleased to be back!”.’ Yet after 32 years they still viewed their permanent migration as an accident. ‘To this day, we have never made the decision to stay here, we’ve never said… “This is it”. We even became Australian citizens by, by default, didn’t we?’ While thoroughly acculturated to Australia, their image of themselves, Robin thought, remained that they were ‘still souls, wandering between the north and the southern hemispheres’. The fact that Robin and Judith clung to their desire to return for so long, in the midst of prosperity, distances them from any sense of an enduring ‘malaise’ in Britain, which spurred the migration of others from the 1970s. Their anxieties about security never translated into hostility to Britain so often voiced in migrant testimony. Years of uncertainty led them to reflect deeply about whether the success they enjoyed in Australia might have been possible had they stayed in Britain. The question is perennial, ultimately unanswerable. But Robin concluded that he had exploited opportunities in Australia which would have been barred to him in Britain. We nearly always conclude on the negative side, that things would not have been as good, had we stayed, and the opportunities would not have been as great, … but I’ve always thought, certainly in our lifetime, that if you have a particular skill or an idea about something in Australia, you’re somewhere where you can thrive, … you can actually make a success of yourself. … There are opportunities, and the windows seem to be more successful in helping people to succeed … whereas I think in England to have been innovative would have been extremely difficult.

For Robin his ‘career change’ into product design in the early 1990s was an object lesson in comparative opportunities in the two countries. The

148  Life stories of modern migration result of a hand injury, his new departure ‘was thrust on me, … it permitted us to change our direction and give us another 10 or 15 years of something totally different’. The transition, he thought, would have been unlikely in Britain, due largely to resistance to innovation. ‘I designed an artificial shoulder joint, and I think that had I done that in England, probably if I’d gone to a major manufacturer they [would have] said: “Well nice, lovely”, you know?’ This has been a powerful ethos of postwar British migrant success stories, common to those recounted in Australia, Canada or New Zealand. They seem even more dramatic when success grew from sharp career change, or indeed the youthful launch of a career in the new country, and viewed over several decades of a life story. Gerry Bullon, who first arrived in Australia from Glasgow in 1967, aged 20, enjoyed outstanding success after starting from humble beginnings in the banking industry. His story provides novel variations on the stellar migrant success story theme. At first glance there seems no reason to assume he might not have reached similar goals if he had stayed home, but reflecting on four decades of achievement convinced him that his migration had been the key. Noting that in business he enjoyed routine access to federal and state ministers and business elites, he drew the obvious conclusion: ‘clearly life in Australia had opened doors which life in Britain would never have done’. But when he left university in 1967, without graduating, disillusioned with the business and accounting degree he was studying, he had few ideas about a future career, focused more on youthful prospects for ‘adventure and excitement’, and independence from a tightly knit family network in Glasgow. Both sets of grandparents were Jewish refugees from Russia and Poland who found that life in Scotland did indeed ‘open doors’ of opportunity. They flourished in small family businesses, in printing and retailing, and Gerry’s parents had every expectation that he would pursue similar opportunities. But the family’s migration narrative of business success was far from the forefront of Gerry’s mind when he left.19 Intent on escape and adventure, hoping to forge an independent pathway unfettered by family influence, he seized an offer of the tenpound passage to Melbourne. An uncle and aunt were settled there, but, prizing his independence, he warned his mother not to tell them of his move, preferring to contact them once established. Mother had other ideas; when the Fairsky docked at Station Pier he was greeted by a welcome banner and a warm gathering from the Polish-Jewish community, then whisked away to be introduced to his well-prepared room in his uncle and aunt’s St Kilda apartment. For them Gerry promised to be the son they never had. Reluctant to hurt them by moving, and worse, threatening family relations with his parents, he settled in as the vicarious son, dashing treasured plans for unfettered freedom. Employment

Migration and career stories  149 as a bank teller followed, and for six months he grew into the job with interesting experiences in two different branches, while life at home replicated his home life in Scotland. Meanwhile, most of his friends from the voyage were established in Sydney and urging him to join them, suggesting a gentle and reasonable way towards his independence. The bank baulked at a transfer request, insisting they were not a ‘travel agency’ for young international travellers, but vacancies in Sydney opened the way, and after six months in Melbourne he had a persuasive case to make the move without hurting his new family. Sydney provided all Gerry had hoped for and more: a freewheeling social life, old and new friends, interesting work at the Paddington bank branch – a ‘gentrified’ inner suburb with an ‘arty mob’ his regular customers. His banking career advanced. But Sydney brought changing directions, challenging his youthful notion of a quest for independence from old world society and family. Banking soon began to pall and he sought new challenges. But he also began to gravitate away from his new friends towards the local Jewish community, attending the Maroubra Synagogue where he befriended the Rabbi and his family. This directed his job search, as he talked his way into a radically different position as advertising manager with the Australian Jewish Times, which dominated much of his career for 20 years. Reflecting on the changes motivating him at the time he recalled, ‘I came out thinking I was independent but I gravitated towards the community, when I wanted “community-ship”. … So I guess it says something about my upbringing, my grandfather, and my mother giving me that sense of Jewishness’. Gerry’s revived Jewish affinity in Sydney did not mean the end of his geographical and career mobility. He had promised his mother that he would return to Glasgow after three years, regardless of intentions about permanent Australian settlement, and did so in 1970. He was now accompanied by Sandra, his fiancée, and they married before returning to Australia eighteen months later. Glasgow was exciting on the career front, as he found his ‘dream job’ as advertising manager on the Rangers’ News, simultaneously feeding his football passion and career ambition, while Sandra worked for IBM. But none of this was enough to deter them from returning to Sydney. Long-term career opportunities in Glasgow were limited, but his Sydney lifestyle and sense of cultural belonging were decidedly the greatest attraction: I had a very good circle of friends, male and female, I loved playing golf, playing tennis, … social activities, and had got involved. I felt very much a part of that particular little Jewish community in Maroubra and Coogee and Randwick and all around that area, so I felt very comfortable. I felt like I’d sort of become a part of a community. … I just knew that this was something I wanted to come back to.

150  Life stories of modern migration Gerry’s confidence in his Australian career prospects within a social comfort zone proved to be fully justified. He resumed his job with the Australian Jewish Times, with other writing tasks alongside advertising management, and developed enduring contacts in advertising and management. Over the next 35 years his career flourished, including profitable ventures into retailing; founding a newspaper, the Australian Jewish News, which took him back to Melbourne; private hospital management and lobbying; investment management with Sigma Pharmaceuticals and finally investment consultancy. Characteristically modest, he insisted that for the first twenty years or more this was the product of luck and serendipity, ‘I kind of do stuff that interests me at the time, and when I start, when my interest starts to roll I look for other opportunities, and I’ve been very fortunate, opportunities have usually come my way’. The prosperity which followed facilitated frequent global travel for business and pleasure, particularly to France; he became an ‘unashamed francophile’ and bought a Côte d’Azure apartment for regular holidays. This dizzying trajectory saw his parents join him in Australia, was accompanied by two divorces, and, in 2005, marriage to ‘my third and last wife’, who enabled him to become, enthusiastically, ‘a father for the first time’, to her daughter from a previous marriage. Gerry was convinced that the ‘opened doors’ to success in Australia would have been closed in Britain, and his celebration of migration as the key brought him to reflect critically on cultural deficiencies in Britain holding others back. Writing about his increasing lack of desire to visit Scotland, and preferring to meet his brother in France, he recalled a recent visit to Glasgow to meet family and friends. Three days of observation confirmed his judgement: This exposure (the first in 11 years) to life and lives back there proved an enlightening experience and indeed frightening glimpse of what my life might have been like had I stayed. My cousins, my brother’s friends had not really ‘grown’ and were living in what to me appeared to be a kind of time warp. Clearly, not everyone in Britain does not have ‘global’ views, but it would be very easy to be seduced by that close and cloistered environment had I not sought to open myself to new opportunities.

When Gerry emigrated in 1967 these views formed no part of his thinking. So his new perspective was a product of long years of experience and observation, stimulated by his sense of different attitudes and opportunities prevailing in Australia. Unlike some of the later generation of emigrants from the 1980s, who claimed to be driven out by a politically inspired malaise in Britain, often associated with Margaret Thatcher, Gerry saw a malaise fostered from the bottom up by a seductive ‘close and cloistered environment’. While his politics were emphatically con-

Migration and career stories  151 servative, his later thinking about reasons for leaving Britain were not far removed from those of ‘Thatcher’s refugees’ who saw little future for themselves in Britain. This nurtured his developing sense of a multiple identity, reflecting the ‘global views’ he found lacking in Glasgow. He took out Australian citizenship relatively late in 1986, fifteen years after his second migration, following an epiphany about Australia being ‘home’, and expressed equal pride in his Australian and Scottish loyalties; ‘I’m proud of being an Australian citizen too, but I still feel very Scottish.’ Despite the enormous importance of his Jewishness in nurturing his sense of community he insisted that ‘I see very much my Jewishness as a religion’ rather than an ethnic identity. And while he had retained dual British and Australian citizenship, he referred to the first as his ‘European passport’, treasured for his new links to France and underlining his diminishing attachment to Britain. The stories told by Gerry Bullon and Robin Higgs chart long careers shaped variously by the migrant experience. Recalled long after their migration, their accounts are coloured by late twentieth-century preoccupations with notions of cultural identity, from Robin’s ‘souls, wandering between the north and the southern hemispheres’ to Gerry’s balancing of his Australian citizenship with his Jewishness, Scottish heritage and francophilia. More recent migrants, with shorter stories to tell, and less opportunity for reflection, were more likely to arrive with recent tertiary education, often began their careers in the new country, working in inherently mobile occupations, In an increasingly globalised economy the mobile habits of these young, educated Britons facilitated working holidays and overseas careers. Richard Gittins, for example, had his first exposure to Melbourne in 2000 on a student exchange between Manchester and Melbourne universities. The experience whetted his appetite for further travel and return to Melbourne, although his parents, intrepid travellers, had already bequeathed their own youthful ‘wanderlust’ to their three children, all of whom enjoyed family trips to North and South America, Europe and Mongolia. On Richard’s return to Manchester and completion of his science degree he promptly left for further backpacking in the United States, Asia and Europe, resting with his parents who had moved to Italy. But his Melbourne obsession persisted, achieved through a working holiday visa in 2001. With no clear career ambition in mind, a fortuitous opportunity at the stock exchange became a promising career, with an employer eager to sponsor him for a permanent resident visa. A short visit to Britain convinced him that ‘I needed to make Australia permanent’. In short order he bought a house in an inner suburb, settled with an Australian girlfriend, enjoyed mostly annual visits to Britain and by 2007 was building a holiday house. Realisation of his student ‘dream’, had been seamless, and with treasured permanent residence he could comfortably speculate about future

152  Life stories of modern migration mobility to enhance his career: ‘I’d like to go and, more a financial decision, to move overseas for work for a bit, and for the career aspect, but that’d probably be in a couple of years.’20 New industries spawned by the IT revolutions from the 1980s generated some of the most visible young highly skilled migrants; their mobility did much to change the face of modern migration. Their skills were inherently mobile, even permitting work from home for international employers, but the overseas lure was always a prospect, generating patterns of opportunistic migration. Mark Pacitti’s story underlines the easy possibilities.21 His surname betrays his Italian heritage, but he was born in Glasgow in 1970 to Scottish-born parents with Italian and Swiss-Italian parentage. His thoroughly Scottish close-knit family regularly enjoyed European camping holidays and took overseas travel for granted. Still, prone to suffering bouts of homesickness away from family, he stayed home during university years at Strathclyde and Glasgow universities, graduating with a Master’s degree in IT and moving to London in 1998 for his first job. There, he conquered most of his homesickness demons, and was sent to Melbourne for a six-week transfer. The experience was transformative: I fell in love with the place and moved out to live about 12 months later. I had it very lucky – I came with work for a twelve-month secondment, and at the end of the 12 months they asked if I wanted to stay permanently. They also offered to pay for my permanent residency visa – talk about Christmas in June!

Mark’s easy path to migration was in line with the generous employment conditions accruing to highly skilled IT professionals; it augured well for a promising Melbourne career. Within months he felt that ‘I had it all, on paper’, including a ‘nice flat by the beach’, a sports car and ample disposable income. By 2006 he was married to an Australian, with a growing family, had bought a beachside house and enjoyed the kind of success common among senior IT employees. He might well have progressed in similar ways had he stayed in Britain; his employer was British and flourishing IT opportunities were arguably greater there. But migration suited Mark, even though the torture of his homesickness appears to have dominated his story until he was married and settled in Melbourne. Academics and global careers Long before migrant mobility became democratised in the late twentieth century some industries and occupations had routinely facilitated global

Migration and career stories  153 circulation. We have seen how the rise of multinational corporations fostered expatriate employment around the world, with senior executives and skilled professionals enjoying consecutive postings, often to the more remote outposts. A more traditional mobile sphere was academic employment. Universities for most of the twentieth century relied upon free circulation of academic labour, especially among anglophone countries; it intensified with the expansion of higher education from the 1960s. In Britain and North America university selection systems promoted internal mobility by encouraging undergraduates to move away from home, often a first step to more ambitious international movement. Competition among universities for talented postgraduates then stimulated global circulation, so, by the time of the academic job search, prospects of transnational employment were virtually taken for granted; for many, regular overseas sabbaticals and conferences intensified transnational experience. Nicholas Collins experienced frequent childhood sojourns in France and Spain, learnt the languages unusually early, specialised in Spanish at university and moved seamlessly into language teaching, first in England and Spain, but mostly in Canada. Looking back on a career of more than 30 years of tertiary teaching in Vancouver he reflected that his migration was ‘really a slow and comfortable process. There was no moment of Eureka and, honestly, there was not ever really a plan. Things evolved and I let them develop happily’. His Spanish expertise stimulated a continuing dimension of mobility, with routine sojourns in Alicante, where he had owned a house for 25 years. Combined with a congenial life in Vancouver with his second, Japanese, wife, he had reason to be satisfied: ‘So here I sit in sunny Kitsilano [Vancouver suburb] near the beach and reflect how fortunate I have been in my schools, universities and jobs.’22 Nicholas’s second marriage to his Japanese wife hints at a significant propensity among academics to enter multicultural marriages. In Western multicultural societies this has become commonplace over recent decades, but frequent academic mobility and circulation opened the way to heterogeneous partnerships ahead of more common practice. Overseas students and scholars brought multiculturalism to university campuses in advance of their host societies, enhancing interracial socialisation and courtship.23 Stan Jones’s story exemplifies these features of combined geographical and marital mobility, alongside reflection on the implications for his identity. Born in 1947 in North Yorkshire (near ‘some of the landscapes of my soul’), he followed a middle-class boy’s pathway, from a scholarship to grammar school, to Hull University, a PhD in German in 1974 and long sojourns in Germany. A paucity of academic jobs in Britain led to a postdoctoral fellowship at Auckland University for a year, followed by short-term teaching at Boise State University, Idaho. He was drawn back to Britain in 1976 to a lectureship

154  Life stories of modern migration at Leicester University, but, still susceptible to New Zealand’s attractions, he leapt at a permanent position in German literature at the University of Waikato in 1978. Sabbaticals in Germany enriched his German studies, and in 1987 at Waikato he expanded his teaching by co-developing a media department, which he developed for 25 years. These bare bones of career and mobility were mirrored by his personal life. While at Leicester he had met Dinja, a Dutch-Australian, and they married in 1976 shortly before the move to Waikato. The marriage afforded congenial visits to her family in Sydney and produced two sons, but in 1990 they divorced, maintaining shared parenthood. By 1996 he was remarried, to Anja, a newly arrived colleague in the German Department. This, he added, ‘has deepened my relations to Germany and to Europe, while causing me to reflect frequently on the identity of us as ex-pats (she cannot, of course, carry two passports as I and my boys do). My sons are Kiwis in all ways, but I am not and will always be English here. My wife is German (we use the language exclusively) and hence a stage more removed from New Zealand “authentic” culture.’24 Academic migrants, notably those in humanities and social sciences disciplines, engage routinely in their teaching and research with issues of identity, and have ample opportunity to reflect on deeper implications of their mobility. Stan identified stages in the evolution of his identity as he traversed the globe. During his fellowship year in Auckland ‘I had seen much of the place, got to know Kiwis … and added a few more dimensions to my idea of who I was, especially as a successor to the British Empire and the colonialists. I also became aware of “tangata whenua” [Maori for “people of the land”], but had no access, as an unreconstructed English/Yorkshireman, to Maori beyond the language.’ His long, fluent familiarity with Germany, alongside frequent visits to Yorkshire, added a further element to his multilayered identity; an extended stay in Berlin in 1990 confirmed my predilection for the city, as I arrived not long after the Wall had collapsed and so could observe the Germans making their history right on the spot. I also went back to Yorkshire with the deliberate intention of systematically revisiting the sites of my childhood – much of which I did on foot. My visit confirmed my identity to me as a Yorkshireman, together with the realisation that I shall never go back to live there; … for preference, I choose something different from what brought me up – a place like Berlin-Kreuzberg, for instance. This was reinforced by contacts made in this time that I still maintain.

But Stan’s long-term residence, and citizenship, in New Zealand brought a more enduring commitment, and a sense that he could only partially belong. ‘I style myself consciously as a citizen of New Zealand’, he

Migration and career stories  155 insisted, but his Englishness remained an ‘inevitability, like my physical constitution, it’s the existential condition. … I’m fated to be part of the woodwork here, but in the European dimension.’ But there was unfinished business to his ‘avowed identification with New Zealand’. Knowing the crucial role of native language competence for engaging with local cultures he was committed to learning Maori. We have seen that for many migrants Stan’s serial employment and residence in England, New Zealand, Idaho and Germany could foster a ‘citizen of the world’ identity, emphatically in opposition to national identities. Stan rejected any such notion; he used the concept regularly in teaching, ‘as a criterion for analysis, description, … I don’t see it as any sort of criterion with which I can really do much for my own identity. … There is nothing global about me, no, it doesn’t figure on my horizons at all.’ In place of the global he clung to distinct local loyalties, to Yorkshire, Berlin and Waikato, which his academic work happily enabled him to renew regularly. Still, the transnational perspective persisted, as he speculated about future moves, but to one location only: ‘If we go back to Europe, then it will be to Berlin.’ The academic predisposition to question and deconstruct everything can extend to the academic career itself. Disillusion and attraction to alternative occupations is hardly unusual, but, while it is relatively rare for tenured academics to switch occupations, when it does happen career change is likely to follow intense reflection and self-scrutiny. It can also come as an abrupt surprise, the case with Hartmut Kopsch after an otherwise characteristic academic career shaped by serial migration. Hartmut was actually born in Cologne, Germany, in 1941, but his family left in 1948 after the communist takeover in East Germany. Subsequently brought up in Widnes, Lancashire, his German background occasioned some bullying, with lasting scars. But he became thoroughly anglicised while attracted to European culture, remained bilingual and completed an economics degree at Sheffield University in 1963. He had no thought of an academic career and was employed by the Ministry of Agriculture in London, a good position but ‘incredibly boring job’. A research project, involving study of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, piqued his interest in the Canadian west and provoked ‘a real tussle in my mind about what to do’. He ‘saw the pictures and absolutely fell in love with British Columbia’. So after nine months’ work he boarded the Empress of Canada for Montreal and the train to Vancouver.25 In Vancouver the young, footloose migrant worked hard for three months at enjoying the environment that had lured him. Soon shocked to realise that ‘my money was beginning to run out’, he sought work. His degree paved the way for work in a stockbroking firm, and longterm settlement beckoned. But a visit to the scenic campus of the University of British Columbia inspired him, and a quick enquiry led to

156  Life stories of modern migration ­ ostgraduate enrolment in political science, partly supported by some p teaching ­assistance; in the 1960s degree programmes, and jobs, were easy to come by with the right qualifications! A two-year course brought Hartmut to feel at home in Vancouver, and to think about permanent settlement. The environment continued to inspire him, he relished freedom from the English class system and revelled in ‘the feeling of being in a meritocracy, which is what I think Canada was, certainly in the sixtiess. … The kind of school that you went to was totally irrelevant, what spoke was ability.’ The intense study and teaching, moreover, brought him to reflect on his future direction. ‘I loved the time so much doing the MA’, he recalled, ‘that I thought “maybe I want to be an academic”.’ To ‘put it to the test’, he resolved to seek a university position, and was offered a year’s contract at Oregon State University. But while still in Vancouver, crucially, he met his future, English, wife, Jane. Jane had emigrated, alone, to Vancouver, also in 1964. After a year of secretarial work in London she was open to change, possibly permanent migration, and had support from an aunt, long settled in Powell River, north of Vancouver. Keen to seize the available opportunities in Canada, and questing for something better, thinking ‘I don’t want to be a secretary for the rest of my life’, she enrolled to do an Arts degree at UBC, a course she would ultimately complete as a serial migrant in three different institutions and countries, finally graduating in Australia. In 1966 she joined Hartmut in the move to the university town of Corvallis, Oregon. They shared a passion for further mobility and a future outside Britain.26 The year of teaching in Oregon confirmed Hartmut’s academic ambitions and he began to seek PhD opportunities at some of the better American universities. But United States residence presented risks of conscription for the war in Vietnam, so he looked further afield and was accepted, with a scholarship, at the London School of Economics. The move provided the opportunity to marry in England among family in 1967, and for three years they thrived among the cultural delights in London they had missed in North America. But their time in England confirmed their feeling that ‘our main goal, really, was to get back to Canada’. By this time, in 1970, the North American academic job market had contracted sharply and Hartmut had the common experience of an accumulating pile of rejection letters. A congenial postdoctoral fellowship in Germany deferred the agony for a year, but by then he had shifted his sights to the antipodes, and late in 1970 received two offers, one from New Zealand and one from the University of New South Wales. The larger Australian city won their vote, and in 1971 Hartmut joined the Politics Department in a tenured position. His academic career was now on a sound footing. The sound footing did indeed seem to foreshadow lifetime success.

Migration and career stories  157 Hartmut thrived in the Department’s intellectual atmosphere and loved his teaching. They promptly bought a house in the idyllic setting of the George’s River on Sydney’s southern edge, enjoyed a six-month sabbatical leave in Germany and over four years Jane gave birth to two daughters. Both of them had niggling doubts, recalling their earlier fondness for Canada, which prompted some comparative judgements of the two countries. Both environments were satisfying, but the cultural settings seemed different. In Vancouver Hartmut had enjoyed exposure to a smorgasbord of European immigrants and cultures, ‘because there I met Hungarians, Germans, Italians, people from every European country, virtually, and there was a very attractive way of exploring … and talking about these kind of issues, about national identity, what does it mean living in Canada’. By contrast, in Sydney, at the University and in Como, he had little exposure to the influx of Mediterranean migrants of the previous two decades. I think that’s what I missed, in Australia, is that the culture was a kind of bastardised English culture, in a sense, because all the people at the university … were all English by background, …. So a lot of those class attitudes that you had in England were not quite the same in Australia, but there were those roots there as well. So that which I found, in English culture, difficult to identify with, I also found in Australian culture difficult to identify with. Yes.

These were irritants, certainly, possibly magnified in retrospect, but not enough to question an established academic career and congenial family life in suburban Sydney. A job offer in Canada would have been tempting, but ‘there were no thoughts about leaving Australia, at all, we were quite happy’. The questioning would emerge from a different source. Ironically it was his very academic success which prompted Hartmut to become unsettled and to embark on a new quest for direction. He loved his teaching, enjoyed research grants and time off and was happy in his family life. ‘All that was wonderful.’ But satisfaction bred new scepticism about direction, based on the question he asked himself repeatedly about how he would look back on his life’s meaning at 65: ‘and I couldn’t find an answer to that question’. What some refer to as a mid-life crisis, for Hartmut in his mid-thirties took the form of a question about meaning and purpose in life. At one point, Jane recalled, he considered becoming a social worker. But the searching led quickly to an investigation of ‘various different kind of religious experiences, including eastern mysticism’. After a few months of ‘exploring Christianity’ he experienced a thorough conversion; after six difficult months in their marriage Jane too turned to the same evangelical form of Christianity. The implications of such a dramatic conversion for their life in

158  Life stories of modern migration Australia remained uncertain, ‘I just went on teaching and doing new research.’ On the surface Hartmut had no reason to anticipate change of occupation or country. A devoted Christian life was not necessarily inconsistent with an academic career. But in another moment of revelation ‘I sensed God speaking to me very clearly that I was to leave, and go to England, … so I quit the next day. … And that’s how we came eventually to go to England.’ In 1978 Hartmut enrolled in theological college in Bristol training for Church of England ministry. Across the next three decades he moved to a series of Anglican English ministries, within an evangelical and charismatic framework and a mission to evangelism; this continued on a voluntary basis after retirement in 2006. The dramatic shift in direction brought deep changes in Hartmut’s attitudes to identity, now reassessing his past through the prism of a Christian identity, ‘a kind of process of your mind being renewed, reexamining everything’ from nation to family. Most emphatic was the healing of his long hangover of prejudice against England stemming from childhood suffering. ‘I feel that England is the place that we were called to. So I feel much more positively towards it now than when I was a child.’ But the serial migrant influence remained, evident in his celebration of the benefits of cosmopolitanism, a familiar refrain to most modern migrants. Living together with people who have that similar experience, coming from another country, who are obviously pursuing something beyond that, otherwise they wouldn’t be there, it does definitely shape you, and it certainly broadens your horizon, and makes you more reflective about the mother country, because you now have something to compare. … I find that all incredibly attractive, the reality of difference, and I find homogeneity frightening, social homogeneity, the idea of living in a small rural community and never being out of it. … I think you have a great advantage having lived together with other migrants, of experiencing that.

It is impossible to disentangle the causal relationships between Hartmut’s serial migration, his academic career, Christian conversion and dramatic change of vocation. Such changes are rare among academics, and indeed religion rarely appears in decision-making of our interviewees, or migrants more generally. But his story underlines the academic propensity for self-reflection and evaluation, which is prone to be magnified by the experience of migration. If academics have traditionally been more open to migration than most other professionals, and less likely to suffer from the cultural shocks of transplantation, they have also been inclined to reflect unusually deeply on the nature of the transnational experience, the comparative merits of different destinations and variable working conditions. Perhaps their routine openness

Migration and career stories  159 to further migration made them less likely to celebrate their moves for realising a ‘better future’ for themselves and their children, like most migrants in this chapter. There is no sign that British academics’ taste for serial migration will diminish in the near future, especially given further narrowing of the academic job market in Britain since the 1990s. In this they remain one high-profile example among others of how career drives mobility. In the next chapter we will see how family migration patterns have interacted with the career imperative. Notes   1 Spencer, interview.   2 Garnett, From anger to apathy; Mandler, English national character, pp. 196–242.   3 For example Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 189–217.   4 Whiteside, interview and written accounts; see also Chapter 2.   5 The reference to Richard Briers recalls the popular television sitcom The Good Life focused on the Goods’ self-sufficient lifestyle in Surbiton, Surrey; according to John it was ‘all the go at the time’ in Barrow.   6 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 202–9.   7 Jupp, English in Australia, pp. 86, 154.   8 Durham, interview and written account.   9 Conversation with Paul’s youngest son, Paul Durham, 14 February 2012. 10 Communication with author, 26 October 2007, 14–18 January 2008. 11 See Chapter 2. 12 S. Gunn and R. Bell, Middle classes: their rise and sprawl, London, Phoenix, 2003. 13 Catherine Taylor, interview and written account. 14 Jefford, interview and written account. See also Chapter 7. 15 www.fionawoodfoundation.com. www.australianoftheyear.org.au/honourroll/?view=fullView&year=2005&recipientID=108. 16 Higgs, interview and written account. 17 The Australian honours system was introduced in 1975, but operated variously in some states alongside the old Imperial system until 1989. 18 For Robin’s resume see www.medicolegaldoctor.com.au/prosthetic_testing. html. 19 Bullon, interview and written account. 20 Gittins, interview and written account. 21 Pacitti, interview and written account. 22 Nicholas Collins, interview and written account. 23 On multicultural marriage generally see, for example, J. D. Owen, Mixed matches: interracial marriage in Australia, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2002. A 2008 Canadian report noted that mixed unions formed 4 per cent of couples in Canada and were dominated by ‘the young and highly educated’. A. Milan et al., A portrait of couples in mixed unions, Ottawa, 2008, www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11–008-x/2010001/article/11143-eng.htm#a8.

160  Life stories of modern migration 24 Jones, interview and written account. 25 Hartmut Kopsch, interview. 26 Jane Kopsch, interview.

6

Family, love, marriage and migration: the push and pull of private life

‘In the end, family is what matters, not the place you live’ (Barbara Totten, emigrated to Perth 1981).1

If work, career and opportunity have been primary drivers of migration, dynamics of family and marriage have been no less powerful in shaping migrants’ life stories. Family priorities can eclipse career in the quest for a new life, and migrations sparked initially by work or adventure can be vulnerable to unanticipated turns in family relationships. The rising tide of divorce from the 1960s began to disrupt the common postwar narrative of stable family migration, so it is hardly surprising that marital and family dysfunction and dispersal came increasingly to dominate migrant memories.2 But this bleak outlook is not the whole story. On the brighter side migration can operate as a spur to marriage, facilitate modern forms of extended family ‘chain’ and retirement migration and provide a stage for the global drama of moving love stories. The larger context to this is the emergence of discretionary migration in developed countries in the later twentieth century. Emigration for love, escape from a dysfunctional family or from a bitter divorce, would have been almost unthinkable less than a century ago. But in conditions of greater affluence, when even ‘lifestyle choices’ can determine migration decisions, emotions have come to play a larger role alongside material factors. Divorce, crisis and family dysfunction: the dark side of migration Barbara Totten’s story illustrates some of the more negative family themes, yet within a brighter context of ultimate vindication. Brought up in an Ayrshire village 30 miles outside Glasgow, she described herself as, originally, a homebody, with ‘no interest in being anywhere else’. Paradoxically, a strict family upbringing inspired her to seek escape from 161

162  Life stories of modern migration family, but not from Ayrshire. Initially she attempted classic late 1960s youth rebellion, ‘trying to be a beatnik but not quite making it’. But in 1969, aged 21, marriage provided a more concrete escape. Her husband was Australian-born, in Scotland since the age of six; after his parents’ divorce he had lived in English children’s homes, then with an aunt in Glasgow. An enduring desire to return to Australia intensified after marriage, while Barbara resisted; she had two brothers out of the country and, as the sole child in Scotland left to her parents, was reluctant to leave them alone.3 By the mid-1970s they had two children, but from the start there were festering tensions in the marriage. Barbara describes her husband as a dominating force, helpful domestically but controlling, His desire to move to Australia simmered as an irritant, alongside her desire, as the family grew, to move to a bigger house in the same district, always flatly refused. A catalyst came in 1980 when she visited one of her brothers, Nick, the closest in age and her childhood soul mate. She was 20, and ‘broken-hearted’ when, in 1969, he married a French wife and moved to Canada, but returned five years later to live in France. Her 1980 French trip, alone, and the first time she left the country, gave her new perspective on her marriage and life in Scotland. ‘It was going to France that first of all made me think: “I don’t want to be in this marriage any more”. … I saw everything from a distance and when I came into Glasgow on the plane and it was raining and grey and dirty, there was my husband meeting me, I thought: “I don’t want this”.’ Tense discussions about separation followed, without resolution, but now she was more receptive to new overtures about an Australian move. They lived close to an explosives factory and the Hunterston nuclear power station, her engineer husband’s employer; there were perennial local fears about their proximity to a key Cold War target, and they agreed that their children’s future might be brighter in Australia. More crucially, Barbara began thinking of migration as a cure for their ailing marriage. ‘I thought: “maybe that will save things”.’ Emigration to save a troubled marriage has been a common theme in recent migration testimony, potentially a triumph of hope over experience, but with high prospects of unanticipated consequences. This was Barbara’s experience. Despite being the hesitant migrant she thrived in Perth from 1981, whereas her enthusiastic husband’s expectations remained unrealised. She reflected that ‘for me it was the making of my life; for my husband it was the breaking of his life in many ways. He was never again the happy man I knew in Scotland.’ But the ‘making’ of her life was hard won through severe trials, not least the still fragile marriage. Her husband was unable to find decent work so started a cabinet-making business, which never achieved great success, and led him into depression. Their worsening financial plight was alleviated when, within a year

Family, love, marriage and migration  163 of arrival, Barbara’s parents joined them in Perth. While it was complicated by their ‘boomerang return’ to Scotland, then prompt re-emigration to Perth, it did enable them jointly to buy a shared house. Eventually their distress in the face of Barbara’s deteriorating marriage prompted them to move, which became the final catalyst, in 1994, inciting Barbara to initiate divorce. It was obvious to Barbara that the Australian marriage rescue had failed, but she persisted. Seeking an outlet for herself she applied through university adult entrance to study English literature part time, but was blocked by her husband. ‘I was accepted and very excited to be doing what I had missed out on as a young person. My husband, however, was not happy about me spending time on myself which should have been spent with the family.’ She had greater success taking a new job in a bank, a boost to her confidence enabling her to find a network of friends. That was compromised too, when, a bank teller, she was the victim of a hold-up. Traumatised, she initially declined counselling, ‘because my husband thought it was unnecessary, considering I was not actually hurt’; he dismissed her anxiety as over-dramatising. But when physical illness followed, doctors traced the cause to the hold-up, and a panic disorder, requiring years of treatment. Under counselling she concluded that her illness ‘stemmed not only from the hold-up but from my continuing feelings of anxiety regarding aspects of our family life. I was ill for some time and the family floundered without me to look after them.’ While divorce seemed inescapable, it too was painful. After sale of the house remaining funds barely enabled a deposit on a smaller house for each of them, Barbara’s in an ‘old run-down area of Perth’. Her daughter had already left home but her sixteen-year-old son decided his father needed him more than his mother, so joined him, but ‘he blamed his unhappiness on me, of course, for leaving him’. ‘This was the worst time in my life – not being with my family.’ But she soon thrived in the transformed conditions of her new-found autonomy. She advanced at work, adding new friends to her widening network. The bank sent her on assertiveness training and public speaking classes, and her confidence flourished. ‘My life’, she thought, ‘only started, really, ten years ago … maybe six years ago, where I became strong and independent and able to do whatever I wanted to do. If you’d said to me do this, ten years ago, I could never have done it, I could never have spoken to you.’ She traced her ‘very good life’ to her migration, enabling her to thrive in Australia while single. ‘I have never remarried and have lived alone since my divorce. Australia has been very good to me and I feel very fortunate to have the life I have.’ As a free agent Barbara now acted on a desire to visit Scotland, where further revelations awaited. In Scotland she had balanced a pride in her Scottish heritage with pride in ‘being British, which’, she acknowledged,

164  Life stories of modern migration ‘is quite odd’. Her patriotism, drew on Scottish cultural traditions, literature, music, Highland traditions and support for Scottish independence. This was hardly touched by growing attachment to Australia, but the visit to family, friends and her native Ayrshire brought a dramatic epiphany. Driving north she was at first thrilled to be back, enjoying family and friends who commented on her new-found poise and confidence. The excitement was short-lived. Very quickly she began to feel ‘foreign’. ‘I came to the little places I’d stayed and felt like I didn’t belong, no part of me belonged anywhere, in Scotland, it was interesting.’ The alienation was deep enough to drive her away, after only two days; her two brothers, one in London, one in France, provided a welcoming refuge, but only in France did she feel composed, so her future overseas travels were mainly to France. During later visits, ‘very much drawn there’, she contemplated settling, but by then her adjustment in Australia was powerful enough to convince her that ‘I would be heartbroken to leave Australia, … wherever I go, it’s just wonderful to come back.’ On reflection, even during the interview, Barbara concluded that her distaste for Scotland stemmed from deep change in her identity, which evolved from both her migration and her divorce. ‘When I was there I was the Australian Barbara, I wasn’t the Scottish Barbara, and I didn’t want to be the Scottish Barbara, I wanted to get away from it as quickly as possible.’ But the Australian Barbara, for whom ‘family is what matters’, was inseparable from the family Barbara, and that continued to complicate the extent to which she could think of herself as a free agent. While her daughter lived in Perth her son had married and lived in New Zealand, and in the face of family dispersal she continued to juggle her desire for reunion. ‘Loneliness is not avoided by a place but by people who love you and although I have many wonderful friends, I will choose to go where my family are, be it New Zealand, France or anywhere in the world – except Scotland.’ Rejection of the Scottish homeland is rare among Scottish migrants, but dilemmas of home and mobility are common for those buffeted by twin disruptions of migration and family breakdown. Ten years after the interview, retired but studying for an anthropology degree, Barbara’s feelings remained powerful, even with the emotional pull of a New Zealand grandchild prompting annual visits, while a pregnant daughter kept her in Perth. ‘As I said when we talked before – family, not place.’4 Barbara’s history illustrates ways in which the ‘dark side’ of migration can be brightened by a more encouraging side, possibly from resilience born of the challenges of adaptation to new countries. For example, that most controversial feature of family breakdown, child custody, is aggravated dramatically when one parent changes countries, but migration can create unexpected developments, positive or negative, with long-term consequences for divided family members. Jessica Carthew’s

Family, love, marriage and migration  165 story might have been an unremarkable one of marriage breakdown and divorce without the intervention of her migration. Born in 1969 in London to an English father and Dutch mother, she grew up with a cosmopolitan background, her father’s accountancy career moving the family between England, Jamaica and the Netherlands until she went to Hull University at 19. Within two years she married and moved to her husband’s hometown, Worcester. They lived initially with his family, working in the family business while she tried, unsuccessfully, to finish her degree. She recalls few times when she felt happy in the marriage, aggravated chronically by her husband’s later adultery. ‘It was very stressful, there was always some crisis with the business, college or family, all very dramatic.’ With her parents in the Netherlands the crisis deepened for her through lack of support, especially when her first child was born in 1997, shortly before she left the marriage. But her outlook changed dramatically. With custody of her son she enjoyed a two-month trip to Canada with a woman friend, enough to kindle enticing thoughts of migration. On return her confidence revived with new friends and she explored prospects of starting a beauty therapy business near her parents in Devon. ‘I had a wonderful time, I discovered that people liked me when I wasn’t part of him … and so it was a really good experience.’5 Prospects changed again in 1999 when she met Alan and married a year later. Alan was a skilled pattern-maker with a mobile background similar to Jessica’s and work experience in the United States. Despite the birth of a child within two years the prospect of migration to Canada appealed. Alan owned his parents’ house in Birmingham, but Canadian prospects in his trade were superior. A job offer in London, Ontario, provided a temporary work permit, effectively a pathway to application for permanent residence after one year. The way seemed clear, until Jessica’s ex-husband flatly refused to agree, even after mediation, to their son moving. A long-drawn-out custody battle loomed, which they could eventually win, but at crippling cost, and too late to act on the Canadian job offer. The dilemma was agony for Jessica, but eventually she concluded that ‘the fight would have been pointless, as well as costing huge amounts of money, allowing my ex-husband to rule our lives and, worst of all, exposing Brendan to a lot of stress. After several months … I decided that Brendan would be fine with my ex. It was a wrench.’ Once in Canada in 2004 with a two-year old, the separation was painful but was eased by regular visits, usually three times a year, and by the passage of time, including birth of a third child in 2006. Most crucially she could celebrate a successful migration, contented family life and belonging in the local community. Despite a long-drawn-out wait for permanent residence – increasingly the Canadian norm – her optimism persisted, with an ultimate vision of reuniting with her son. ‘It is getting easier. I hope Brendan will choose to come and live with us in the future. He is

166  Life stories of modern migration now nine and loves coming to visit.’ She embraced prospects of Canadian citizenship, an easy decision given lack of commitment to England or an English identity, increasingly yielding to a cosmopolitan outlook: ‘I’ve always considered myself to be a world citizen, or European, definitely, a European.’ Cosmopolitanism affords no secure protection against the agonies of separation from children, but Jessica’s determination to adapt in Canada brought some relief. Most migrants have always paid a high price for their mobility through family separation, usually from grandparents and extended kin. A rising divorce rate, combined with easier mobility, has added child–parent separation to the challenges. The sanctuary of home and mobile happy families Few migrant narratives fail to recount painful memories of family separation and disruption, even without the major dramas of divorce. The stories are remarkable in their diversity, not least among families otherwise notable for their closeness. The differences challenge Leo Tolstoy’s famous dictum in Anna Karenina that ‘All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. ‘Happy families’, especially mobile ones, have their own stories of emotional pain to tell, and few resemble each other. Zoe Brook’s story details one example. Born in 1967, Zoe was the youngest of three daughters in a family she characterised as close-knit, despite the frequent absence of her father, a successful sales manager. His work mobility resettled the family from England to Ayrshire when Zoe was only four, the first of several moves but vital for instilling in her a lasting Scottish identity. Life for Zoe and her sisters in rural Ayrshire remains in her memory as a childhood idyll.6 To me that was just the most perfect childhood you could have, because we had horses and lots of animals and, in those days we used to be able to just saddle up and go away for the day. We would be surrounded by countryside, every weekend was an adventure and I’ve very, very fond memories of that time. … Mum was always there when we came home from school, and Dad was away quite a lot on business, sometimes for six months of the year, but I was still close to him.

The idyll was challenged in 1982, when Zoe’s father agreed to manage the company’s Sydney office. For the family the project was largely consensual. Fifteen-year-old Zoe, ‘just so excited’, and her middle sister, while typically sad at missing friends, took to the experience as an adventure and adjusted to their new school and university environments. But crucially migration split the family. The eldest daughter, Helen, aged

Family, love, marriage and migration  167 19, had started university and moved to Glasgow. Reluctant to risk an uncertain fate in Australian universities, she resolved to complete her degree and then follow the family. For their mother especially this was an emotional shock; she was ‘devastated’ at leaving her behind, but for years hoped she would join them, most obviously during a long visit to Sydney on a university break. But, predictably, a long-term relationship, a house purchase and the start of a professional career cemented Helen’s stay in Britain; ultimately she worked in Scotland while living in Northumberland with two daughters. Zoe was next to pursue a separate path. After finishing school in 1985 she felt unprepared for university so pursued a fledgling career in retailing, with a course in retail management. At the same time her father effected a career change, downsizing from high-stress corporate management and moving from Sydney to the New South Wales north coast in Coffs Harbour on ten acres of land. This left Zoe to move to shared apartments in Sydney, but with the comfort of routine family visits to yet another idyllic rural setting. By 1989 she had met a New Zealander, who pressed her to go to New Zealand with him, and finally succeeded by asking her to marry him. A second migration gave Zoe a different insight into family life. They joined her fiancé’s family on substantial land north of Auckland, where they were to work in the family business while living in a separate house on the property. Both family and business seemed to be dominated by his mother, ‘she was the complete matriarch and everybody bowed down and did what she wanted’, and he promptly submitted to her intrusion into their lives. ‘It was so bad that his mother used to come over to our house and just walk in without knocking, because she was used to doing that.’ Very quickly Zoe witnessed the strange transformation of her partner once back in his native environment, a not uncommon experience for women who emigrated with new husbands or fiancés to their homeland.7 ‘In Australia he was completely the opposite to that. … He seemed completely different to me, and he stopped being attractive to me because he was so under the thumb.’ There were horses on the property, which enabled Zoe to find some lone solace, recalling childhood pleasures in Scotland. But within weeks she broke from rigid expectations about obligations to the family business and found a promising job with a bank in Auckland. The family life remained oppressive and deprived her of her voice. The planned wedding was delayed and receded further into an uncertain future. Her parents’ planned wedding trip became simply a three-week holiday, an unexpected shock for them when they saw their daughter’s plight. ‘I’m naturally a talker, and I will chat and chat, for hours on end, but my dad saw me there, sitting, quietly subdued.’ ‘This is not you, you know’, he said, and promised her a home in Coffs Harbour if she decided to leave. Her partner took to excessive drinking, and heated

168  Life stories of modern migration rows, the ‘last straw’ when he threw a plate and a broken piece struck her chin, requiring four stitches in an emergency medical centre. Within a week she was on a plane to Sydney, fleeing with whatever she could carry. Return to the parental home in Coffs Harbour brought welcome relief. The loss was material as well as emotional because she had ‘ploughed all my salary for two years into our house, we’d had a lot of work done on the house. … They really owned it but for two years I paid the mortgage. So I came away with nothing, of course my mum and dad were furious.’ Six months at home provided recuperation time, although the hurt and anger faded slowly, rekindled when the ex-boyfriend made regular calls asking her to return to his family, always promptly rebuffed. ‘I licked my wounds’, she recalled, found work and enjoyed two years housesitting alone in a comfortable beach house. She accumulated more savings – ‘a little nest egg’ – and her thoughts turned to further travel, particularly to renew contact with her sister, who had just given birth to a second daughter in England. She planned a year’s working holiday and in 1996 bought a return ticket. But her prescient mother had other thoughts. ‘My mum and dad came to the airport to see me off, … and my mum says to me now that when they put me on that plane she knew I was not coming back. … “I just had a feeling that you would get back to the UK and that’s where you would settle”, so, she’s quite insightful as it turns out.’ It was Zoe’s first trip back to Britain, and her memory is of ‘quite weird’ anxiety and uncertainty on the long plane trip. ‘I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to find at the other end, and I hadn’t spent any length of time with Helen for donkey’s years, so there was no guarantee.’ The anxiety was short-lived. Promptly she fell in love with the Northumberland landscape, enjoyed staying with her sister’s family, met a succession of new friends and made exciting trips to Scotland. After only a few months she felt ‘very at home’ and decided to stay, settling on Glasgow which she knew best and where she promptly found promising work. It is a decision she has mostly never regretted, enabling her to stay close to her sister Helen in Northumberland while the other sister in Sydney had close contact with her parents. ‘It’s almost quite fair really.’ In diasporic countries in the early twenty-first century it is unremarkable for even close families like Zoe’s to be comfortably separated in these ways, with three children in different locations variably distant from each other and their parents. In her view it was accommodated by their parents’ open attitude. While her mother was often tortured by guilt that they ‘did the wrong thing by taking us there in the first place’, they always, after open discussion, supported their daughters’ decisions. Her father, especially, encouraged them to forge their paths, wherever it took them. ‘He says: “You go and you do what you want to do, you live your life, it is your life, you’ve only got one life”, and that’s the way we’ve been brought up.’ The compromises were hard won emotionally, but left Zoe in par-

Family, love, marriage and migration  169 ticular, without children, with a transnational view of ‘home’, located still with her parents. After New Zealand the Coffs Harbour home had been there for recovery, and it remained as a welcome respite during regular visits. For many of her Glasgow friends their childhood parental home, ‘down the road in South Lanark’, remained with their families, with their old bedrooms still intact. For Zoe, because ‘we’ve all moved so often’ this was a ‘totally alien concept’; ‘home is where Mum and Dad and the family are. … To me it’s still, when I go to Mum and Dad’s house, that’s like me going home, although I now think of Glasgow as home, but, it’s home in a different way, I’ve never really had this thing about just having one home.’ The idea of complex understandings of home is ubiquitous among migration scholars, but remains largely focused on migrants’ place of origin, a ‘locus of nostalgia and nightmares’ which can be ‘imagined, recreated, longed for, remembered in the present’.8 For Zoe, by contrast, home was a shifting product of memory and close family attachments. Idealisation of the captivating Coffs Harbour parental home perhaps recalled her Ayrshire childhood, remaining a refuge from more traumatic times in New Zealand, but it was also a product of her complex history of modern mobility. Making the heart grow fonder: transnational love stories Migration has often been bound up with the mixed fortunes of love and marriage. British migrants of the 1940s and 1950s, during housing shortages and overcrowding, could use the long sea voyage to the antipodes as an effective honeymoon, investing enduring memories of travel with romantic overtones. New countries and new marriages could also make for a challenging cocktail, with spouses’ high expectations of each other and their new homes linked inextricably, for better or ill. Hardship and adjustment could test the strongest partnerships, although ‘it brought us together’ is a common response to questions about how marriages fared under stresses of settlement. The use of migration to realise a love quest has, perhaps, been less common; like the pursuit of changed lifestyles, it is a product of a new age of discretionary migration which lends itself to the fulfilment of personal desires. But the journey can be arduous. When distance and migration join the turbulence of highly charged love affairs, both heartache and fulfilment can be prolonged. For migrant lovers distance might make the heart grow fonder, but it can also intensify the stress. An instructive example, Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘long-distance’ love affair was long-distance in both space, between Britain and Australia, and time, as its fortunes fluctuated for nearly four decades of highs, lows and competing marriages. In 2005, when we conducted the interview, Elizabeth

170  Life stories of modern migration had been settled, finally, since 2001, with her Australian partner, Michael, in idyllic hilltop surroundings in the Dandenong mountains outside Melbourne. Her daughter’s family joined her two years later and lived virtually across the road. Evidently this fulfilled a lifetime of yearning for Elizabeth and Michael. It began in 1961 as an adolescent romance when she was 16 and Michael, in London seeking work with the BBC, was 22. She remembers the love-at-first-sight nature of their encounter as an instant commitment, that ‘we immediately both knew that this was to be a crucial relationship’. Crucial indeed, but the ideal love match was not easily realised. The age difference dictated several years of school and university still ahead, and with poor work prospects in Britain Michael returned to Australia, pursuing a law career. Years later he told her that back in Melbourne he boasted to his friends ‘I’ve met the woman I’m going to marry’. But while they continued to write, distance pushed them in other directions. Five years later, as she was completing her degree finals, Michael visited her in England, despite his closeness to a girlfriend in Melbourne. Their ‘indecision and confusion’ worked against any firm understanding, Michael returned to Australia and married within a year. In 1967 Elizabeth married too. ‘I gave up on Michael, … but Michael wrote impassioned letters not to marry Paul, and in fact turned up two weeks before the wedding to stop me, but I’d had enough of this so I did marry Paul, which was probably a mistake.’ But while she turned her back on Michael she admits that even then she had reservations about her marriage. Paul, she thought, needed help, and she decided ‘this was someone I could support, who had enormous talent, enormous ability, and, and yet was flawed emotionally and I could provide the bandage on his wounds and allow him to be successful. Of course that doesn’t work, but (laugh) I did try.’9 Even in the early years her marriage was troubled. Paul’s drinking increased and he was unfaithful ‘almost from the beginning’, but she persevered; they had ‘shared aspirations’, she had stimulating work with a consultancy firm and they prospered financially, with a holiday house in Somerset. Six years after marrying, in 1973, she had her only child, Rachel, and gave up work for full-time care. Within a year Michael, still married and with a young son in Melbourne, visited London. Not surprisingly they were soon together again. With Paul’s knowledge I got myself into an affair with Michael and we rekindled all the feelings, which culminated in my coming to Australia [in 1975] for two months with Rachel, when Rachel was two and a half. By this time he had a son and so was anchored here with the son with the mother [in Melbourne], and I obviously had all my ties back in England, including my husband, we decided we couldn’t do it, we would maintain contact, but I went back.

Family, love, marriage and migration  171 The tentative finality suggested here was short-lived. Within a year, as her marriage deteriorated, she was driven by her desire, with Michael’s encouragement, to try again. In 1976 ‘I made the decision to finally and decisively leave my husband, close extended family, friends etc. and go to Australia’. Hoping to obtain permanent residence, she sought an extension to her tourist visa, but after interviewing Michael, the Department ‘cancelled my visa altogether, so I couldn’t even come as a tourist’. The prospect of permanent settlement in Melbourne with Michael now seemed insuperable, her account does indeed imply a sense of closure. At least that is how she came to remember it: ‘Eventually, therefore, I just gave up, stayed with my husband and made a satisfactory life. Michael married a couple of times more, became a barrister, and also made a satisfactory life.’ Her satisfactory life encompassed a move to Somerset, a career shift to teaching, then to social work. Significantly her mother lived with them, but Paul stayed in their London flat during the week, joining them on weekends. It was, she recalled, ‘an increasingly semi-detached marriage, he went on holiday without me and we were increasingly detached, his drinking was accelerating, but it was still a marriage, it was still a relationship’. The letter-writing continued, at times with unpromising results. Michael’s second marriage ended in the early 1980s, and after a year of feeling demoralised he wrote to urge Elizabeth to join him: ‘I am now free, come and join me, please come and join me, I am free, I have no entanglements.’ This was unwelcome, just as she was re-establishing stability, with her career, her daughter in school and her mother comfortably settled; she particularly resented his failure to persuade her in person. ‘I was so angry I wrote back a really stinking nasty letter and so he burnt all my letters and said: “That’s the end of her”, which of course it wasn’t! (laugh) … I just said, why didn’t he come, why didn’t he physically turn up?’ Still, correspondence continued, and spasmodically he did turn up again, first in 1988 for three weeks, then in 1997; ‘both times feelings were rekindled’. By 1997, each of them in shaky marriages, they were ready to go beyond temporary ‘rekindling’, with increasing certainty that they were reaching towards a union. A pointer to change was their joint purchase of a run-down farmhouse in France, not for permanent settlement but for weekends and holidays. Her now married daughter, Rachel, and her husband, themselves keen on a move to France, warmed to the idea and joined her in regular renovation trips. This seemed to mark something of a turning point, as Elizabeth and Michael each made more frequent short-term visits, and both marriages moved inexorably towards collapse. By 2000 both had left their spouses and in 2001 Elizabeth emigrated permanently to Melbourne, now with seamless Immigration Department approval. When Rachel’s family arrived in 2003 it seemed the culmination of a lifetime’s love quest, settlement with Michael and daughter and grandchildren close at hand.10

172  Life stories of modern migration Such epic love stories would be of interest even without the relatively infrequent complication of distance and migration. For Elizabeth the complication loomed large, and her emotional tug of war about changing country mirrored the turbulence of her love quest. In every respect but her love for Michael she was a reluctant migrant, intensely attached to place, especially locality, with little attraction to Australia. After comfortable settlement she described herself as ‘the least likely person to want to come to Australia’. Years earlier she had mourned her departure from Ealing Broadway, her birthplace and site of childhood memories, and later from London to Somerset. It broke my heart leaving London to go to the West Country, let alone I didn’t want to leave London, I didn’t want to leave Ealing, for God’s sake! … When I got married and moved to Wimbledon from Ealing, I used to almost weep when I saw Ealing Broadway up on the sign on the Underground when I was catching my district line train to Wimbledon, because I wanted to be in Ealing Broadway.

Quick to attribute her travel shyness to ‘temperament’, she saw her grief over leaving England as a simple extension of her attachment to locality and a degree of aversion to Australia. [It’s] not just the fact that I’m temperamentally unsuited to it, but also I very much value British culture, … I value the British newspapers, I value the cut and thrust, the sophistication of it, I value the art galleries in London, I value the proximity to the Continent, I don’t like sports, I don’t like the sun, I don’t like beaches! (laughter) I find the materialism offensive, especially when everybody has so much, everybody’s so lucky and wealthy and doesn’t seem to appreciate it and only wants more, and of course that’s true of some English people too. … But in general the English don’t have as much, they don’t live in great big spreads with horses and things, not unless they’re really rich.

Elizabeth’s ‘homebody’ identity seems surprising in the light of her background. Her treasured home in Ealing was not an ideal site of family harmony. She was close to her mother but described her father as a weak man but a ‘domestic tyrant’, while her mother, whom she described as an ‘appeaser’, worked to limit the conflict. Significantly, Elizabeth’s daughter, Rachel, used the ‘domestic tyrant’ label to describe her father. Elizabeth’s parents, both from working-class backgrounds, experienced upward mobility together; her father became a schoolteacher and her mother served as mayor of Ealing, ‘a real go-getter, a really ambitious woman, but she was in this domestic role’. Tensions with her controlling father might have pushed Elizabeth to leave home early, but closeness

Family, love, marriage and migration  173 to her mother, her ‘aspirational’ desire for education and attachment to Ealing kept her there until attending Sussex University, an experience ‘somewhat hampered by my relationship with this renegade Australian’. In later years her English identity deepened, while her Ealing commitment intensified through growing closeness to her mother, who moved to Somerset. Here, she thought, was a consistent family theme of female solidarity against difficult males. There’s been a very strong female theme in the family. I mean … we lived in the same place as my sister, so we had her and her daughter there and she had an alcoholic husband. None of this is coincidence is it? Both of us took on lame ducks and domestic tyrants. … So there’s these two sisters, two daughters, and my mother who was around, only died in 2000. So she was a matriarch and a strong group of strong women and obviously this has been a theme of my life.

Her closeness to Rachel, she thought, was ‘not accidental’. Missing from the strong feminised culture was a single positive male role model, ‘until Ian [Rachel’s husband] and Michael. They’re the first two decent male role-models that I’ve come across, personally.’ Elizabeth’s reluctant migration, then, came with compensations beyond joining Michael: sustaining close connection with her daughter, a son-in-law she could respect and finding family harmony rarely experienced in England. Her choice to settle with Michael in Melbourne rather than persuade him to move to Somerset, which he was willing to do, was based on a self-abnegating conviction that in rural England he would be unhappy, unemployable and separated from his son. ‘I just knew it wouldn’t work, I knew, and it wasn’t something that I could ask him to do, because why ask somebody to do something that you know will fail. I wasn’t convinced I could do it either, but I thought I’d a better chance … than he had.’ Competition between the benefits and missing her homeland remained an emotional struggle, as she wrote about her attempts to accentuate the positive. It’s been very difficult to come to appreciate what is offered here rather than dwelling on what was offered in England. Because I didn’t actually choose to come here and because I’ve never wanted to live anywhere but England, because I’m English through and through and all my allegiances are Euro-centred (and because I don’t like sport and beaches!) I struggle with the desire to disparage what is here.

As though in an afterthought, she later wrote to underscore the positives. ‘I forgot to mention, and it’s important, certainly to me, how happy I am despite all the aforementioned reservations. Rachel and family are

174  Life stories of modern migration here and I’m very happy with Michael and have an extremely enjoyable life. I’ve been very fortunate and enjoyed all stages of my life, but this is the best one.’ She had earlier spoken of the beauty of her local environment in the Dandenong mountains, of attractive architecture and of Melbourne, a ‘stunning, stunning city’, so discovered physical compensations. Moreover, she enrolled to study for a PhD in history and gender studies at Melbourne University and was thoroughly caught up in the research and collegial environment. Homesickness was ever-present but manageable as she pursued her project of adaptation. To the best of our knowledge romantic love, until recently, has rarely worked as a stimulus to migration. But in the historical record there is nothing new about migration being dictated by marital agendas. The history of migration is full of events of large-scale social engineering, of women migrants especially, used to achieve ‘gender balance’ in colonial populations by importing potential wives for male setters. Colonial histories of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa testify to British imperial reliance on the ‘feminine civilising mission’, which often sent shiploads of single women into male-dominated colonies, where the rhetoric of marriage as destiny was ubiquitous. By the mid-twentieth century other examples appeared, like the ‘war brides’, where love indeed did play a role.11 But love stories like Elizabeth’s imply a different trend. They underscore the relative ease of modern migration, despite barriers of immigration bureaucracy, and the widening range of motivations for global mobility. Love, like migration, can be enduring or fickle, but it is genuinely new for migrant decisions to be driven, and potentially reversed, by affairs of the heart. Even the relative ease with which couples like Elizabeth and Michael made multiple transnational journeys to be with each other would have been unheard of, save among the very wealthy, only a generation earlier. Love might prosper in a new age of discretionary migration. It may be no accident that these stories of love and migration come predominantly from women. While there are important exceptions, women in our interviews have been generally more candid about their emotional lives. Men’s accounts of their relationships are inclined to be more commonplace, with shorter descriptions of searches for a partner, and details of wedding timings alongside more detailed recall of career and travel experiences. But their stories still point to powerful ways in which romantic desires could drive migration decisions. Rod Blackburn, for example, had a solid education and employment record in automotive engineering when, aged 25 and single, he left his promising future with Vauxhall for a job with General Motors Holden in Melbourne in 1966. But this was hardly a career-driven migration. Crucial to his thinking was the end of a year-long affair with ‘a very attractive and intelligent woman’. Intensely self-critical, he blamed himself for the end of the

Family, love, marriage and migration  175 affair. ‘I was a very immature person and didn’t pick up a lot of signals and bits and things that weren’t very sensible in general life terms, … it eventually became clear, to her at any rate, that I wasn’t the man for her.’ Unsettled, lacking in self-confidence and keen for a new career opportunity, he reflects, somewhat cryptically, that there were other considerations, and that his 1966 migration, like others, ‘was undertaken to escape the consequences of my personality’. One of the other considerations was expressly to find a new relationship – or relationships – and he regretted that his choice of social life in Australia, focused on motoring clubs and learning to fly, was ‘not best suited to meeting members of the opposite sex’. A ‘brief but very exciting’ relationship with a colleague’s sister in Sydney failed because of her distance from Melbourne, and lack of a stable relationship was again one of the factors when he decided to return to England in 1970.12 By this time Rod had made a career change into computer engineering with IBM, leading to prompt employment in England. But before long his restlessness asserted itself, aided in 1972 by an offer from Shell of a twoyear expatriate position in Cape Town. He had few qualms about moving to apartheid South Africa, confessing that he was then ‘politically naive, and had not given it much thought other than vaguely understanding that apartheid was not a good thing’. There were compensations as his political awareness dawned. ‘It was possible to live a good life without being too conscious of the negative aspects of apartheid, however reprehensible that might seem. An undercurrent of conscience always existed, but the effort and courage needed to put up a fight was beyond me.’ Crucial compensations were evident in a more flourishing social life, a ‘ready-made social environment for me to join’. Before long, on a blind date, he met Jill, a South African born of English parents. The attraction was immediate; within a year they were married, and by the time Rod’s contract with Shell expired they had a two-month-old daughter, happily settled in a Cape Town suburb. At the end of the contract he had little desire to return to England and before their departure he received an employment offer from IBM, which meant a return to England financed by Shell, followed by a prompt return trip to Cape Town financed by IBM. He obtained permanent residence, their son was born, and they seemed set for a permanent and comfortable settlement. Rod had lingering thoughts of returning to Australia but while Jill’s mother was alive she was reluctant to leave. The death of her mother and conflict over apartheid in the late 1980s brought things to a head. Echoing other migrants in South Africa, Rod recalled that ‘the prospect of our son having to join the Defence Force and be used to help maintain apartheid was unattractive to us’. The conflict was soon to be resolved by majority rule under President Nelson Mandela, and Rod reflected that ‘had we stayed another two years we might not have left’. An offer from IBM in Canberra led to

176  Life stories of modern migration another migration in 1989, helped by Rod’s sister who had, at his urging, emigrated to Sydney years earlier and eased their arrival. Security anxieties, an instant job transfer and Rod’s preference for Australia did much to shape this final, eminently successful move. But for him migration to a ‘third country’ was a key element in the cause of marital harmony and adaptation. His serial migrations, and a sustained English identity, had left him with a routine awareness of the emotional costs of relocation, with singular implications for transnational marriages. This was an ongoing subject of discussion. ‘Because I said to Jill when we got married: Why don’t we go and live in Australia because it’s a country which is neither of our countries and we can make a life there, and both of us will then have that slight insecurity of not being in their home country any more and neither one of us will be feeling: “Well, I’m in your country and resenting it”.’ The insight is common among migrants in transnational marriages, a pointed reminder that, for young single migrants, especially, the chances of making a transnational, or cross-cultural marriage, are particularly high.13 The potential tensions anticipated by Rod suggest heightened risks of marital breakdown, which is reflected in our files.14 ‘Eric’, who moved several times between Britain, New Zealand and New York over fifty years, and had two marriages, with British women, observed from his psychotherapy practice in Wellington that a frequent factor in marriage breakdown was the mixed national or cultural backgrounds of spouses. ‘I see people in my practice, when they come from different places, when you get a British person who’s married a New Zealander, or other countries, and they can’t agree where they want to live, which is a real problem.’15 Some writers label the result of these mixed marriages ‘accidental immigrants’, mostly referring to women, who followed a partner to his homeland, but with no other desire for migration, sometimes with outright reluctance.16 ‘Olivia’s’ story follows the pattern explicitly, albeit with complicating factors like career and adventure impulses. She met Douglas, a New Zealander, in London while attending the Royal College of Music. Both graduated in 1976 as professional musicians, Olivia as a cellist, Douglas a flautist. Their preference was to work in Britain, but Douglas’s New Zealand scholarship ran out at the end of the summer term. The British government ‘required him out of the country that day, by midnight’. After ‘a rather rapid six-month courtship’ they were forced to decide their next move. She reflected, ‘I suppose this is a typical story, students meet, fall in love, then what to do with their lives’. A job offer for Douglas from the Symphonia of Auckland forced the decision. He departed promptly, with Olivia to follow soon afterwards. She recalls her steadfast reluctance to leave England, but admits that ‘at the same time it was an adventure, so I can’t say that he dragged me, but at the same time it certainly wasn’t a hundred per cent of my preference’.17

Family, love, marriage and migration  177 In the event Olivia’s journey began with an uncommon adventure, on a freighter carrying breeding cattle through Panama. The sole paying passenger, in company with six of the crew’s wives, she was initially ‘viewed with a certain amount of suspicion’. The suspicion soon melted and friendly relations prevailed, with a great deal of drinking in the relatively cramped conditions, aggravated by cattle quarantine regulations prohibiting disembarkation in ports en route. Her abiding memory was that ‘I drank all the way out. I was drinking half pint mugs of Bacardi and coke. I haven’t touched the stuff since!’ She disembarked near Wellington to meet Douglas ‘with a colossal hangover’, which blunted her first impressions and enthusiasm for the country well before they travelled to Auckland and his family. Despite Olivia’s reluctance to emigrate, the prospects for congenial settlement were reasonably promising. She thrilled to the natural environment on the drive to Auckland, and was offered a cellist position with the Symphonia of Auckland, alongside Douglas. She also had the advantage of a welcoming extended family through an aunt who emigrated as a war bride. But there were countervailing negatives, characteristic of much migrant culture shock. She was dismayed by an impression of philistinism, especially 1970s domestic architecture, incredulous that ‘houses that looked like bathing huts were actually what people lived in’. Relief at an initial welcome from Douglas’s parents soon gave way to shock at hostility from his wider family; on the first evening ‘immediately I was called a Pommy bitch by one of the brothers-in-law’. Stark class difference was at the heart of this apparent culture clash. Olivia came from a professional middle-class background in London, with an architect father and musician mother, although she described her family as dysfunctional, and her parents later divorced. Douglas’s were struggling working-class, eventually running a dairy, but, in Olivia’s description, ‘petrol-pump type people’. His mother clearly had aspirations for upward mobility, sending her three eldest children to England to study music or art; ‘music is seen as a way for social mobility, isn’t it?’ A measure of Olivia’s alienation from the family was their decision to elope, tape-recording the wedding for his family. As if to confirm Olivia’s apprehensions, ‘the mother was so worried that we might be living in sin that all she said was “thank you”, rather than “congratulations”.’ The negative experiences took their toll on Olivia in ways characteristic of homesickness among reluctant migrants, which soon affected the marriage. ‘It was incredibly hard. … Everything was so different. The honeymoon period was not a long one, and I went into a sort of a slough of despond really, I didn’t cope very well at all.’ Despite making friends and working hard she craved further activity, and enrolled for an arts degree at Auckland University, with bursary and scholarship, fitting her classes and study around the orchestra’s demands. She calculated that

178  Life stories of modern migration it was three years before her mood turned, and then largely because ‘I got through the despond, by keeping my brain occupied’. They bought a house, marking her adjustment, and she delighted in New Zealand’s environment. Then, in 1980, the Symphonia of Auckland collapsed and both were made redundant.18 The joint job search began again, Douglas receiving the first offer – from the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in Hobart. Olivia admits to feeling a ‘wrench’ at leaving, following their recent house purchase, and losing her aunt’s family’s support. But professional needs had priority. ‘After all our training it seemed we wanted to follow our career rather than settle in Auckland.’ Given her New Zealand experience she had apprehensions about resettling. ‘I sort of felt a bit like a seedling that’s been pulled up and wasn’t sure that I was going to transplant that well.’ But Hobart was a pleasant surprise. The orchestra manager immediately offered her a job, she was impressed by the ‘superb high quality’ of the orchestra and warmed to a different atmosphere ‘because, everyone was open to new ideas, it was wonderful’. She continued her academic studies at the University of Tasmania, now for a history honours degree. She enjoyed Hobart, had a good marriage and ‘my entire social life was based around the orchestra’. The early years were all she could have wished. ‘I mean I was totally fulfilled, and I remember at the time thinking: “You know even for a million dollars I wouldn’t change my life”.’ Then it fell apart. Olivia and Douglas became close friends with another married couple in the orchestra. Unknown to her, in 1983 Douglas ‘fell in love with my ex-best friend’, for a time she was the only member not to know. ‘It was just so awful the orchestra knowing, me not knowing and then all the social splits…. He just carried on, and I just couldn’t bear being even in the same bar as him, let alone anything else.’ She dropped her academic work ‘because I was suffering from depression and tears and all those sort of things’. Separation followed in 1984, divorce in 1985, and in 1986 she took study leave and returned for eight months to London, where she forged closer relations with her recently repartnered father; he was now a reformed drinker, a quite different man from the father she knew as a child. He cheered her by suggesting he would like to have her settle in England, but she was contracted to return to the orchestra so returned to Hobart. An opportunity for an exchange with a Perth orchestra player enabled escape from the ‘ridiculous’ situation in Hobart. Permanent prospects there seemed to promise a ‘good life’ in Perth, but she was yet to resolve the pull of London and her father, who urged her to return. Inspired by the fact that ‘someone wants me’ she returned in 1987, ostensibly for her father’s sixtieth birthday, but was barely settled when he died. With little support from her mother and no orchestral work in London, Olivia now faced a struggle to support herself. ‘I got a job in a

Family, love, marriage and migration  179 record shop in London which was horrendously hard, earning an absolute pittance and living in a squat, because I couldn’t possibly afford anything else.’ With help from her ‘beloved grandmother’ she qualified to teach English as a foreign language, but with such meagre pay that she turned to music teaching. Ironically, ‘that rather ghastly prime minister’, Margaret Thatcher, had briefly opened a ‘window of opportunity’, enabling trained professionals to gain ‘qualified teacher status’ without formal teacher training. Stable employment as a music teacher brought dramatic improvement in her outlook. In 1991 she formed a relationship with John, not a musician, which flourished into a de facto partnership. Her first daughter, Emily, born in 1993, seemed to promise a settled future in England, but then in 1997 her second daughter, Lucy, died at birth. The tragedy plunged her into depression, which eventually brought a government early retirement pension on medical grounds. More crucially, with little support from remaining family in England, she now looked to her migration history for a new start. That was why I came to New Zealand, I knew that I couldn’t stay in England, because there was no support for me, or my daughter, from anyone, so I knew it had to be either with friends in Australia or family in New Zealand. … I knew I had to start again, either that or I was going to live through my daughter, because, oh, she was the only thing that was keeping me alive at that point.

Ultimately the supportive extended family of her aunt, located near Hamilton, turned the decision in New Zealand’s favour. ‘I got the support here I needed so desperately, and they gave it to me in bucket-loads, I can’t thank them enough.’ Their move in 1999 followed an earlier trip to New Zealand, John’s first, ‘to decide where to live’. The decision was easy, John loved the country, ‘it reminded him of Scotland, and Scotland’s the top place in the world for him’. The resolve to settle in Hamilton signified Olivia’s priority of close family support. A healing time followed, she turned to English teaching, John had work and Emily had a huge network of similar-age cousins to enjoy. But a further hurdle remained. Olivia had begun to worry that John’s behaviour was often ‘a bit odd’. Her depression initially obscured it, but in New Zealand he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. It was manageable between them, but became a threat when he was alone with Emily, as he abandoned her in public places and, ‘the last straw’, at the beach when she nearly drowned. An agonising decision followed. The relationship was mostly healthy, ‘it’s been a matter of protection for her, but it is very sad because actually, when he’s normal he’s fantastic, it seems like he phases in and phases out.’ But at her insistence ‘a very long drawn-out separation’ followed, with John barely understanding, ‘and it’s all entirely my fault etc.’, but

180  Life stories of modern migration they sustained regular contact and Emily was able to see him when she wished. By 2006 Olivia was thoroughly at home in Hamilton, a lifetime away from her alienation in the ‘philistine’ New Zealand of the 1970s. She was keenly aware of the epic life journey that brought her to Hamilton. ‘I certainly feel I’ve grown a huge amount. … I mean my life experience has not been easy, but just by moving I’ve grown a huge amount.’ Settlement in a small town in New Zealand brought opportunities that were inaccessible in London. ‘I’ve also got the most gorgeous piece of land, that is so beautiful and I feel free there, which I never felt in London, never ever felt free in London, because it’s just so small.’ Olivia’s original migration was shaped by love alongside career imperatives and thoughts of adventure. After Hobart and divorce her serial mobility was increasingly pushed mostly by family priorities, but she experienced all the agonies familiar to migrants who struggle with homesickness and alienation, ultimately returning to her migrant past to surmount critical dilemmas. She has been in strong company in the late twentieth century in resorting, repeatedly, to migration to resolve emotional challenges. These emotional challenges often seem to eclipse the primacy of the economics of migrant motivations, potentially positive or negative. Here the conventional ‘push’ drive might appear in the form of ‘flight’ from emotional trauma, as in Olivia’s move from Hobart or Zoe Brook’s from Auckland; alternatively, Elizabeth Taylor’s flight was to join her lover in Australia. In all these cases what is striking is the adaptability of migrants to changing conditions dictated by family relationships as well as mobility. Here we have barely skimmed the surface of ways in which, in recent decades, love, marriage and family – the push and pull of private life – drove migration decisions. Few developments could do more to mark a new trend of discretionary migration in an age of affluence. But ‘lifestyle’ factors, explored in the next chapter, were also at the heart of those shifting trends. Notes              

1 Totten, written account. 2 See Chapter 2 on divorce legislation and rising rates of marital breakdown. 3 Totten, interview and written account. 4 Communication with author, 15 February 2016. 5 Carthew, interview and written accounts. 6 Brook, interview and written account. 7 See Amanda Stuart in Chapter 8. The experience was common among war brides in the 1940s.   8 F. Stock, ‘Home and memory’, in K. Knott and S. McLoughlin (eds), Diasporas: concepts, intersections, identities, London, Zed Books, 2010, pp. 24–8.

Family, love, marriage and migration  181   9 Elizabeth Taylor, interview and written account. 10 Clark, interview and written account. 11 M. Harper and S., Constantine, Migration and empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; A. J. Hammerton, ‘Gender and migration’, in P. Levine (ed.), Gender and empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 157–80. 12 Blackburn, interview and written account. 13 See, for example, Ros Smith, Introduction; David Tucker, Chapter 2. Owen, Mixed matches. 14 Out of 135 interviewees in the project 35 (25.9 per cent) had transnational marriages or partnerships; 11 of these (31.4 per cent) ended in divorce. 15 ‘Eric’, interview. 16 C. E. Kelley, Accidental immigrants and the search for home: women, cultural identity and community, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2013. 17 ‘Olivia’, interview and written account. 18 In the same year some Symphonia members founded the co-operatively run Auckland Symphony Orchestra.

7

The quest for new lifestyles: migration, treechange and grey nomads

The reason we chose Canberra, I didn’t know anything about Australia, and Sue [emigration agent], said: ‘What are you looking for?’ and because it was winter I was looking for the sunshine, I didn’t want wet and cold, I didn’t want too hot, you’re dripping, humid, hot, and ‘I want a good lifestyle’, so she said: ‘Canberra’s what you need’. So she, she chose it, really. (Elaine Jefford, emigrated to Canberra, 2005)1

Elaine Jefford, a senior nurse and midwife, echoed the climate-conscious sentiments of countless postwar British emigrants, from those fleeing the austerity-driven years of the 1940s, marked in memories of devastating winters, to more prosperous nomads of the early twenty-first century like herself. The push of inclement British weather and the pull of warmer climates, like those in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, has become a cliché in migrant recollections, and official immigration propaganda was quick to incorporate it in adverts like the Australian ‘Poms in the sun’ motif.2 Canada, with its mostly sub-zero winters, enjoyed less of an advantage, a seeming contradiction for those fleeing bitter cold and wet. But Canada also had warmer and more reliable summers, and still offered something beyond climate in greater space and the promise of ‘outdoor life’, in later years summed up in Elaine Jefford’s shorthand, ‘lifestyle’. We have seen the evolution of lifestyle goals in previous chapters, as weather preoccupations expanded into desires for a better ‘way of life’. At one extreme this could be expressed in escape stories from urban societies more generally, to a way of life informed by ecological principles and anti-urbanism. More often a transformed lifestyle was just one aspiration among many, as with Elaine, whose primary motivation was to forge a professional nursing career, but in an environment less subject to urban overcrowding. In this chapter we will see expressions of the ways migration was used to forge that ‘purer’ lifestyle. It could be part of the original motivation, like Graeme Beverley’s aversion to London, ‘a very 182

The quest for new lifestyles  183 unfriendly, miserable town’, and big-city living, which led him ultimately to the interior of British Columbia.3 In others it could evolve from new country experience, but invariably underline links between migration and the quest for a simpler, purer, way of life. Ironically this coexists with a quite contrary passion for inner-city apartment living, often pursued in contrast to prior life in British provincial towns, villages or suburbs.4 But the anti-urban drive is more common. Island stories Island living is quintessentially the ultimate form of escape from the stress and pollution of urban life. Tourist clichés about tropical holiday retreats colour the meaning of island life generally but for permanent residents the reality, especially on larger islands, is likely to differ only marginally from that on the mainland. In Britain, for example, life on the Isle of Wight is mostly an extension of coastal suburban living; Vancouver Island in Canada is home to Victoria, the provincial capital; the Australian Philip Island in Victoria and Bribie Island in Queensland, with connecting bridges, are virtually indistinguishable from adjacent suburbs or countryside; and Waiheke Island off Auckland has its own central business district. It is true that larger, well-populated islands, like the state of Tasmania and Vancouver Island, have long held special attractions, distinct from the mainland, for residents and migrants alike, and readily lend themselves to rural escape living.5 But smaller islands retain romantic appeal, especially those with a degree of remoteness, close-knit community and some modern facilities. Most migrants, seeking something beyond a holiday retreat, gravitate to mainland locations, but for those hoping to combine escape with earning capacity, and those in the early years of retirement, islands can provide an ideal compromise. At the time of interview two from 121 interviews lived on islands, one each in Canada and Australia. In Canada Mark Whitear was on Salt Spring Island, one of the larger ‘Gulf Islands’ lying in the Strait of Georgia between the mainland and the larger Vancouver Island, with a mild climate relative to much of Canada. In Australia Michele Rumsey lived on the smaller Dangar Island in the Hawkesbury River estuary, about 55 kilometres north of Sydney. Of the two the much larger and more populous is Salt Spring, some 183 square kilometres and a population of about 10,500 in 2008. By contrast Dangar is a mere 29 hectares, under a square kilometre, with 267 residents in 2011. Each is serviced by ferries, although the ten-minute trip to Dangar in a tiny vessel from the village of Brooklyn is brief compared to at least an hour to Salt Spring from Vancouver and 35 minutes from Victoria, with the tempting ­costlier

184  Life stories of modern migration option of a short seaplane flight to Vancouver Harbour. Despite the contrasts both exude a sense of remoteness, difference and close-knit community, central attractions for permanent residents. Mark Whitear’s story suggests that he might always have been a candidate to seek some form of escape from the stresses of urban society. Born in 1956 to a Swiss mother, an ardent anglophile, he grew up in a village on the rural fringes of Welwyn Garden City. His father, an artist and illustrator, worked from home. In a close-knit family, with a younger sister and brother, Mark recalls an idyllic rural childhood, much of their food provided from the ‘huge’ vegetable garden, where he loved to work; but he was also drawn to things mechanical. While still at school he developed a mechanical talent, and at 13 ‘I used to service the family car and fix people’s cars for them’; in later years he began collecting and modifying fast cars. The practical inclination grew and kept him firmly away from academic studies at school, doing A-levels in technical drawing, Art and Woodwork, then three years at the London College of Furniture in east London. Throughout college years he did the long commute home to escape from a city that failed to attract him. After a stint of European travel he worked independently, designing and making furniture. Living in an apartment in Chiswick, London, he still hated the city and most weekends fled back to the family home, by now confirmed in his anti-urban mindset. ‘I have much more connection to rural life; I much preferred it there. … I stayed [in London] for a bit but had to get out, quick, because it drove me crazy, I don’t like cities much.’ A by-product seemed to be very little exposure to social life opportunities available to young people in London.6 Still drawn to rural living, Mark returned to live at home, but not without turbulent disruptions. In 1976 the family was shattered when his brother was killed in a motorbike accident, two years later Mark was injured on his bicycle in collision with a car. He was hospitalised with a serious hip injury, and for some time disabled; this curtailed much of his work, and slowly he returned to doing the simpler work he enjoyed most, making furniture. Then he met a Canadian, Rosalie. She had lived in England for 25 years, with two children from a previous marriage, but, crucially for the future, her parents lived in their native Vancouver. By 1982 they were living together in part of his parents’ old, very large house – actually a large converted laundry which they renovated in stages, eventually buying it from his parents. Neither questioned the prospects for a settled and secure existence in their congenial rural surroundings. The settled prospects soon faced new challenges. Throughout the 1980s they made three visits to Rosalie’s parents in Vancouver, where British Columbia’s natural attractions impressed Mark. Then about 1988 he experienced an epiphany when he read a book, The end, the imminent ice-age and how we can stop it.7 This echoed some 1970s alarms about

The quest for new lifestyles  185 global cooling and seemed counter to growing alarms of global warming, but the effect on Mark was similar, prompting his politicisation and an awareness of environmental threats. He and Rosalie joined the Green Party and, with help from the ecological leader, Jonathon Porritt, they founded a local branch of Friends of the Earth. For Mark the political rapidly became the personal, as he progressively sold his treasured fast cars and motorbikes and viewed life through an ecological prism. ‘I’d got a lot more interested in living more sustainably, having less of an impact on the earth and I really felt like I wanted to leave the planet in at least as good if not better condition than when I found it.’ At home conflict with industrial-scale adjacent farmers, who polluted their land with powerful pesticides, gave them ample cause for grievance and protest. ‘So we had to filter all our water, … I think it was more polluted than living in London.’ These complaints formed an instant push factor in waiting when overseas attractions began to beckon. Mark’s transformed outlook coincided with a surprise offer in 1989 from Rosalie’s parents. Since 1962 they had owned 500 acres of land on Salt Spring Island, and since retirement the burden of growing land taxes was difficult to meet, so they were keen to sell and offered it to Rosalie and her two siblings. While Mark had no deep urge to emigrate, he was already captivated by British Columbia, and seized the offer as a chance too good to refuse, capitalising on disillusion at home and his ecological visions. It seemed like: ‘Whoa, this doesn’t happen to you more than once in a lifetime’. So, Rosie and I talked about it, and … I was pretty keen. Plus, I was getting more disillusioned with work, because it’s all for big companies, really rich people, and it all just seemed, like bullshit basically. It wasn’t meeting my need for my commitment to the planet.

The location on an attractive island and a renowned beauty spot they had visited before was an added bonus. ‘Because I’d been here, and I really liked it, and this is a very beautiful place, because you’re on an island, and you’ve got the sea and mountains, and it’s an idyllic spot.’ There was complicated business to transact before they could make the move, but Mark’s ailing father had died in 1989, which would otherwise have made it difficult to leave. One of Rosalie’s children was finishing school, the other at university, and neither wanted to leave the country at the time. For Rosalie this was painful, and she was more cautious than Mark about the move, but it was not an absolute deterrent. Canadian immigration authorities also stressed that their long-term de facto relationship, falling short of marriage to a citizen, would complicate Mark’s visa application, so plans to marry in Vancouver were brought forward, with a wedding just before departure in September 1990, thus resolving visa issues.

186  Life stories of modern migration Once on Salt Spring more challenging complications awaited. Beyond an ideal of sustainable living they had few concrete plans for combining an island idyll with making a living on land with no habitable building. First thoughts were to ‘build a few cabins, rent them out, … and then when we got here reality kicked in, in a hurry’. Reality included steep land taxes and looming costs of building and bureaucracy, complicated by difficult relations with Rosalie’s brother, who wanted to share in the project and occupied a separate caravan, while agreeing on very little. The impasse was resolved only when her brother gave up the whole idea and went to Australia with his Australian wife. This enabled them to proceed with organic farming plans, attracting major tax concessions. With help from an American expert, Mark pursued a project in sustainable ecoforestry, deeply at odds with conventional practices of industrial-scale forest stripping. Here again, with the help of a small ‘portable sawmill’, his ecological ideals came into play: It’s a small access system that you can use for getting into the forest and managing it in a sustainable way, so … we’re taking out the weaker trees, you’re leaving the stronger trees, which is just the opposite of normal forestry. … You carefully do it so you don’t damage all the trees that are there because that’s your future sustainability.

Progress was slow, and entailed much hardship of a rough pioneering character, which was harder on Rosalie than Mark, who could revive childhood camping memories. I had fond memories of caravan holidays, with my family (laughter), … I kind of like roughing it, we didn’t have any running water, we didn’t have a well, or anything, so from September until July of the following year, we got water from the creek, or from the local park, and we had baths up in the woods you know, we put a cast-iron bathtub and built a fire underneath and got water out of the creek. … And you washed in freezing cold water (laugh).

Housing remained a major challenge, but they achieved that too unconventionally. With foundations laid, rising costs prompted a rethink, so they purchased an old house due for demolition on Vancouver Island. The building, minus a sawn-off veranda, cost a hundred dollars to buy and $29,000 to move – on a barge and trucks through the night – an instant, sustainable, house at vast savings. In the following years many of their plans came to modest fruition. The sustainable forestry thrived, Rosalie pursued mixed organic farming and restored the oldest orchard on the island. A ready source of sales was the local farmers’ market, where they joined a community of like-minded

The quest for new lifestyles  187 Salt Spring artisans and farmers catering to residents and tourists. Since the interview they realised their original intention of building tourist cabins, with an adjacent upmarket restaurant, The Apple Tree, run by a gourmet chef. But great riches, Mark insisted, had never been part of their agenda. ‘Neither of us was motivated by making a whole load of money, we were much more motivated by having a good lifestyle, that’s really what I like about here, … living in a sustainable way, more self-sufficient.’ The attractions of the long-sought lifestyle were evident audibly during the interview, conducted outside on the reconstructed veranda while the background cry of a resident peacock dominated a choir of continuous birdsong. Nestled on a hill between the sustainable forest, the productive garden and a wildflower meadow, with a panorama of distant mountains, the setting gave them ample reason to feel vindicated. The island itself, and its people, provided the clue to Mark’s satisfaction, and in retrospect became the main justification for his migration. Like most island residents, those on Salt Spring celebrated its beguiling charms. One boasted, ‘it is an enchanted place, this island, and everyone who came here from somewhere else can tell you exactly when and where the island worked its charms and cast its spell on them. … The siren call of Salt Spring is particularly seductive for creative types.’ Mark’s neighbours mirrored those in other getaway sites with ‘new age’ attractions, like Nimbin and Byron Bay in Australia. ‘Creative types’ included painters, sculptors, masons, potters, spinners, weavers, jewellers, writers and filmmakers. Gourmet food manufacture, mostly organic, especially bread and cheese, proliferated over the years.8 Occupational cohesion encouraged solidarity among the island community, for Mark the chief attraction. ‘I love it, it’s just a fantastic place, and there’s a great community, so I really like the small community side of this.’ It was, too, an ideal setting for them to remain politically active in Green politics, more fertile ground for their environmental passions than before migration. ‘There are a lot of like-minded people here, a lot more than where we were in England.’ The close-knit community, in Mark’s thinking, owed much to its island nature. Their migration had arisen from sheer good fortune with the offer from Rosalie’s parents; presumably an attractive mainland site would have been equally tempting. But over time the ‘siren call of Salt Spring’ worked on them too, bringing a conviction that the island environment transformed its inhabitants. It’s, just because you’ve got to go across that piece of water and on a ferry, it changes the kind of way –. Certain people, if you can’t handle it, if you need anything that a city provides you, well you’re not going to live on Salt Spring, so it attracts a certain kind of person here, and that’s good.

188  Life stories of modern migration Mark admitted that he was no nomad, averse to leaving anywhere once contentedly settled, manifested for years in his reluctance to leave the English family home. ‘If a place is comfortable and I like it, I’ll stay there.’ But while he might have been an ‘accidental immigrant’ in that sense, his outlook shared that of more calculated migrants in appreciating migration’s potential for personal transformation, again owing much to island living. ‘So many opportunities opened up from coming here, that I doubt that I would ever have had in England. … So my exposure to a very different culture, … a much closer community, just because it is an island, somehow it does make things really different.’ If Mark’s island journey was effected despite his antipathy to mobility, Michele Rumsey’s, to Dangar Island, resulted, by contrast, from a deep sense of identity as a global itinerant. She was conscious that this owed much to her family background. Even her birth, in 1964 on a houseboat at Kingston upon Thames, was, she thought, the start of ‘that mobility, that need for exploring cultures, that thing of freedom, that itinerant thing I’ve always had’. It was reinforced by a theme of mobility in her female family forebears. Her grandmother, attracted to an Alberta farmer, had emigrated from London after the Second World War to marry him, only to find herself isolated ‘on a farm in the middle of nowhere’. She returned with Michele’s infant mother. Her mother later travelled to Canada as an adult, forging enduring links with several step-siblings from her father’s second marriage. Three aunts pursued various temporary and permanent migrations to New Zealand and Australia, which sparked further moves and links among the next generation. Michele’s parents later divorced and remarried, and among the large and congenial blended families that resulted ‘there’ve been periods when every single one of us has been overseas, living in different areas of the world’. ‘Even growing up’ she absorbed ‘that feeling of moving around’ as her father’s work – in building and quantity surveying –was taken for granted as she became an adult. ‘My father’s always said I’d be happy living in a tent on the top of a hill.’ The interview with Michele was punctuated by this assumed nomadic persona, yet ultimately it was challenged by family life on Dangar Island.9 From adolescence Michele’s travel desires were matched by her ambition to forge an international nursing career. But there were interruptions. By 1981 she was a student nurse, but after two years ‘I went and lived in Greece for a year, as a 19-year-old’, supporting herself from work as a nanny and English teacher. Returning to Britain in 1983, she had ‘enjoyed myself so much it took a while to get back to nursing anyway’. A university nursing education course in Wales gave her the qualifications she sought by 1988. She then promptly fulfilled her long desire to retrace her maternal heritage in Canada. She nursed for a year in Vancouver, fell in love with British Columbia, travelled locally, and crystallised her ideas

The quest for new lifestyles  189 about travel and her identity, much of which she traced to her parents’ divorce. I mean it’s affected me over my life. … It’s allowed me to be open and take chances and do all those things, and I’ve often said to [my father] it changed my character in a good way, not a bad way. … Your friends become your family. The travelling community is an incredibly gracious one … supporting each other, especially in those days, the early eighties and nineties … actually everywhere you went, there was this automatic family, … you make these great friends who are all in the same boat, supportiveness, and then keep going.

Michele was lured back to England in 1990 by a London job and further education offer too good to refuse. She pursued her career relentlessly, moving from clinical nursing into managerial roles, with appointments in the professional trade union and then as Ethics Adviser for the international nursing and midwifery regulatory authority. She also partnered with David and by 1996 they had a baby girl. David had visited an uncle in New South Wales when young and obtained Australian residency. He was keen to emigrate, an appealing prospect to Michele. It fed her professional passions, while motherhood, she insisted, was no bar to her priorities of mobility or career. What happened was I fell pregnant. I wasn’t particularly worried about being pregnant, … I was mid-thirties, if I was going to be pregnant and have a family, then where I was didn’t matter and, hey, Australia was as good a place, if not better place, to bring up children, so we moved out here.

Michele approached the Australian project systematically, like her previous travels, with few concessions to constraints of family life with an infant. She had set up an international nursing consultancy with colleagues across the globe, which afforded modest earning capacity while travelling. Arriving in Perth in 1998 they planned to travel the country for several months before deciding where to settle. The financial plan was meticulous. After selling ‘everything we had in the UK’, they divided the proceeds into three portions, ‘one chunk for travelling, one for surviving before we got jobs, and one for a deposit on a house’. While David had planned the migration for years, he was less comfortable with the idea of open-ended travel before settling, which underlined Michele’s contrasting desire to learn about new cultures and places. His preference was to move straight to New South Wales, where his uncle then lived, and settle promptly. But the travel ‘cemented our relationship and his love of the open road’.

190  Life stories of modern migration In the event the travelling project was a great adventure for both of them, as they progressively fell in love with Western Australia, Tasmania and other ‘amazing places’. Their Northern Territory plans were cut short by Michele’s second pregnancy, so after six months of touring a location decision became urgent. David’s uncle had now moved to Noosa on the Queensland coast, where they were to drive from Sydney. Driving downhill towards the mouth of the Hawkesbury River they were struck by the view of islands and the small riverside village of Brooklyn and called in to investigate, promptly deciding ‘this is it’. Apart from the spectacular setting it had the material advantage of a nearby train stop for a one-hour trip to Sydney. The drive to Noosa offered further temptations but they rushed back to Brooklyn and took up a previously arranged rented house. The rental arrangement lasted a year, there were challenges obtaining Michele’s permanent residence visa and buying a house. But David found work in Sydney in his property valuation business and Michele continued to build her international nursing consultancy. Most crucially, their initial attraction to the area intensified, and they decided to settle not on the mainland but on Dangar Island, where they bought a house within a year. To a casual visitor the attractions of Dangar are plain. The few residents on the short ferry ride from Brooklyn all seem to know each other, and the small landing jetty leads to a beach with a collection of wheelbarrows used by residents to push goods up the heavily forested hill along small tracks to their homes – there have never been paved roads or cars. Nearby islands, the mainland and railway bridge, the river estuary and the Pacific Ocean provide a feast of aesthetic delights and recreation prospects. These features drew them to the island, and after six years, with growing children, Michele remained delighted with their choice. The children attended a small school in Brooklyn, they acquired a sailboat and kayaks and there were regular social events on Dangar and Brooklyn, from a ‘fantastic café’, theatre in the park, an island bowling green and cinema to canoeing regattas. Their closeness to fellow islanders defined much of their social life. The small population on Dangar contrasted with that on Salt Spring, with little capacity to support small farming and artisanal cultures so common on the larger island. Overwhelmingly the settlement was professional middle-class, mostly employed, with a small group of retirees. It was also, predominantly, an Anglo population, largely Australian-born, with 12 per cent British migrants and 13 per cent from non-Englishspeaking backgrounds.10 Michele stressed the multicultural diversity, although most of their friends were Australian. The professional commuter predominance suited her. She recalled her mother’s comment on a visit:

The quest for new lifestyles  191 Mum laughs because she comes here and says: ‘everyone comes off the ferry looking extremely professional and two seconds later they look like tramps, … that suits me perfectly’ – this very laid-back lifestyle but with professional people. And for us personally … I feel like we looked for it and found something.

Michele avowedly enjoyed the best of both worlds, with an active community life and engagement with the school, while her home-based work fostered her national and international nursing consultancy. Occasional international travel sustained her global and national outlook. Still, containment on a small island was diametrically at odds with the nomadic persona she had cultivated since adolescence. She did allude to negatives, particularly combining small children with consultancy work from a home base. She experienced a common symptom labelled ‘island fever’, usually associated with feelings of entrapment and island claustrophobia, but treated this with short periods away, always keen to return. It was ironic, she thought, that David, the Sydney commuter, would be happy never to leave the island, while she worked at home, often craving a change. Her opportunities to revive her deeply felt need for travel, and to sustain contacts with her large, globally scattered extended family, were slight, constrained by costs of international travel and dynamics of school and family. The pleasures of island family life and fulfilling work seemed to have brought her to accept permanent settlement, mostly spurning her travel desires, though with an eye to English family contacts. I don’t feel fazed by it, not at all. … This is our home, and that’s it. But … we’re actually working a system where we can go back to the UK regularly so there’s not so much pressure. I’m looking at ways to be positive about keeping all the family with a granny flat down the back.

Michele clung to some remnants of her nomadism in a casual attitude to her national origin, with little regard for Britain beyond family networks. She had recently taken Australian citizenship with her daughter, signifying that ‘I definitely have aligned myself with Australia’. At a recent conference in Taiwan she stressed to former British colleagues that her loyalties had shifted, thus facing ‘turncoat’ accusations. ‘But I was definitely Australian there, because that’s where my alliances are, that’s where I work.’ There was little sentimentality here, she supported an Australian republic and was politically active locally and through work, but reflections on her identity were eminently practical. ‘My identities now are very firmly local in my personal life, and very firmly national and western Pacific in my work life. I have worked hard to understand the cultures and settings in my new regional home. … I know more about health settings, systems and policies in Australia and the

192  Life stories of modern migration Pacific region than I do in the UK.’ Island living provided a unique base for a life Michele played out on a global stage, while her work reinforced her conviction that she was in Australia to stay. Seachange and treechange: serial migration from the city Migrants hoping to escape city life have diverse locations to choose from beyond islands. Small towns and their rural and coastal hinterlands routinely work to lure alienated urbanites.11 But for migrants the desire to escape from the city is more likely to be an evolving product of their migration rather than an original motivation to change countries, albeit with important exceptions. Marcus Daley, who emigrated with his partner, Elegy, to Sydney in 2003, aged 32, is perhaps an example of a more calculating and flexible generation with an eye to ultimate nonurban settlement. He enjoyed life as an IT professional in Edinburgh and London, but planned to use Sydney as a stepping-stone for a coastal ‘seachange’. We thought: ‘We’ll go to Sydney first, … then from Sydney we’ll move somewhere else when we’ve adjusted to being in a quieter [city] than London’, so that was the theory. … We came for a lifestyle and we haven’t achieved that yet, to be honest, I think our next move will be the central coast. … The more relaxed lifestyle, and outdoors. … We do want to have the surf, we do want to have the bush, we do want to have the outdoor lifestyle, but I think we have to go for it. It doesn’t come to you.

While quick to acquire Australian citizenship, Marcus continued to think in global terms; the south of France offered a possible alternative to the Australian coast for ultimate settlement, with the advantage of closer proximity to their families. But, as young upwardly mobile professionals, they were alert to an open-ended future with an eye on preferred lifestyle. We found the possibility of holding two passports to be an advantage in this age of global travel. To have the ability to live anywhere in Europe, UK or Australia, for us and our children (none as yet), would be a great advantage. As global travel times shorten, this flexibility could mean a place in the sun all year round. … We are happy in Australia at present, but still feel we may end up in the South of France, or somewhere with a similar temperate weather zone near the UK. I’d also like to live and work in Asia for a couple of years.

Lifestyle goals, in this youthful voice of modern mobility, could be pursued globally, at least until imperatives of children and schooling

The quest for new lifestyles  193 might intervene. In the meantime mobile futures could remain: ‘We celebrate the move (especially when on the beach) but push ourselves to see and do more in Australia, as we both know we could move on to the next country down the track.’12 Marcus’s words in 2007 were prophetic. In less than five years they had three children, moved to the Central Coast for nine months, and – with an eye on costly family visits for a family of five – emigrated to the south of France in 2012 to be closer to both families. Ease of movement in Europe was an advantage, but, conscious of the ‘Brexit’ issue in 2016, they were seeking to acquire third passports from France.13 Marcus’s story, with lifestyle ambitions mostly yet to be realised, typifies those of a young generation of enthusiastic migrants at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But young migrants have no monopoly on the pursuit of lifestyle passions. The previous generation could cherish similar goals, but in longer life stories they can take unusual directions. Heather Sayer’s direction came to focus intensely on lifestyle goals, but well outside the norm of beach and bush living. Born in 1943 into a middle-class family – her father an industrial chemist and her mother a primary teacher – her childhood was mobile, moving from Staffordshire to south Lancashire and summers with grandparents in North Yorkshire. That childhood exposure became significant in later years, nurturing her attraction to rugged coastal landscapes. ‘That’s the area I still identify with, it’s where my grandparents lived, where I spent my childhood every summer. … The North Yorkshire coast is beautiful, … much more attractive than where we lived.’ She was captivated by a family trip to Norway, Germany, France and Austria; the same passions later influenced her to study geography at Southampton University. Field trips cemented her northern preferences, particularly for the moors, the Pennines and the fells of the Lake District.14 Her study and travel, she thought, heightened awareness of the importance of ‘place’, ‘with landscape as a backdrop to, and influence on, human activity’.15 These interests never translated into a suitable career that might feed her passions for rugged wilderness. Following a graduate secretarial course she did administrative and research assistant work in London and Cambridge, which at least facilitated walking, climbing and caving in the Mendips, Wales, Derbyshire and Yorkshire on weekends and holidays. But no clear career path followed, and she admitted to ‘restlessness’ as she saw young friends marrying and settling down locally. Combing newspapers for new opportunities she seized on a three-year graduate teaching programme in New Zealand, intending later to move through Australia, South Africa or Canada. At this stage she explicitly distinguished her restlessness from hints of ‘wanderlust’ – ‘I get bored in jobs, I don’t actually get bored with places’. She left by ship in 1967, and early regrets on departure were soon dispelled by a shipboard romance and opportunities

194  Life stories of modern migration to make enduring, and later invaluable, friendships. She was a curiosity in being burdened by walking shoes and camping equipment, but was a classic female single migrant of the time, adventurous, intent on working holiday opportunities, but no longer exceptional for her lone voyaging. After a term of intensive training in Hamilton, Heather was posted to the small coastal town of Timaru, south of Christchurch. Teaching among the sparse population and small town ambience was a challenge after London and, like the voyage, ‘not easy for a single woman’, but she seized the opportunities for Asian travel, New Zealand exploration and learning to ski. At the end of her three-year contract she returned to England for her sister’s wedding, with thoughts of staying. She worked in Liverpool, Warwickshire and the Pembroke coast, but recalled a classic returnee’s sentiment that she ‘hated it most of the time. It was good to be with family but I had moved on from friends who had no idea of my New Zealand experience and were largely uninterested’. After 20 months, in 1973, she returned, now fully qualified, to teaching in in Dunedin. Again she grasped the opportunity for intensive international travel: she moved around New Zealand with multiple jobs, to Hamilton again and finally Rotorua, where, at 42 in 1985, she married an Englishman, Roger, and acquired two teenage stepsons. But Roger’s untimely death, seven years later, followed by that of her mother, prompted reassessment, and she considered returning to England. But she ‘realised that I had adjusted to the easier New Zealand lifestyle and had most of the friends from my adult life here. My big supports in New Zealand proved to be mainly friends who were immigrants too and realised how difficult lack of family here was at that time.’ The boys had grown up and left home, so her habitual diversion of international travel resumed, to Texas, Oregon and Europe; in 1996 she leapt at an offer of a contract in Oregon’s Career Information Service – ‘Just the opportunity I needed. So once again off I went, hardly knowing anyone’. She was 53. Oregon afforded further travel opportunities and she adjusted easily, while never surmounting the feeling of being a social outsider. Compensations were readily at hand in the north-west wilderness. The natural environment, rugged, often unspoilt and open, recalled the attractions of New Zealand; ‘the environment is very like here. [I] felt very much at home’. She explored the state and sampled the wilderness of British Columbia. ‘It was, the thing that put me back on my feet, well and truly. When I came back I felt ready to pick up the threads here and could cope again.’ At the end of two years she was tempted by a longerterm contract, seriously pondering prospects of permanent settlement in Oregon. Acutely conscious of her already split migrant identity she ‘decided that I would end up pulled in three directions rather than two. I’ve been back several times.’ So Heather came to apparent final settlement seven miles from

The quest for new lifestyles  195 Rotorua on two acres, an elevated prospect overlooking the lake and hills. By 2003 she partnered, while living apart, with a Danish man, who, she claims anchored her in New Zealand and joined her global travels. Her addiction to travel and passion for rural Nordic landscapes and seascapes, is what most came to define her identity, distinct from national attachments. When asked about her identity she referred instead to her ‘soul places’: Lake Ohau in the South Island, the Oregon mountains and British Columbia coast, the North Yorkshire coast and west coast of Scotland, Iceland, Japan and the northern western and eastern states of the USA. Emphatically she excluded the tropics and insisted that ‘I’m a Nordic person, I realise that now’. She reflected that her New Zealand settlement accommodated her Nordic preferences. But a deep cosmopolitanism is echoed in her Nordic outlook and her comments about travel, particularly the common migrant observation that those who have lived in different countries differ fundamentally from those anchored in one place for a lifetime. Reflecting on her decision against resettlement in England she recalled that, on a visit, I realised there’s a gap, when you’ve travelled and moved away like that and you meet people who are still in Britain, particularly people who’ve stayed in their home area, there’s a gap widens between you that’s quite hard to bridge. Interested to see you, very interested to know about New Zealand for about five minutes, and then it’s back to Aunty Flo down the road.

Heather is exceptional in focusing her identity on an idiosyncratic preoccupation with Nordic landscapes and climates. But the emigration of affluence, central to modern Western mobility, is routinely driven by such lifestyle aspirations rather than strictly economic ones. Even when lifestyle goals stem from new country experience, they can still owe much to the migrant drive. Beth McIntosh, born in 1959, illustrates the process with a story characteristic of late-twentieth-century ‘new age’ experience. Her origins, from the Home Counties middle class in Egham, Surrey, were largely suburban, and there was nothing to suggest that might change. Her family, with three sisters, was close-knit, with a grandmother in Sunderland whom she ‘adored’, and she stresses that they ‘were all brought up to be pretty independent’, especially by their father. This did not translate into early travel, mainly because she was intent on a ‘career path’ in pharmaceutical molecular biology, and soon after getting her degree worked for a biotechnology company doing cuttingedge research in genetic engineering. But a series of epiphanies gradually prompted different directions. Even at 18 she claimed to feel different from her politically left-wing friends in her environmental focus. ‘It was before anyone had heard of environmental issues, it was still very closed doors and fanatical hippy groups.’16

196  Life stories of modern migration Still, Beth’s early travel in her mid-twenties owed little to any fundamental change of direction. In the early 1980s she briefly visited the United States, mainly the west coast, admitting that her motivation was for a ‘recce’ – or reconnaissance – to scout for career prospects. In retrospect she reflected there was something more to it. ‘I wouldn’t have known the expression “new-agey” then, but I realised that’s what I was looking for, the counter-culture, whatever is the modern vernacular.’ Restless, she put out feelers elsewhere, and in 1987 accepted a position in Singapore, which then fell through. So she was quick, in 1988, to accept a Melbourne University offer for a research position, with sponsorship and relatively seamless visa approvals. In a written recollection of her move she cited conventional motivations, at least for young singles,: ‘unrequited love, spirit of adventure, frustrations with my career’. But in an afterthought she added that ‘the real, undisclosed reasons I emigrated were spiritual in nature; personal growth, fate, destiny’. Her Australian experience was to provide added spurs to those spiritual drives. Beth’s prompt appointment afforded little time to prepare and learn about the country – ‘definitely a step out into the unknown’ – which translated into culture shock. Her university workplace she found ‘parochial’, and she encountered anti-British hostility. Social life was disappointing, leaving her to explore Melbourne’s hinterland, especially the rugged Wilson’s Promontory, her ‘sanctuary’, mostly alone. What seemed an exciting career opportunity soon turned sour as it dawned she was being used for her prior knowledge, sensitive information kept ‘hush hush’ from colleagues, with no prospects or growth. And she was coming to question the ethical nature of pharmaceutical research financed by commercial interests. Before ending her year’s contract, hoping to ‘rekindle my passion’, she negotiated a position with the Melbourne Children’s Hospital. But first she embarked on a tour of Sumatra, accompanying an anthropological research team studying remote tribes. Sleeping ‘on a bamboo platform, in the middle of the jungle’, and exposure to a culture remote from civilisation, was a ‘formative experience’, followed by travel to Nepal, India, family in England and return through South-east Asia. The impact emerged slowly, ‘I think I’d expected some huge revelation, but it was much subtler than that’. Most of her travelling friends were from Sydney, so once working back in Melbourne, in 1991, she developed ‘itchy feet’, satisfying it by visiting most weekends. Gradually her career doubts and spiritual questing came together: There were epiphany moments, it’s when I started to discover the counterculture that year, actively, rather than just reading books, I met people who thought very differently, and part of the reason I realise now that I left the UK was because I was different. And, for example, I was always a heretic within the science community, which probably didn’t help all the other

The quest for new lifestyles  197 perceived challenges, and … I could not hold these two views. I suppose I got to break point when I thought: Right, either this is the career you’re staying in, or you can say: ‘look for something else’, because that’s when I started formally meditating that year. … I’d discovered New Age bookshops. … I discovered Depak Chopra … and he just said all my misgivings. … And that’s when I started exploring the alternative medicine field.

A move followed late in 1991 to Sydney, where she studied naturopathy massage. She also met Daniel, an American immigrant immersed in the corporate world, a well-paid executive with Shell. Beth’s turn towards the counter-culture – she mixed with a new alternative-inclined circle as well as their mutual friends – hardly augured well for a harmonious relationship, but he warmed to her ideas, and for some years Beth’s alternative practices coexisted with Daniel’s corporate employment. They moved in together in Sydney, travelled to America and visited Beth’s mother in England. Daniel then returned to the United States for a short course with the well-known American guru, Tony Robbins – traversing issues like health and energy, self-help, persuasive communication and relationship enhancement. Daniel’s engagement with Robbins implied sympathy with Beth’s worldview, and together they experienced mounting dissonance between their ideals and practices. In 1994 Daniel transferred to Melbourne for three years just as Beth became pregnant. Her pregnancy stimulated further searching for natural childbirth practices, reinforcing the contradictions. ‘I got very involved in birthing politics, a very grass-roots movement, and Sam was a home-birth, we didn’t vaccinate, we were very alternative, while we were still in a social circle who were anything but, so again I was looking around for the underground, I suppose, in maternal practices.’ By this time Beth and Daniel had begun to plan more radical changes, in Daniel’s employment and to a location more in tune with their shifting outlook. Beth had been increasingly aware of the ‘new age’ reputation of Byron Bay on the New South Wales north coast; it emerged as their obvious goal, but needed an income to sustain it. In 1997 Daniel engineered a job transfer to Brisbane, about two hours’ drive north of Byron, ‘a strategic move, to be nearer, to look for somewhere, … being part of the alternative movement’. Again the move coincided with a pregnancy and the birth of a daughter, and within two years they found the ideal location. Daniel resigned from his position and they drew on their capital to invest in a hairdressing business in Toowoomba, a three-hour drive west. It was a careful and systematic strategy designed to provide an income and to avoid the stereotypical Byron reputation of ‘dropping out’. ‘But that was always with a view to setting up a livelihood that would sustain us here, we didn’t want to come here and drop out and sit in the hills and smoke dope, I knew that wasn’t the culture I was attracted to.’ Six years

198  Life stories of modern migration

12  Beth McIntosh at home in Byron Bay, 2006

later they were settled in Byron, heavily engaged in joint child-rearing; Beth maintained a modest massage business and Daniel pursued various creative activities, including writing film scripts. Beth’s journey to an alternative lifestyle in Byron Bay was never far removed from awareness of the deeper roots of her mobile history. While contented with her Australian life, she remained attached to her English heritage – ‘there is part of me would like to feel I’ve got roots in both places’; the focus was on both place and family, especially her ageing

The quest for new lifestyles  199 mother, invariably troubled by absence and departure during holiday visits. The challenge is the wrench when I leave, there is still a wrench. … It’s a choice I make every time I choose to go back. … But I found there’s a critical period, if it’s longer than five weeks my feet start going under the table again, and it’s harder to leave. The last time we left the wrench was because Mum’s 80. I’m not going to leave it eight years before I go, we can’t get that casual about it, so the pull is to find a way where we’re not worrying financially how to do it. … I’ve never been a refugee, in the true sense, but to be away from your homeland because you can’t afford to live there, it may not be the same because of some atrocious political regime, but there’s still this sense of non-choice.

Any sense of national identity Beth may have claimed had disappeared under the influence of her travels and shifting value system. ‘I don’t consider myself particularly British or particularly Australian, I know I have huge English influences, … but I don’t wear it like a badge, it’s not an identity for me.’ Asked if she wore her mobility like a badge, she reflected, ‘I probably do, and that’s a fantastic question, I suppose I do tend to identify with being mobile’. Despite being settled in Byron Bay, further travel still beckoned, but now her outlook had shifted to a sense of spiritual and community belonging, distinct from sightseeing. ‘It is that sense of connecting, I suppose very new-agey, to the planet, it’s become far less geographical to me, having travelled and having lived in so many places.’ It incorporated an intangible sense of connection to ‘the land’, a not uncommon emphasis in migrant reflections on living in postcolonial societies, where new country experience of a contested land discourse around indigenous dispossession stimulates rethinking of continuing connections with the home country. My criteria for travel have changed. Ticking off parts of the world on a list is no longer attractive (I realised this even as I was travelling). Finding the best in humanity, and sharing in it for a while in a different place, is. Stimulation is still probably as important as it ever was, but now it comes in different ways. Living here can be, and often is, very stimulating. … The land itself is important to me. It took me a long time to connect with the land in Australia. It’s not just aborigines that have a sense of place. I believe there is an inherent drive, or impulse, to migrate in some people, about connecting lands perceived to be separate. A spiritual quest if you will, that is about embracing the whole planet and its peoples.

When pressed about her understanding of attachment to ‘the land’, especially relating to her British origin, Beth translated it initially simply

200  Life stories of modern migration as ‘a sense of home-ness’, recalling her early homesickness during in Melbourne. But then she expanded on years of enjoyment of the accessible English countryside, the unique ‘vast network of footpaths … the actual, public rights of way, that Australia doesn’t have’, which link urban people to the land, the history and culture of rural life. This is reminiscent of the more traditional migrant nostalgia for the English countryside. But Beth’s version of ‘embracing the whole planet and its peoples’ offers an unusual variant of migrant cosmopolitanism, one very much in tune with changes affecting migration from the 1970s. Her openness to travel was challenged in later years when work and financial pressures dictated a return to England while Daniel worked in African mining. Within a year they move to Perth, again for Daniel’s ‘fly-in fly-out’ engineering work. While her values ‘often felt assaulted in suburban living in a state dependent on the extractive industries’, she relied on her ‘tenacity of spirit’, with her travel ‘not done yet!’ From migrants to grey nomads During later life, and particularly retirement years, the wandering life of grey nomads has become one of the last acts of serial migration.17 A product of rising prosperity and retirement incomes, the grey nomad phenomenon has been dominated by native retirees and adventurous cashed up tourists, but for settled migrants the attempt to revive memories of earlier mobility by selling a family home and embarking on permanent touring in a well-equipped caravan has been tempting. Over recent decades the practice has become a virtual international industry, serviced by popular websites and chat rooms, expanding campsites eager for custom and caravan showrooms and governments eager to deploy its potential for tourist dollars.18 Networks of travellers, intersecting regularly in one or more countries, provide the comfort of close but ever-changing communities and friendships to balance hours of isolated driving. Costs are routinely minimised by offering skilled labour in exchange for food and sites on private land. Escape to rural districts is most popular, alongside avoidance of large cities. While some extend their travels to ambitious intercontinental adventures, most focus on single countries or continents; Australia and New Zealand figure strongly in the southern hemisphere, and multiple North American countries in the northern hemisphere. Keith and Olive Fielding, for example, migrants to Bermuda in 1971, and Toronto in 1977, used an eventful two-year grey nomad trip from 1999 around Canada, the United States and Mexico as a prelude to retirement in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.19 Jennie Christie’s enthusiastic travels around Australia, in her fifties,

The quest for new lifestyles  201 with her husband, Hector, illuminate the nexus between prior migration and grey nomad roaming. In 2007, when we planned an interview, her travels posed a logistical challenge. Their address, in Cooloola Cove, Queensland, a small coastal town north of Brisbane, was simply a block of land for occasional wintering in the caravan, but for most of the year they were touring. A fortuitous stay on a friend’s property in the summer of 2007, near Merton in rural Victoria, provided the best opportunity for an interview. While the latter part of the drive was through cooling forest, conditions were those of peak summer heat wave temperatures, with high bushfire risks. The cooler house provided respite from the scorching atmosphere outside, and Jennie’s enthusiasm betrayed no sign of frustration with the harsh conditions, which must have tested their patience on the road. She was keen to tell her story, full of the delights of adventures around the country. They had been travelling since 2001 with no regrets, what she wrote of as ‘the Great Australian Dream’. For the first three and a half years they toured Australia in a ‘huge figure of eight’ pattern, ‘because we didn’t think we could do the two top parts, the Kimberleys and the Cape, in the same season’. The highlights were the most isolated spots off-road for a month at a time, in the Kimberleys, the Pilbara, the Birdsville Track and the Flinders Ranges. In more populated farming areas they economised through a club, ‘willing workers on organic farms’ or ‘Woofers’, where, for four hours’ work, the owner provided accommodation, food and power, although usually they needed only power. Equally important was socialisation with kindred spirits on the move. ‘Sometimes you get to places where you’re all transient, and you all get together for happy-hour and you find out where you’re from, what you do.’ Hector was a building surveyor with much senior experience in construction, and so could do maintenance work in return for a site and power. When short of funds they stopped in Perth and Adelaide where both could do temporary work. After a further seven-month trip around Tasmania and over two more years on the mainland, Jennie insisted that ‘we haven’t finished’, with plans for a year in New Zealand, ‘we reckon we’ve got ten years up our sleeves’.20 Jennie’s enthusiasm for her dream was unqualified. Yet in telling her story, in writing and in interview, her early migration narrative took pride of place, dominated by a theme of restlessness and the joys of mobility. She was born in 1951 in the ‘tiny’ village of Verwood in Dorset into a hardworking, locally respected family of butchers. Even her brother and sister entered the business and thrived, while she set her thoughts on ‘wider horizons’ from childhood. At school she recalls being ‘intrigued’ by local Gypsies, whom older locals disliked ‘because they were thieves’, while she admired their romantic image ‘because they wandered. Oh! And here I am now, a gypsy!’21 At 18 she was keen to leave for London, but her mother demurred, convincing her to stay closer to home for a

202  Life stories of modern migration year by working in nearby Southampton, easier for family visits. Living at the YWCA she found her feet quickly, enjoyed plentiful ‘temping’ work, then a full-time job at the University, met students and ‘knew all the boys at the YMCA’. Her social life was frenetic and soon those ‘wider horizons’ beckoned. An Australian woman at work intrigued her about Sydney, ‘the men in work-shorts, and you could go to work barefoot, which I’ve never seen, mind you! … And the beaches, that all sounded very romantic’. But thoughts of Australia were promptly diverted by meeting Bob, Canadian-born but English-reared, who was keen to go to Canada and urged her to join him. ‘So it was only the fact that I was a bit besotted with Bob, and I would have married him at the drop of a hat, that I decided to emigrate to Canada.’ Jennie entered Bob’s migration project with great excitement, but the process faltered. She took multiple jobs to save for the fare and pursued her immigration status assiduously, all against her mother’s disapproval, ‘she always thought I was a meal-ticket for Bob, she never approved of Bob’. Mother’s doubts proved to be well-founded. Within a year Jennie saved enough funds and contacted some distant cousins in Toronto who offered accommodation. Booked on the Russian liner Alexander Pushkin for May 1971, she was ready to go, until, at the last minute, Bob ‘changed his mind’. Keen to join a ‘best mate’ in Australia, he decided to join him. She remained resolute, against her mother’s urging to cancel the whole business. ‘I said: “I’m going, it’s all in place, I’m going to these cousins”, I suppose I was stroppy, and they put me on that big ship, at Tilbury Docks.’ Eight days of socialising with young people on the Atlantic followed. In Toronto she bonded quickly with her cousins, found well-paid work and recovered from a brief spell of homesickness. Within a month a letter from Bob, still in England, announced, ‘“I’m really missing you but I haven’t got enough money”, so I sent him the ₤50 and he flew out’. In Toronto, lacking the funds to pay any rent, he stayed with relatives, even after Jennie found a shared flat, joining her only when her friend moved out. Jennie revelled in Toronto, with an eye to romantic adventures waiting in the west. She discovered an attractive multiculturalism she had never seen in England, meeting her Ukrainian flatmate’s family and becoming friends with a French-Canadian woman. At Seneca College, where she worked, ‘we had all these Caribbeans, and I just adored them, I think I may have been black in a past life, I have this thing about black people, and Red Indians I have a thing about too, … that appealed to me’. But she never doubted that Canada was one stage in a long-term working adventure, to ‘work my way around the world’. This suited Bob, still keen on Australia, so by 1973 they were ready to move on, urgently when they heard that the Whitlam government was to tighten British migrants’ visa requirements at the end of the year. While their booking on the Arcadia

The quest for new lifestyles  203

13  Jennie Christie in Toronto, 1972

from Vancouver left little time for leisurely cross-country driving, Jennie thrilled to the changing scenery, from forests to wheat belts and the Rockies. ‘That was just magic, to drive across that country, through places I had seen pictures of and going into the Rocky Mountains.’ She kept a diary of the drive and even some of the wet bleakness of the Prairies failed to dampen her enthusiasm. Her passion for long-distance driving, acutely observed, may well have been born here. On the Arcadia Jennie took to oceanic travel with zest, enjoying the social life and stopovers while Bob slept in his cabin, read in the library or played quoits. The voyage, she thought, ‘would either make or break us’, and after arrival the prospects looked bleak. But she was enchanted with Sydney and recalls entering the harbour thinking ‘“this is it”, my heart soared’. Both found work within days and soon rented a small apartment in Edgecliff, an inner suburb. She reflects that she never lost her passion for Sydney, ‘Sydney fitted me like a warm fluffy slipper and I settled in to the Australian way of life very easily’. At Christmas, 1973, they enjoyed a holiday in Surfer’s Paradise, but Bob decided to remain for a further fortnight, having, as Jennie suspected, ‘met somebody else’. Within a year they separated. It was fortuitous that her neighbour, Hector, a New Zealander, was, like her, ‘on the rebound’, and a solid relationship soon developed. Unlike Bob, who felt he never needed a car, Hector drove her to alluring parts of the Sydney hinterland, laying the foundation for what would become an intensely mobile life together. His construction work was itinerant, and she joined him in Melbourne in 1975; in 1976 they travelled to England for a wedding. Over the next quarter-century even the birth of a daughter and son did little to inhibit Jennie’s willingness to accompany Hector on his work moves, back and forth to Sydney and

204  Life stories of modern migration Melbourne, to provincial towns and married quarters on a mostly singlemale mining camp in north Queensland. Jennie, evidently, infected even the children with her positive attitude to mobility. Every move was an adventure. Our kids’ll tell you: ‘Mum says: “This is another adventure!”’. You know, I’d listen to other construction wives saying: ‘Oh, you can’t move once your kids go to school, and I’d go: ‘Why?’ … But they were small, and it doesn’t matter. Although, did our kids miss out on lifelong school-buddies? Yes they did.

The intense itinerancy paused, ultimately for nine years, when Hector suffered a nervous breakdown while managing a politically controversial ocean sewage outfall project in Sydney. They had just bought a run-down house outside Sydney, so Jennie promptly went to work while Hector did renovations, ‘so he became mother, and did the most fabulous job with our kids, and I went back to work full-time’. The idea to sell up to embark on open-ended travel was originally Hector’s, some five years before the event, so there was a long period of gestation. The children were unimpressed, but by 2001, at ages 21 and 18, the purchase of a small flat in Dee Why, a northern beach suburb, gave the parents peace of mind about their stability and security; neither went to university but they matured quickly under the new conditions. It seemed that the more Jennie and Hector travelled the more addictive it became. At one point their daughter joined them, demanding to know when they would settle. ‘Okay, I want to know when you’re going to stop this nonsense … because when I get married and have children, I want to know I’ve got grandparents around.’ They evaded the question carefully by suggesting that when both son and daughter were settled in different locations they could travel between them and ‘be useful’. Jennie’s thoughts about her past and her future embodied the mobile persona she had assumed for years, and she returned repeatedly to the idea that her first migration laid foundations for her adaptability. Thinking about her first move to Canada, and her sole brief period of homesickness in Toronto, she reflected that Since I was 22, I thought going to Canada, and then moving to Australia, was the best thing I did, it just lets you let go of your roots. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but you don’t compare things, and you get on with life, you don’t do, you know all those Poms that go to Perth and go home and come back and go home and come back, and sell up and they lose money, and you think ‘why are you doing that? Why is that pull so huge?’

Her celebration of the virtues of itinerancy is a tribute to serial migration, which many migrants would endorse. Their travels had prompted

The quest for new lifestyles  205

14  Jennie Christie and Victor with campervan in Darwin, 2016

them to select their friends from those with similar mobile backgrounds. ‘The people you meet, who have travelled and chosen to leave, you know, we gravitate to people who do what we do.’ Even her thoughts of the future and growing old incorporated the same mobile persona, with a small concession to ‘retiring’ only when fatigue might finally leave her with invaluable memories. Against the sedentary ‘sitting in a chair’ of old age she hoped to be ‘like the lady in Titanic, the young girl, who when she was 86 was jumping out of planes, and had photos because she’d been all over the world, you know, you’ve always got your memories, haven’t you?’ Few stories encapsulate so thoroughly the evolving nature of lifestyle factors in migration, from Jennie’s impulsive desires for youthful adventure to taken-for-granted notions of adult mobility and grey nomad roving in retirement. They are a logical extension from the young ‘sojourners’ of the 1950s and 1960s, and their backpacker successors. It took several decades of rising affluence, improved education standards and advances in transportation technology for migrants like Jennie and Hector to be able to contemplate lives of permanent itinerancy, well into later life. They are among the changing faces of modern migration, of which we will see more in the next chapter. Notes   1 Jefford, interview and written account. See also Chapter 5.   2 P. Black, The Poms in the sun, London, Joseph, 1965.

206  Life stories of modern migration   3 Beverley, interview and written account.   4 For example King, interview and written accounts, discussed in Chapter 3.   5 For example Bromfield interview and written account, discussed in Chapter 2.   6 Whitear, interview.   7 L. Ephron, The end: the imminent ice age and how we can stop it, Berkeley, Celestial Arts, 1988.   8 Arthur Black, in H. Fry et al., Salt Spring: The people, the place, a visual odyssey of an island, Salt Spring Island, Chu’an, 2004.   9 Rumsey, interview, and written account. 10 In the 2011 census the occupational breakdown included 40 per cent professional and 12.4 per cent managerial. ABS, QPZM, ‘Local Stats’, http://localstats.qpzm.com.au/stats/nsw/sydney/hawkesbury/dangar-island. 11 For academic discussion of the ‘seachange’ process in Australia see I. Burnley and P. Murphy, Sea change: movement from metropolitan to arcadian Australia, Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2004. 12 Daley, interview. 13 Communication with author, 20 March 2016. 14 Sayer, interview, and written account. 15 Communication with author, 24 March 2016. 16 McIntosh, interview and written account. 17 Sociologists have scrutinised the relationship of ageing to migration, but few historians have recognised the grey nomad phenomenon as a subject of serious study; A. Davies and A. James, Geographies of ageing: social processes and the spatial unevenness of population ageing, Burlington, Ashgate, 2011, pp. 65–78. 18 For example, Queensland Government response to the Economic Development Committee’s issues, Paper no. 3: Grey Nomad Tourism, 2010. 19 Fielding, interview and written account. 20 Christie, interview and written account. 21 The once ubiquitous, often pejorative, term ‘Gypsy’ has faded from modern usage, replaced by the ethnically correct ‘Romany’, but I have retained informants’ language for accuracy. The same applies to similar ethnic labels like ‘Red Indian’ later in this chapter.

8

Changing faces of modern migration

Changes in British migration practice since the end of the Second World War have been dramatic, reflecting the modernisation of British society itself. In previous chapters we have seen an accumulation of new influences working over several decades to transform the migrant experience. The most profound shift was emergence from deep postwar austerity to relative, although fluctuating, prosperity, accompanied by expanding standards and opportunities in education and employment. A predictable response among intending migrants, increasingly from educated and upwardly mobile backgrounds, was greater freedom to exercise discretion over migration decisions and to reverse decisions without grievous penalty. The loosening of traditional national loyalties to old and new countries became a predictable result of heightened mobility. Temporary expatriate employment contracts could stimulate permanent migration decisions and new preoccupations with dreams of transformed lifestyles have begun to refashion our understanding of voluntary migration. So too has the greater visibility of women as migrants. Moreover, the preferred destination countries have spread well beyond traditional ‘British world’ settlements, particularly to the European Union. Migration to satisfy a love quest is perhaps the most conspicuous example of discretionary migration, but it is one among many motivations to spring from affluence and easier access to migration opportunities, even while receiving countries, in further far-reaching reforms, erected new barriers to entry. Evidently the migration landscape changed beyond recognition within half a century. But migration history is no exception to the rule that continuity is invariably bound up with historical change, and this has been most apparent in the recounted experiences of migrants. Homesickness and nostalgia, for example, have remained a marked presence in memories of modern migrants, despite nomadic habits and relaxed attitudes to serial migration. After 14 years of mobility, Caroline Streeter confessed 207

208  Life stories of modern migration to frequent waves of homesickness for family and places, never satisfied by return trips because ‘no trip is ever long enough … I can’t satisfy that yearning’.1 Much the same applies to patriotic loyalties, where fierce attachment to the homeland persisted for many despite the increasing emergence of ‘citizen of the world’ identities and rejection of flag-waving nationalism. While serial migration has become a trademark of modern migrants, the traditional pattern of one-way settlement has remained dominant, albeit punctuated by more frequent visits home and global tourism. Even the most modern feature of all migrant ambitions, the search for more exotic ‘lifestyles’, was in many respects an extension of the older search for better climate and wide-open spaces. Among young people those lifestyle pursuits are partly an extension of the backpacker revolution of the last two decades, which itself recalls the young ‘sojourners’ of postwar years and even of the nineteenth century. And while the dominance of tertiary educated and middle-class profiles is genuinely new, the presence of traditional skilled workers persists. For every upwardly mobile professional like Mark Pacitti, pursuing a professional IT career in Melbourne, there are skilled workers, like boilermaker John Whiteside, moving straight into his trade in Adelaide, but perhaps more prepared to seek entrepreneurial opportunities than their predecessors.2 Return migration, traditional and modern This interplay of change and continuity can be seen in generational terms over more than half a century. It appears with particular force in migrants’ life stories, where it can be challenging to unravel the traditional from the modern. Marilyn Chapman, for example, presented at first glance as a traditional 1970s returnee migrant to Australia. Born in 1949, she was raised mostly on the Dorset coast in the close-knit – clannish in her opinion – community on the ‘Isle of Portland’. Her father, whom she adored, was a health inspector, changing jobs and locations regularly, until her mother ‘put her foot down’, staying in Portland, where Marilyn thought locals treated them as outsiders. With a strict mother, home life was tense, her father working long hours so rarely there, and her mother ‘on a short fuse and wielding the cane’. Her brother ‘moved away as soon as he could’, and left for Australia, aged 18, while Marilyn became increasingly rebellious, left school at 15, then left home at 16 to work as a nanny. Within a year she had moved to London, an alienating experience for a young provincial girl, but at 21 she found her feet, landing a prized nanny position with actors Laurence Olivier and his then wife Joan Plowright, living alternately in Brighton and Victoria in London. The generous perks of the job, lasting 18 months, came at the price of virtually round-the-clock demands minding three children, an irritant

Changing faces of modern migration  209 when she met Phil, her future husband. ‘There was no way I could have a normal relationship with him in this job, it wasn’t possible, because they didn’t encourage me to have a social life.’ After a painful departure from the Oliviers, they went to America as a paid support team for a long-distance race walker. America was a ‘tough experience’, but awakened travel ambitions, and with relatives already in Australia she warmed in 1973 to Phil’s proposal to emigrate on the assisted passage, by then of £25.3 Marilyn and Phil’s migration was in the tradition of a generation of young sojourners who exploited schemes designed to attract married, skilled and stable workers. Only at her mother’s insistence, against Marilyn’s wishes, did they marry before departure, simply intent on open-ended adventure, limited by the requirement to stay for two years to retain the subsidy. After expensive travels in America the cheap fare enabled them to act freely on youthful wanderlust urges with little thought for the future. ‘It seemed like: “Wow, we can travel!” We were like the new travellers I think, really, for 25 quid.’ The presence of her brother and other relatives in Australia, and Phil’s earning capacity as a plumber and building surveyor, cushioned the potential risks, and return to England loomed only as the remote conclusion to an exciting sojourn. But once in Perth Marilyn realised, to her shock, that Phil wanted to ‘settle for life’, he was ‘not of the same mind, he was coming at it from a different angle I think’. This was compounded by a ‘blisteringly’ hot Perth summer and a newly discovered aversion for city living, prompting a bout of homesickness and depression which deterred her from seeking work. ‘I was almost ill with being homesick, the pain, in my chest, the anguish of being cut off from everybody, with my husband at work all day.’ Phil refused to return despite disappointing job experience, but consented to move to Tasmania after she saw literature suggesting that it looked ‘a bit like England … it seemed like an answer’. Escape from Perth’s heat was welcome, but not the answer she sought. She ‘felt equally homesick, if not more so because it was further away. … crying all the time, all the time, and my poor husband didn’t know what to do with me’. A hospital diagnosis of acute depression prescribed months of therapy, and over three months as an out-patient she recovered, while developing an interest in child psychology, enrolling in a childcare course, and developing a new network of close and supportive friends. Hobart began to feel like home. When the two-year mandatory stay period expired, Marilyn’s desire to return had thoroughly evaporated. But the prospect of permanence yielded to family ties when her father’s health deteriorated dramatically. They viewed their return, in 1976 after three years, as a temporary matter, with work and a welcoming close community awaiting in Hobart. But circumstances conspired to change plans. Within a year Marilyn was pregnant, and the birth of her daughter in 1978 added reasons to stay close, now to doting grandparents. But motherhood challenged the

210  Life stories of modern migration marriage, as she developed new self-confidence and began to resist ‘my neediness that had become apparent to me in Australia. … I wanted to actually be strong and resolute and not go back to that, … and I became empowered and found my own fulfilment’. When the marriage ended, four years after their daughter’s birth, Marilyn had embarked on an ambitious round of training, building on her studies in Hobart, and developing a career as a social worker and therapist. Marilyn’s later career was thoroughly fulfilling and successful, despite ongoing regrets for leaving Australia. Her return migration narrative echoes many of the features found in the stories of traditional postwar returnees. Return migration, common to most voluntary migrations, was certainly not unusual in the postwar years, with numbers from Australia in the 1950s and 1960s as high as 29 per cent.4 Many women would have been familiar with Marilyn’s pathological degree of homesickness and depression, by the ‘needy’ dependence on a husband who dictated their movements, and the sense of being trapped by the contractual prohibition on return, even for family visits. The ultimate return, driven by a sick parent, was stock-in-trade experience for returnee migrants, as was lifelong regret for leaving what in retrospect was remembered as a better life and lost opportunity. Most, too, would identify with emotional pressures of family ties driving migration decisions. In other respects Marilyn’s story is a thoroughly modern one, notably in her continuing openness to mobility and insistence that her identity was moulded by migration and subsequent travels to India and Africa. In a later note she wrote that ‘I have never found anywhere in the world I have felt was home – and that I couldn’t move from – as yet!’ She recalled moments of epiphany in Australia. Her Hobart childcare course was a ‘trigger point’ that ‘changed my life, … I’m interested in personal development of others and myself’. Her first holiday back to Australia persuaded her that migration had changed her fundamentally, widening her understanding of global events. ‘I’m, very, very glad I did it, I think it had a profound effect on the career I’ve chosen now, a profound effect on my thinking and my understanding of displaced people, displaced in every way.’ This had perhaps been reinforced by her awareness of feminism, changes affecting women’s employment, and her daughter’s recent return from a year’s sojourn in Australia, a sense that she had bequeathed to her daughter her own nomadic instincts. Both contemplated resettlement in Perth, where now a welcoming extended family might offer a more attractive alternative than the West Sussex coast. ‘I feel my family in Perth are very much more on my wavelength than the family in England, Emma and I both think that. … They’ve let go of all this stuff that’s been handed down through generations here, they’ve formed a new identity over there. … I do feel as if there’s a part of me there still.’ Reflections on her identity suggest Marilyn’s sense of her migration journey remained a

Changing faces of modern migration  211 work in progress. By 2015 she was feeling more ‘at home’ in Shorehamby-Sea, but still sought to ‘satisfy the nomadic aspect of me’ through overseas cruises and holidays and further trips to Australia.5 Marilyn’s ex-husband, Phil, lived through a quite different postmigration story, equally reflective of modern trends. With a new partner he acquired a house in southern France and divided time equally living there and in England. With building skills he could maintain a decent income ‘doing up houses’. Marilyn reflected, wryly, that ‘he’s got the lifestyle with her that he wanted with me really’. Phil, of course, was pursuing a new migration destination, continental Europe, which had been mostly unattainable for British migrants in postwar decades. With increasing numbers crossing the Channel from the 1970s, the trend brought some genuinely new faces of British migration into play, and warrants some scrutiny. A new wave of migration: Europe and serial migrants This book draws mainly on experiences of the British in ‘old Commonwealth’ countries of original white settlement, but for a generation now the modern British diaspora has been reshaped by progressively easier access to Continental Europe for immigration. British entry into the European Union in 1973 introduced its citizens to the much coveted, though controversial, principle that ‘the core right of EU citizenship is freedom of movement’.6 The changes opened attractive prospects for residence throughout the Community. Statistical trends illustrate British migrants’ readiness to turn their sights to the Continent, part of more general circulation of EU citizens since the 1970s. While movement to old Commonwealth countries was in relative decline, and United States numbers increased slightly, those to the European Union experienced a dramatic increase (see Table 2). The early moves lent themselves to negative stereotyping of British tourists and retirees at coastal sites like the Costa del Sol, but the realities were more complex.7 While retirement migration to coastal Spain was huge, resulting in some exclusively English-speaking enclaves remote from Spanish culture, there was a substantial body of permanent, hesitantly integrated and often younger settlers with children, with motives as mixed as those in anglophone countries.8 France had a long tradition of British settlement. Romantic and bohemian ideals of French intellectual and artistic life have long attracted a minority of Britons to settle, especially in Paris. Elite professionals and business executives were accustomed to extended postings in France, now expanded with the spread of transnational employment of the urban middle class, characterised by one sociologist as ‘Eurostars in Eurocities’. But the ­experience then

212  Life stories of modern migration democratised, as younger settlers sought fixed employment.9 Equally significant was the large body of migrants pursuing a different way of life in rural France.10 Historians have been slow to recognise these British Euro expatriates as part of a sustained British diaspora, but since the 1990s sociologists and anthropologists have conducted in-depth interviews with them, especially in France and Spain. The accent in most research is migration for ‘lifestyle’ change, for leisure and a more ‘authentic’ rural way of life.11 But the most persistent themes revolve around identity and integration. Karen O’Reilly’s work on the Costa del Sol, for example, found ambivalence among Britons about integration into Spanish society, with most relying on a British expatriate community for their ‘sense of status, self worth and belonging’, despite the fact that many clung to a negative stereotype of a ‘bad Britain’ worth escaping.12 By contrast, Michaela Benson found that the British in the Lot region measured these goals through successful incorporation (rarely achieved) into local, and ‘authentic’, French life.13 But in both cases local networks of compatriots were important, more important, it would seem, than for most British migrants in anglophone countries. Apart from the stimulus of European integration, social changes and intense mobility were already democratising British familiarity with Europe during the immediate postwar decades. The twentieth-century version of the Continental ‘grand tour’, often on a shoestring through hitch-hiking and youth hostels, was a virtual rite of passage for adventurous young students, with valuable experiences in the challenges and rewards of mobility. For Adam Salt in the early 1990s his ‘decision to emigrate came about through a desire to travel and see more of the world’ after extensive European travels. ‘I wanted to see more and go further.’14 Even annual family holidays and school trips provided familiarity with place and language, stimulating prospects of future migration. Some emigrated to the continent before their Commonwealth moves, then retained prior emotional attachment to Europe.15 Many who missed the European move could be inspired to emigrate elsewhere by family members who did. Claire Blanchfield, who eventually went to Australia, then New Zealand, found inspiration in an aunt who had moved permanently to Spain when she was a baby. They prospered and ‘were good role models, absolutely, so that was my plan’.16 References to close relatives in Europe were routine in interviews, enabling frequent holiday visits, often in preference to Britain.17 If experience in Europe afforded a springboard to move farther afield, the reverse could be true. European attractions exercised fascination for many permanent Commonwealth migrants and returnees, like Phil Chapman. Some of the most prosperous enjoyed a foot in both camps, like the ‘unashamed francophile’, Gerry Bullon, who combined comfort-

Changing faces of modern migration  213 able Melbourne living with a holiday apartment on the Côte d’Azure.18 Elizabeth Taylor and her Australian partner, who had enjoyed their French farmhouse in the later years of their long transnational love affair, kept it for continuing visits after Elizabeth finally joined Michael in Melbourne.19 The routine nature of these movements underlines the ways in which serial global mobility came to be taken for granted by seasoned migrants. For returnees from Commonwealth countries another migration to the continent might seem relatively painless, with bonuses like proximity to Britain for return visits. Charles Eugster’s story illustrates this nexus of shifting migration practices. Charles was born in London in 1935 into a comfortable middleclass family, his father the managing director of an engineering company. Disruptive circumstances of war and schooling seemed to accustom him to routine mobility in childhood. His father joined the Fleet Air Arm and was rarely at home, there were frequent evacuations and changes of home and schools, and in later years he attended a Catholic secondary boarding school, then underwent two years of National Service. His family, with three sisters, was close-knit, and well adapted to mobility, which Charles attributed to wartime. There had been so much bouncing around during the War, … I mean the concept of a settled home, as our children had, you know, in one place, wasn’t really there. I think that’s one of the things war did to people, you didn’t have a settled place. You had a home, and the warmth of the family, but not in a fixed location.20

Boarding school and National Service deepened Charles’s casual adaptation to absence from home. Discharged from the army, the 21-year-old found himself in London in 1956 during the Suez crisis, with Britain struggling out of recession and few employment prospects. Contacts through his Canadian-born mother and his father’s networks enticed him to move to Toronto, ‘so I took the proverbial one-way ticket’. His flight heralded a seamless migration experience, with instant accommodation through family and congenial work, ‘almost immediately’, as proof-reader with a large department store chain. A year later, as a copywriter and instantly employable, he moved to Montreal, encouraged by his sister already there, by reports of a more interesting social life, ‘and I spoke a bit of French’. Charles promptly made friends with a range of young Canadians, French-Canadians and a network of expatriate Britons and others, mostly young single middle-class sojourners enjoying a few years abroad before settling down at home, forming groups to rent ski cottages for winter weekends and lakeside houses in summer. The setting made for an engaging social life, full of courtship prospects, reinforcing the attractions of a stimulating city. But unlike his compatriots Charles

214  Life stories of modern migration s­ eriously considered permanent settlement, took out Canadian citizenship and sought educational opportunities. At Sir George Williams University (later Concordia), which offered part-time degree programmes through evening classes in the city centre, he enrolled in a BA degree programme. He was conscious of the unique opportunity, not so easily available in Britain. ‘I have to say it’s a very Canadian thing to do, it’s not an English thing to do.’ He enjoyed stimulating professors and fascinating subject matter, mainly in English literature. Work and social life was thus juggled with intensive study, and at graduation in 1964 he was tired, needing a break, and ready for a visit home. The visit home was never intended to be anything more than that, but unexpectedly a good job offer and other interests brought a change of direction, ‘for romantic reasons and meeting people, but not with any dissatisfaction with Canada’. Canada’s attractions never waned, with return a real but receding possibility, and he reflected that ‘in a funny way, I never thought I’d really left it. … No, I never felt there was a break.’ Still, his career in marketing prospered. By 1969 he was married to Maureen, who had also sojourned in Montreal; they had two children and when his firm relocated to Gloucestershire they moved from urban to rural living, enjoying the benefits of a close-knit English village. Gradually a family tradition developed of annual holidays in France, which took on an explicit educative role, particularly for the children. We started the link with France, because we spent all our holidays in France. And trying to get the children used to the idea of language … so they’re not afraid if someone speaks another language. …. So that was great. … I think what you get, linguistically, is the idea that speaking a foreign language might not be so difficult, … you’re not terribly surprised by it.

Many years later the family bilingualism took on greater significance, enabling them to surmount the greatest obstacle facing Britons moving to Europe. The change came in 1996 when Charles’s company restructured, making him redundant at 61. Both children had left home while at university, so Charles and Maureen opted not to ‘downsize’ but to move to a much cheaper but sizeable rural property in the Lot, near Cahors, well known from countless family holidays. They were sufficiently familiar for the move to be a pull rather than a push, ‘more pulled, I’d have thought, by the attractions of it’. The attractions, focused particularly on lifestyle, endured, they had good friends from earlier visits, trips to England were easy and their children, too, could enjoy extended stays. The local district was entirely French, but Charles’s friendship network was a mixture of locals and British expatriates, ‘it’s just like Québec really’. A measure of their integration was Charles’s prominence in the

Changing faces of modern migration  215 local Quercy branch of the Association France-Grande Bretagne, with about three hundred members dedicated to Franco-British cultural integration, sponsoring social and cultural activities and language teaching. In later years he became president.21 The experience reinforced his conviction about his compatriots, that their ‘major problem’ was linguistic: ‘they don’t speak good French, or one partner speaks French and the other doesn’t. They then locate themselves somewhere very rural, like here, … and after ‘bonjour’ they can’t say very much, and it can be difficult.’ Here Charles identified the greatest deterrent to European migration for the British, never a concern for the great majority of Britons who emigrated to anglophone countries. In Europe they experienced that profound linguistic challenge faced by the great majority of non-English speakers in the Anglosphere. Some coped through getting by and adhering to expatriate British social circles. But Charles’s practice points to a more integrated direction, consistent with some research on rural France depicting the British as earnestly bilingual aspirants to full social and cultural integration.22 In 2011, about a year before our interview, Charles’s wife died, followed soon afterwards by the birth of his first grandchild in England, which prompted more frequent visits back. Questions nagged him about whether to return, only to be rejected. Well, you obviously think through, when I’m on my own, should I go back, but what are you going to do when you get back? Do your children necessarily want you living side by side? … Here I was then President of the FGB, I’m now running the atelier [workshop], … I mean it’s an active life, … so I’m involved with that, I’m involved with the neighbours, and I can get back. Well, you get a plane from Brive, and there in half a day.

At 76, then, Charles was content to remain a well-integrated Briton in France, still enjoying the benefits of a French rural lifestyle, with a relaxed attitude to mobility and ease of access to family. Looking back on his mobile life he considered it had ‘got me out of the box’ enabling contemplation of change without fear. I think I’ve been very lucky. I went to Canada, which was absolutely marvellous. I love England. France has been very good to me. … I speak French, I have lots of French friends here. … But you’ve just got to keep going, looking for new things, and trying not to sort of, go back in the box and look out and be terrified.

Charles’s prominent role in the Association France-Grand Bretagne suggests the importance for him of maintaining a mix of British and French social networks. But his prior experience as a migrant in Canada perhaps

216  Life stories of modern migration gave him a wider view, evident in his potent observation that for him the social mix was ‘just like Québec really’. His move to Canada in the 1960s had been a traditional single person’s migration, seeking, and taking, better opportunities while enjoying the new country adventure. His migration to France built on that but indicated a more modern direction with a relaxed attitude to mobility, an attractive attitude to later generations of relatively affluent migrants. These trends were deep-rooted by the 1990s, but the ‘Brexit’ decision in July 2016 undoubtedly raised serious questions for the future of British settlers in Europe. Some had already sought European passports, and government showed apparent indifference towards ‘Brexpats’.23 Whatever the outcome, the longerterm desire of the British to settle in Europe is well established and likely to continue. Visible women, changing migrants It is no surprise that migrant women have a disproportionate presence in these stories of change and continuity. For the most part men emigrate in greater numbers, but in previous chapters we have seen diverse examples of how changes of the later twentieth century impacted more starkly on migrant women, from the mid-century ‘nomad daughters of Empire’ to mobile professionals, often leading quests for altered lifestyles, and using their mobility to resolve transnational love lives. Twentieth-century revolutions in family size, employment, education and mobility were the most obvious drivers impacting on women’s migration patterns by the 1960s. Such changes stimulated migration decisions, but the act of migration itself could encourage further transformations in women’s lives. These patterns were becoming clear by mid-century, so we can see substantial continuity in women’s later migration practices, most vividly in their own words. Women, frequently with no prior writing experience, evidently became more willing to document their migrant lives, often in intimate detail about family and relationships.24 In the mid-1950s Eunice Gardner and Diana Williams, two young single women, emigrated to Australia as ‘ten pound Poms’ and eventually returned, partly hitchhiking, across Asia and Europe. Eunice published an engaging account of their adventures in 1957, The world at our feet: the story of two women who adventured halfway across the globe.25 Richly illustrated from their various encounters, with Malayan pearl cutters in Broome, Australian aborigines and Afghans at the Khyber Pass, and romantic interludes, it capitalised on the notion that women’s mobility was newsworthy. A generation later high-profile travel memoirs by women, like Lisa St Aubin de Teran’s Off the rails –as much about mobile relationships as locations – entered the mainstream, possibly reflecting the greater

Changing faces of modern migration  217

15  Book cover of Eunice Gardner’s The world at our feet, 1957

popularity of women’s life writing.26 So it is no surprise to find women experimenting with forms of migrant life writing for a range of purposes, like family interest and self-exploration. Toni Dobinson’s story nicely illustrates the ease with which women’s

218  Life stories of modern migration

16  Eunice Gardner and Diana Williams ‘on the road’, waving to a Malayan pearl cutter, near Broome, Western Australia, c. 1954

mobility came to dictate other life decisions. In response to our invitation to write her life story for the project, she produced a detailed account from her childhood onwards, based on the notion that mobility was educative. ‘I for one have no regrets at all about the moves I have made in my life. I see moving around as learning and hope my kids will be lucky enough to do the same. We plan to take a trip around the world with the kids in 2008.’ The theme was underlined when we rearranged an interview time to accommodate their return from a family holiday in Vietnam.27 Toni was originally a child migrant, eight years old, from Leicester to Western Australia in 1967. Her father, a painter and decorator, ominously for the future, ‘liked a drink’; although still together, her parents divorced after the birth of Toni’s older sister. His long determination to take his family to Australia initially foundered on the grounds of inertia and ‘cold feet’, but eventually ensued through his wife’s initiative and a necessary remarriage (followed by separation in Perth after his drinking and conflict escalated). Toni was a shy girl, slow to adjust, but gradually made close friends and did well at school. But after a year of university, and despite having a close boyfriend, she acted upon her restlessness and desire to ‘go back to my roots’ and left for London in 1979 with a school girl friend. She had no intention of staying, initially enduring much hardship, but was still in London in 1984. ‘I was poorer and life was

Changing faces of modern migration  219 a lot tougher, but I felt like I was alive and enjoyed the challenges each day brought. I looked upon my previous life as boring, too comfortable and bland.’ Crucial to her adjustment was a serious relationship with Paul; he too was moving from one unrewarding job to another, though with increasing frustration. By 1983 they were seeking new opportunities, but unsuccessful in attempts to enrol for university courses. A short holiday in Cairo exposed them to prospects of brief training, in England, to qualify as teachers of English as a foreign language (TEFL), and the opportunity to teach ‘all over the world’. Toni insisted that this was her transformative moment, ‘doing the course changed our lives’. Fully qualified in 1984, they left promptly for Athens, found no opportunities there so flew to Cairo and quickly obtained teaching positions with the British Council. The experience was electrifying, albeit dangerous, with exposure to serious health risks, regular riots and anarchy on the roads. ‘One day in Cairo was like a whole year in London and a lifetime in Perth.’ But after two years she tired of ‘living on the edge’, and in Perth the University of Western Australia threatened to terminate her deferred enrolment if she delayed her return. She was also conscious of the need to see more of her mother, still in Perth. After complications with Toni’s re-entry visa for Australia they returned to England briefly, taught at a private language school for several months, had a short holiday in Turkey and travelled to Perth at the end of 1986. It seemed there was no time to waste. Toni completed her degree speedily and, married in 1987, they each found work in language teaching schools while upgrading their skills in teacher training, another qualification ideally suited to overseas employment. After two years restlessness emerged again. ‘We felt a little bored with Perth and wanted the excitement of living and working in another country.’ Two-year expatriate contracts in Oman in 1989 offered the ideal prospect. By this time Toni particularly enjoyed teaching Arab students, warming to ‘a natural affinity with Arabic culture generally, I’m very much into it’. Perth beckoned again in 1990, after short trips to England and India. Determination and good fortune saw her complete a Master’s degree in applied linguistics, followed by a lecturing appointment in the same field at Curtin University, and by 2000 Paul obtained a similar appointment. Their positions were ideally suited to the prospect of having children as well as facilitating future travel. But for much of the 1990s their good fortune came with accompanying angst. Keen to start a family, Toni had a stillborn child in 1993, followed by three miscarriages and medical advice that she might not be able to have children, raising prospects of overseas adoption. The advice proved to be off the mark, with two sons born in 1997 and 1999. Now firmly settled in Perth, further expatriate adventures seemed out of reach. But holidays apart, the prospect of further ‘moving around as learning’, as a family, remained part of Toni’s mindset. Her

220  Life stories of modern migration mobility had ‘made me, the person that I am, and I think you just learn so much about yourself, as well about other cultures, and learn tolerance’. Characteristically, her attitude to national identity was relaxed and flexible; focused mainly on her Australian citizenship, she reflected that ‘I still do think of myself very much as English, and I’m not quite sure why, because the thought of actually living there would involve so much effort, I’m at that sort of lazy stage of my life’. The laziness was barely evident in annual family holidays, one around the world, others to Asia, Europe and America. She later predicted that ‘we will probably be thinking of where to next as soon as the children leave home’.28 Toni’s self-conscious assertion of a mobile identity was a gradual work-in-progress, and indeed her discovery of a virtual ticket to further mobility through the TEFL course was a piece of serendipity. It evolved into a single-minded pursuit aimed at serial movement that changed their lives; by 2014 both had received their doctorates. These virtual passports to mobility had numerous precursors, even in the 1970s. Since the 1940s occupations like nursing, physiotherapy, teaching, secretarial work and hairdressing had offered seamless opportunities to young single women for adventure during a period of mass British emigration.29 Moreover, British Council promotion of overseas English teaching dates back to the 1930s.30 But as receiving countries elevated their entry requirements for essential skills from the 1970s, ambitious sojourners with uncertain qualifications needed the single-minded focus on mobile qualifications exemplified by Toni. In most periods there are more married women migrants than single, and the traditional separate-spheres model of dependence on a breadwinning husband has been slow to change. But since the 1950s the well-known transformation in married women’s roles, especially in employment, has been particularly marked among migrants; while the causal link is not easy to establish, it is a powerful theme in the written life stories explored below. Two young wives who emigrated to Melbourne, in 1968 and 1974, exemplify this process, in both interviews and writing, especially the latter. Both came as mothers, dependent on husbands, both lived through different forms of family and psychological crisis, then became high professional achievers, and both, talented writers, used their writing to explore and understand their lives. The first to move, Amanda Stuart, had little agency on the assisted passage to Melbourne, aged 22, with her Australian journalist husband, Alan, and a toddler daughter. She had been ‘intrigued’ by Australia since childhood, and hoped to visit with Alan without marrying. But he insisted on marriage – ‘in those days I did what I was told!’ Still in England a baby followed, then a short expatriate sojourn for Alan’s work in the Netherlands, where Amanda experienced her first taste of isolation. Alan worked irregular hours and she was often alone.

Changing faces of modern migration  221 The 1968 subsidised trip to Australia – depicted by Alan as a ‘land of milk and honey’, with welcoming family – followed much discussion and his promise that they would return if she ‘wasn’t happy’. Cracks appeared soon after the Oriana left Southampton, as Alan partied on until early hours while Amanda cared for the baby. She recalled her dawning realisation that ‘I saw a side of him I didn’t really know’. She formed an enduring friendship with a similarly situated woman. ‘Our stories have many parallels; we had married men we didn’t really know, who could keep up a pretence away from home, we were both very naive about the decision to emigrate.’ Disillusion continued after arrival. Alan’s mother announced, ‘I told him not to come back married to a Pom’. After a disorienting start visiting Alan’s family in the provincial town of Hamilton – ‘I was reminded of a deserted town in a wild west movie’ – she faced the common plight in Melbourne of the young migrant wife and mother in suburban isolation. The culture shock of those years is central to her story.31 There was little in Amanda’s background that might lead us to expect this lack of agency in her marriage and the depth of her alienation. She admits that while she had a ‘turbulent childhood’ it began well, with a solid middle-class background, mostly in Surrey. Her father was an army major, which brought a two-year posting in Italy when Amanda was six, with primary schooling giving her proficiency in Italian and fond memories. But on return to England ‘everything went to pieces’; her father left the army, failed in a business venture and returned to Sandhurst to teach mathematics. Financial and other pressures triggered marital stress and both parents became alcoholics, separating just before Amanda left the country. With two younger siblings and an older brother, Amanda became de-facto mother, carrying ‘much of the burden and responsibility of the family’. In the process she formed close bonds with her siblings and two sets of aunts and uncles, but family tensions provided one incentive for her early marriage. After completing school, despite lacking the usual prerequisite of a university degree, she landed an executive officer position with the Foreign Office in London. She thrived on city life, revelled in cultural activities and made close friends, much of which ended when she married Alan and had to leave her job. Early in the marriage she still enjoyed London with Alan during her pregnancy, but during the work sojourn in the Netherlands she began to feel the isolation that foreshadowed her later experience in Australia. On return to England, shortly before the Australian move, she enjoyed support from her immediate and extended family. A poem, written by a much-loved, grieving uncle, before departure, hints at the esteem she enjoyed and the feisty persona which endeared her to family and friends. It hints, too, at the challenges she would face in Melbourne: rereading it years later she wrote ‘I can see he knew me better than I knew myself’.

222  Life stories of modern migration A small piece of heart Douce niece, nectarine skinned Tall, lissom, jouncy, gleaming girl In captive love with her Australian Bound for Melbourne Shy, sheathed-clawed animal, intuitive and kind; God damn her crude, commanding Aussie Lochinvar So to bereave me of her joyous grace For Melbourne Melbourne!

Migrant women for generations had suffered experiences of homesickness similar to Amanda’s in Melbourne. Most eventually recovered, some with great success, but the early pressures could put great strain on their marriages, and in Amanda’s case this seemed to be in train during the voyage. A second child, born only thirteen months after arrival, did little to relieve her ‘fairly depressed state’. But soon a degree of salvation beckoned when her beloved elder brother, Peter, also a journalist, emigrated to Melbourne with his wife, Fiona, and soon after began working for Alan.32 Having two close, loving confidants lifted Amanda’s spirits, but her joy was short-lived. Alan expected Peter to conform to his long and late hours which kept him away from home; tensions soon emerged. Within two years their working relationship broke down, and, with Fiona keen to have a baby with her mother nearby, they returned, reluctantly, leaving Amanda, as she saw it ‘on my own again’. Still, her involvement in local childcare activities began to yield new friendships, leading to more ambitious ventures and a lift in spirits. With one friend she found work as a waitress in a jazz restaurant two nights a week. ‘My mini-skirts and long hair were just right for my new job and for me it meant salvation.’ In less than two years the generous tips enabled her to finance a return trip to England with her children. Enthused by a rewarding time feeling ‘at home again’ with her English family, but disturbed by her realisation ‘that I didn’t miss Alan, and if anything, I felt more “myself” in England and away from him’, she returned with a determination to relocate the family in England. Alan flatly refused, despite his original promise, ‘saying his life, his work, was in Australia’. The marriage deteriorated progressively through Alan’s affairs and binge drinking, and ended in 1974. Her option, again, to return to England was vetoed flatly by one of her children, and she embarked on an essential search for income. With a friend she had already run a health food shop, but for small return. Over more than two decades she earned a BA and teaching diploma, worked in library positions and language

Changing faces of modern migration  223 teaching at Melbourne University and two elite private schools, and led student study tours to Italy. Swept up by a wave of redundancies in 1998, at 53, she contemplated another career change. She had been seeing a psychologist for some years, was impressed by the results, and enrolled in a counselling course. Her counsellor had been ‘able to resolve many of the issues from my childhood, so I knew a lot about the process of psychotherapy’. Within two years she established a successful private counselling practice, keeping fees low to cater to those unable to afford higher fees charged by psychologists. Symptomatic of her achievement was a book on counselling she published in 2012, The longest journey: finding the true self.33 Her career success was complemented from 1980 by a new relationship with Ian, her ‘soul mate’, turbulent at times since both had young children, but increasingly close; they married in 1989. ‘I cannot imagine my life, over the past three decades, without him. He supports me in all the things I want to do. I know that if I really wanted to go back to England to live, he would agree.’ Three themes recur throughout Amanda’s written story: her slow recovery, through work and counselling, from the emotional trauma of migration and dysfunctional marriage; the triumph of her counselling career and the fulfilment of a second marriage; and, over nearly five decades, coming to terms with her life in Australia alongside sustained attachment to England and her family. She knew her career flowed from her migration and was acutely conscious of the relative handicaps facing her in England at the time of departure: I couldn’t have been a counsellor in England, I wouldn’t have become one in England, I wouldn’t have gone to a psychotherapist in England, because nobody does, or nobody I know does. Whereas here it was acceptable, it became a bit of the norm that you could get counselling. And so in a sense I think my career wouldn’t have happened in England.

Resolution of Amanda’s sense of dislocation and family separation was more complex, partly reconciled by the act of writing itself. At the end of her story she reflected on the many Australian features and experiences she had come to appreciate: the literature and culture she discovered at university: her friendships with aborigines, the richness of their culture and contact with the land; and the beauty of the landscape she discovered when they bought a beach house, enjoying birds attracted to ‘the garden we are creating’. ‘This gives me a true sense of home, just as the Victorian house I grew up in, which was surrounded by acres of lawn and English trees, did when I was little.’ Against this was her absence from her English family, although assuaged by frequent reunions in both countries. The last, in London, ‘was a wonderful occasion, and I felt very much that I belonged there. This was also my family and my home.’ She concluded

224  Life stories of modern migration that ‘for a long time I didn’t feel “at home” in either country; writing this has shown me I now feel at home in both’. Julie Watts’s story contrasts with Amanda’s in the advantage of a single, long-term stable marriage, but themes of destructive parental conflict, migrant trauma and homesickness were strikingly similar, and they shape much of her written story. Born in 1950 in Guildford, she was from a working-class family, on the cusp of the lower middle class, with a ‘bohemian writer father’. The marriage disintegrated within weeks of her birth, when her father, with a new woman, locked his wife and Julie out of the house; her mother had a breakdown and took Julie to live with her parents. Julie recalls, ‘I was put in nursery school, but it was my beloved grandparents who really brought me up’. The theme of her father’s philandering was to recur for years ahead. When I was five my father, who had been off experiencing what was then labelled ‘free love’, turned up looking for a divorce. He told my mother she had to bring me up herself, and he found a room in a Scientologist’s house in London (Battersea). She agreed, hoping this meant they would get back together, but this wasn’t to be as my father was having an affair with the Scientologist! My mother went to work in Westminster as a secretary and I became a latchkey kid.34

As a ‘latchkey kid’, Julie could spend weekends with her grandparents in Guildford, routinely put on the train by her mother at Clapham Junction, and met by her grandfather. She was nine when her mother remarried, already pregnant, to a single father met at a Scientology meeting, ‘and suddenly I had a whole new family – a stepfather (engineer), an older stepsister (by two years) and a baby half brother – and my special weekends in Guildford became largely a thing of the past’. Domestic violence soon split the family, and Julie began ‘to care for my baby brother’ and to ‘keep the warring factions apart’. Occasionally she saw her father, vividly recalling, while young, a ‘weekend away at a nudist camp (which I hated – why were these Scientologist people always trying to get me naked and put their healing hands near me but not on me – as I thought?)’. To the seven-year-old his place in her life seemed enigmatic, later even prophetic, evident in a poem he wrote for her, Poem for Julie, who walks by herself … ‘where nobody else would ever think of walking’. Her timidity, she thought, eventually caused him to ‘wash his hands of me’, particularly after she refused to join him and his latest partner for three months in the Greek islands. In 1964 he emigrated to Melbourne with an Australian woman, and developed a reputation in radical-left journalist circles. For Julie liberation from family angst came when, at 14, she met Roger (16), soon becoming inseparable. They married in 1969, when Julie was 19,

Changing faces of modern migration  225 and struggled while Roger attended teaching college, recovered from a potentially fatal disease and they had two children. After his illness Roger ‘wanted to live a more adventurous life’, and both were keen to escape from their Midlands housing estate. Gradually, correspondence with her father in Australia revived the relationship and he portrayed an enticing prospect: I was writing more frequently to my father who painted a glorious picture of a bohemian family life in rural Warrandyte, on an acre of riverside bushland where the sun always shone, and where he lived now with another woman and her son and their new baby. I wondered if he had mellowed and was settling down! When he suggested we become ten-pound Poms and would sponsor us, there was the answer! A two-year adventure with a job guaranteed (the government was recruiting teachers at the time).

So in 1974, with loving good wishes from her grandmother, but bitter recrimination from her mother, Julie’s family flew to Melbourne for their Australian project: an adventure, getting to know her father better, and return after two years. After an unusually bitter winter, power strikes and life in a council estate, the allure of sunshine and stable employment for Roger was too tempting to resist. But even the first day’s meeting revived memories of her father’s ‘bohemian family life’. My father, his young artist wife, her five-year-old son and their three-yearold daughter … were awaiting us at Tullamarine [airport], all long hair, sarongs, pendants and bare feet. … At their Penleigh Boyd mud brick ‘gingerbread cottage’ by the river they stripped off – he was still a nudist. A bit confronting for his shy daughter! A party was held, the writers and artists came, the children frolicked, the mosquitoes bit us, and here it seemed was a family embracing me at last. My stepmother said I was the sister she’d always wanted.

The happy families theme was short-lived. Her father’s young wife soon shifted from affection to jealous hostility. He found a rental house for them within two weeks and presented them with a bill for expenses, including phone calls, oil for a bike chain, and petrol. The house, remote from town, recalled everything ‘we’d hated in the Midlands’. The bill came with ‘a not very sincere apology … that he couldn’t see me again because his young wife (only eight years my senior) didn’t like it’. The young family struggled without father’s support, Julie suffering chronic migrant alienation, as she summarised it: ‘homesickness, abandonment, foreignness, entrapment, loneliness, anxiety, timidity, floating in a bland and arid (in every way) environment with a two-year sentence to be served’. A medical diagnosis of clinical depression appalled her,

226  Life stories of modern migration prompting a new approach. ‘I immediately pulled myself together and began to re-engage with my children and made moves towards making some kind of life happen for us. I took driving lessons and joined a playgroup and found the mothers to be very friendly and generous, and a lifeline.’ Life began to improve, until a year after their arrival, without contact from her father, he asked to see her, declaring that the young wife had left him; he was distressed and uncomprehending. Julie was distinctly unsympathetic; ‘I reminded him of the hurt he’d inflicted on so many women.’ She was torn between desire for a close family, the father she’d never known and grandfather for the children, against knowledge that he would always be emotionally manipulative and demanding. ‘We parted, me coolly, he questioning.’ A week later he killed himself. Only later did she learn that he might have been stockpiling sleeping pills for some time. What might have utterly derailed their migration ‘adventure’ instead became a turning point. At the funeral, bereft and hysterical, she met an Australian, the woman her father emigrated with and who bought the Boyd house for him. ‘She told me later of the cruelty he had inflicted on her too. She took me aside in her arms and told me not to weep but to go to work.’ To paraphrase a long, complex story, Julie took her advice and help, found a part-time typing job with McPhee-Gribble, an independent publisher started ‘by two marvellous women’. Later, with Penguin, she rose from publishing department secretary to publisher within seven years, winning two prestigious awards and engaging in regular speaking engagements and international travel. Between jobs for two years from 1978 she started a tearoom in the Dandenong hills, Selby Tarts, with a woman neighbour, a former close neighbour in London. It thrived as a popular novelty, extended into catering, sold only after two years when both women were exhausted. Julie credits a culture of opportunity in Australia for her success at Penguin, unable to ‘imagine that I could have had such a career had I stayed in England’. First, I didn’t know a soul there with the kind of influence or connections that started me off here. Second, it was here … where I was embraced for who I was, regardless of ‘station’ or education or accent, where my opinions (mine, the typist’s!) were sought, where I was challenged and given opportunities, where, because of this faith, I gradually lost my timidity and learned to believe in myself. That was such a gift. Could this have happened in the publishing world in England? I don’t believe so. Not then anyway. … Instead of ‘you can’t do that’, it was always ‘give it a go’. (Hence the teashop, hence the alternative school in the bush – all bare feet, guitars and goats – where Roger taught and was later principal. Heady days!)

A different advantage came from Roger himself, with a similar work ethic, at times working two jobs to make ends meet. Twice he faced ter-

Changing faces of modern migration  227 minal illness diagnoses but survived, throwing himself into work while supporting Julie. As a teacher he was ‘there for the kids after school and in the holidays’, crucial when they rejected alternative care and had no supportive family. Julie speculated that had he not survived his second illness when she started at Penguin, ‘I’d have probably returned to England – and wouldn’t that have been a different story!’35 Most similarities to Amanda’s story end here, with Roger’s support enabling Julie ‘to follow my dreams and to grow. (We always did this for each other.)’ Amanda found similar support from a second partner only after the trauma of her divorce and the early stages of her struggle to forge two successive careers. Both women, though, adapted to the challenges of migration in similar ways, and are good exponents of the complex mix of interactions between migration, marriage and career. With career success Julie’s family prospered and she could enjoy annual work trips to England and regularly reconnect with her mother. Frequent travel also brought new appreciation of Australia, so that, when she regularly held forth on the distinctiveness of the Australian ‘land’ compared to an overbuilt Europe, Roger would tease her about ‘Mum’s land speech’. In later years her son, Daniel, and daughter, Ali, followed her into publishing. Daniel pursued his career in London, Hong Kong and Delhi, in a more casual pursuit of mobility than that undertaken by his parents, returning to Australia, with a Thai wife and two children, in 2012.36

17  Julie Watts (first right) family farewell to son Daniel (second right) to London at Melbourne airport, 1996

228  Life stories of modern migration Only with Julie’s mother was there a reminder of the enduring family costs of migration – the painful deprivation of the children–grandparent relationship, but worse her mother’s bitterness and long resentment over Julie’s ‘betrayal’, never wanting to share her with the rest of her family. Julie’s long written account of how ‘our two year adventure’ became ‘the adventure of a lifetime’ is a triumphal one, in career and family terms, celebrating her love for her adopted country. But if escape from the disastrous relationship with her father set her free, the relational hangover with her mother remained, as she recounted from a late visit when she took her to visit Roger’s parents, and again, ‘it seemed she just couldn’t share me with anyone. … All I could do was count the days till we returned home.’37 For Julie, like Amanda, writing her story became a cathartic exercise.38 Two weeks after writing she reread it, adding further ‘reflections’, noting how much of it was about her mother and how little of her family’s feelings towards Australia. She detailed all they came to love about Australia, and underlined the enduring emotional theme of family separation. ‘I guess the separation issue along with the question of belonging has been huge for me in all our 32 years here, and it will probably never get any easier, in a practical sense anyway, even if I am finally coming to accept the emotional situation.’ Unstated here was the profound transformation she had shaped in her own and her family’s lives through her career, almost as though it were taken for granted. Nearly a decade after the interview she thrived in retirement, combining active grandparenthood with work as a consultant, freelance editor and literary agent. Like Amanda she was a model for senior professional women. By the end of the century migrant women’s career success was unremarkable, but it illustrated how their migration experiences had evolved in recent decades. The autobiographical urge, too, was a product of those changes; writers like Julie and Amanda are good exponents of Alain de Botton’s observation that ‘journeys are the midwives of thought’.39 Just as expatriate novelists’ writing benefits from the highs and lows of exile, so too the migrant memory can bring unique clarity to reflections on transplantation, and a pressing need to make sense of the experience. Loyalty and community in a modern diaspora This book’s focus on life stories reflects the individualist tendencies of British migrants, unlike non-English speakers in anglophone countries, to avoid close-knit ethnic loyalty organisations and institutional ways of finding community among compatriots. With a few exceptions postwar British migrants, mostly dispersed in suburban settlements, found companionship among a mixture of British, locally born and other

Changing faces of modern migration  229 migrants.40 It is true that in the main Commonwealth country destinations various collective loyalty organisations existed since colonial times, like the St George’s societies, especially in Canada, local groups like the British-Australian Community (formerly the UK Settlers’ Association) in Melbourne; Caledonian and Burns clubs among the Scots; and a range of county-based expatriate clubs like Leicester Overseas. During the 1950s and 1960s some served as sociable clubs with activities like ballroom dancing, albeit with short-term loyalties; some pursued a political agenda. Gail Rayment, president of the Toronto St George’s Society in 2000, stressed its benevolent and non-political character, consistent with its foundation in the 1830s, formed to assist English immigrants fallen on hard times; its membership, including some with no English inheritance, simply liked to ‘dabble in Britishness every now and then … you know, play croquet, go to Gilbert and Sullivan, … play cricket, have pub-nights’.41 Eventually many became web-based organisations appealing more to temporary expatriates and tourists than migrants; many are short-lived. Historians of the various ethnic components of British migration have stressed the importance of these ‘associational cultures’ over time, but few have demonstrated a case for their representativeness of wider immigrant populations.42 In the highly individualised contexts of late twentieth-century British migration, and of a relatively weak associational culture in Britain, new migrants would more likely seek belonging in family, work, sport and neighbourhood.43 In the oral testimony, reluctance to join loyalty associations, regardless of patriotic or sentimental attachment to Britain, was ubiquitous. ‘Carol’s’ comment in Wellington that ‘I would never join an English club, God it just sounds too ridiculous’, is characteristic of the attitudes of most interviewees, but rarely inconsistent with enduring emotional links with Britain. In Carol’s case this included continuing homesickness ‘in both countries’ despite a long history of mobility and ultimate settlement in New Zealand only since 1998.44 British and non-British clubs and activities without explicit nationalist or ethnic overtones have been more appealing, especially those connected to sport. Stephanie Hayward, a relative newcomer to Australia in 2001, with a highly mobile past, joined her husband’s cricket passions in Perth, offering support and hospitality to England’s cricket team supporters, the ‘barmy army’, during the 2006 Ashes contest. As the photographs suggest, her family’s enthusiastic commitment to England in cricket coexisted with equally strong loyalty to the new country, illustrated at celebration of their Australian citizenship on Australia Day, 2007. British loyalty through sport required no other formal connection as they evolved a casual migrant identity. Australia, Stephanie declared, ‘is our home now, our country of choice. We will, of course, still support the Poms in sport, but only when they are against Australia, otherwise we will be Aussies.’45

230  Life stories of modern migration

18  Stephanie Hayward at Ashes cricket match with England’s ‘Barmy Army’, Perth, 2006

19  Stephanie Hayward, with husband and daughter, at Australian citizenship ceremony. Perth, 2007

In a rare case of retirement migration to Australia, Doreen and Tom Barton followed their daughter to Queensland after retirement in 1998, built a house but by 2003 decided to enter a retirement home near the Gold Coast, just as they obtained Australian citizenship. Thoroughly committed to Australia, and not remotely interested in joining British clubs, they nevertheless promoted the annual ‘Pommy night’ in the home each year on St George’s Day, in which residents, regardless of national backgrounds, joined in, dressed in red and white, although their table

Changing faces of modern migration  231 was decorated with the Union Jack rather that the St George’s Cross. The evening denoted sociability rather than ethnic attachment.46 By the 1990s a new means of ‘dabbling in Britishness’ began to emerge, but with a commercial edge. Across old Commonwealth countries in particular, new shops began to open in major cities to serve the peculiarly British tastes of tourists, expats, migrants, even former visitors to Britain. The range of goods varied from Marmite to Yorkshire tea, Bird’s custard to Bisto gravy and English chutneys, but the overwhelming demand was for British confectionery, especially boiled sweets, even Blackpool rock. As migrant numbers increased around 2000 these outlets flourished. Most were launched by British migrants, from mixed motives, particularly an eye for commercial advantage and awareness, from experience, of Britons’ emotional attachment to familiar consumer goods. For six years in Wellington, Lancastrians Claire Blanchfield and her partner ran two branches of Cool Britannia, catering to migrants, tourists and British visitors to the nearby immigration offices.47 Both branches flourished and became well known as sites for ethnic sociability of the kind that rarely succeeded at the institutional level. At its peak the citycentre shop was well known to the media and a ‘beacon of all things British’, an irony to Claire ‘because I’m not a very patriotic person’. But by 2010, under the pressure of competition from supermarkets and online websites, Cool Britannia had closed its doors. A more durable outlet was Treats from Home, which began trading in central Sydney in 2003, followed by a Melbourne branch in 2005. Ironically these were the initiative of an Australian, Alison Carr, anxious to relieve her British husband’s homesickness. Paul missed ‘his chocolates and goodies from home while staying up late to watch West Ham play football’.48 In his early years, after moving to Sydney in 2000, the shop fostered British socialising, which nourished his admitted sense of British patriotism. 49 Another flourishing British shop in Floreat, an inner suburb of Perth, was the outcome of a global love story similar to some we encountered in Chapter 6. Anne Howe and Ian Hatfield, both from Middlesbrough, had been friends at school but had quite separate marriage and migration trajectories. Ian had two marriages with two children, Anne one marriage with three children, although it deteriorated progressively over time. Anne had a long interest in Australia, enhanced by publicity during the 1987 America’s Cup; keen to leave Middlesbrough, she dreamed of opportunities beyond their limited incomes from Anne’s hairdressing and her husband’s blast furnace work with British Steel. A long bureaucratic process led to their migration in 1989, after intense emotional farewells from close-knit families – ‘by far the hardest thing I had ever experienced’. Within four weeks of arrival they found a rental house, and she found hairdressing work with long hours while her husband stayed home, ‘a situation I found repeating itself many times in the future’.50

232  Life stories of modern migration Thirteen years later, as Anne’s marriage neared its end and Ian’s second marriage foundered, they made a chance encounter on the British website Friends Reunited. An internet romance blossomed, and in 2003 Anne made a family visit to Middlesbrough, enhanced by the prospect of seeing Ian. Within two months of Anne’s return, and no longer married, Ian arrived in Perth on a one-year visa. Their relationship faced numerous obstacles, particularly with Ian’s sons left behind, interference from Anne’s resentful husband and a lengthy struggle for Ian’s residency. At one point he risked deportation for allegedly breaking his holiday visa condition banning employment, evidently on the word of ‘an informant’. Apparently his stated intention to open a retail business worked in his favour. In 2005 they launched Best of British. The British goods enterprise was Ian’s idea, born of long experience in the food industry and retail, but enhanced by Anne’s background in customer relations and sales. It was a joint business, mainly operated by Ian while Anne continued to earn an income, but both worked weekends in the shop. Floreat, an inner suburb west of Perth, by 2011 benefited from a British-born Perth population density of 12 per cent overall, with outer suburbs as high as 43 per ent.51 Canny marketing, including advertising in the International Express aimed at British expats, brought prompt recognition and thriving custom. Food products were the mainstay, but Ian had other ideas because ‘everybody concentrates on lollies and sweets’. Nobody really does the nostalgia, and I was wanting more, something more, the nostalgia, the memorabilia, where people could come in and reminisce. … I really wasn’t aware that people would reminisce over a tin of baked beans, but they do (laugh). … And, so, the name ‘Best of British’ would have encompassed everything, so, it didn’t matter what it was, whether it was a recipe book or a calendar or whether it was an article of clothing … It didn’t matter, but the food is what initially brings people in.

By coincidence, the shop’s launch coincided with the publication of Hammerton and Thomson’s book Ten pound Poms, promoted and sold assiduously by Ian, and used as a ‘really good talking point’ among customers, ‘and everybody says I was a ten pound Pom’. A visit to the shop in 2007 illustrated the success of Ian’s ambition to create a casual ‘dropin centre’ alongside a retail business. Locals, as well as migrants from northern and southern suburbs, came to purchase, often with squeals of delight, but crammed the limited space indulging in conversation and banter. ‘What we tried to develop’, Ian explained ‘was the old British corner shop mentality, where Mrs. Bloggs would walk in and she’d want a loaf of bread, but it would take her half an hour to buy it.’ On weekends they provided entertainment to accompany the reminiscing:

Changing faces of modern migration  233

20  Best of British shop front, Floreat, Western Australia

21  Anne Howe in Best of British TV interview for birth of Prince George, 2 June, 2013

234  Life stories of modern migration IAN: And we had done a lot, an awful lot, an awful lot, Anne and I … so the two of us were a double act in there, but we would mimic each other and criticise a lot. ANNE: Oh we criticise each other heaps, don’t we? Rib each other and … IAN: And you know it’s a, it’s a real double act when we’re in there together. And Saturday’s a bit of a social experience for us as well.

Here, perhaps, was live replication of scenes reminiscent of Coronation Street, a bonus to supplement the ‘lollies and sweets’. The ‘drop-in centre’ nourished as much or more of a sense of Britishness than more formal loyalty organisations, demanding sustained commitment but with limited patronage. But the shop could be sustained only by regular custom, and competitive forces, especially from online websites, posed an increasing challenge to viability. Best of British, like Treats from Home, managed the challenge by operating a strong online presence itself. As other ‘expat’ websites demonstrated, this informal option was, increasingly, the way British migrants might choose to nourish their British identity. Sushi Das and changing faces of British migration Michelle Payne’s story, narrated in Chapter 2, illustrated how utterly traditional family migration experiences could be embodied in what was otherwise quite novel: British migrants to Australia in 1975, actually Anglo-Indians, originally migrants from India to England in 1955. Their migration history, conventionally British in most respects, was overlain with themes of ethnic difference and discrimination, of the kind often associated with non-British and non-white migrants. Sushi Das’s story, similarly, highlights issues of racial identity within a migration story otherwise familiar to generations of British migrants. It is an appropriate conclusion to this exploration of change and continuity in British migration history. Sushi, born in India in 1964, went to England – Twickenham, a then all-white London suburb – with her mother to join her father, in 1965. Her father was a civil servant in the tax office, and, with his wife, worked to maintain an utterly respectable family life, conforming to Indian values and customs, including arranged marriages for their three children. Sushi developed other ideas and became a thoroughly anglicised rebellious teenager, defied her parents’ schemes for arranged marriages with various Indian suitors, aspired to a career in journalism and, at university in the 1980s, was highly politicised in the anti-Thatcher university atmosphere of the time and met her future husband.52 Her memoir of 2012, Deranged marriage, describes her journalism career alongside her struggle to escape from her parents’ traditional values and arranged mar-

Changing faces of modern migration  235 riage projects with a succession of Indian suitors unknown to her. Her actual marriages, first to an English sociologist, later to an Australian journalist, represented her escape. It caused a deep, seemingly unbridgeable chasm between Sushi and her parents, and her younger sister too, who finally took one of the eligible suitors, an Indian doctor, to keep the peace at home, later emigrating to New York. In the book she described the depth of her alienation and family crisis, in a dialogue with her father, caused by her rebellion on the night she announced her intention to marry her English partner, her father initially assuming she referred to an Indian husband: ‘… I don’t want an arranged marriage – ever. I want to choose someone myself.’ ‘That’s all right, … you just tell us who he is and we can make the necessary arrangements.’ … ‘Who is it?’ he asked. I thought I heard a note of mild but invariable irritation in his tone. I hesitated momentarily. … ‘He’s English. I’m sorry.’ … He was silent, and stayed silent. … His gaze was fixed on me, not in anger, but with crushing despair in his eyes. He seemed, all of a sudden, so far away. His tears fell onto his light grey trousers, spreading into small dark drops of parental anguish. ‘I’m sorry Dad. I’m so sorry,’ I said, and burst into childish tears. Later that evening, when he told Mum, she lashed out and tried to strike me, but Dad held her back until she fell to her knees and broke down. She beat her head with her clenched fists and cried deep, breathy sobs of disappointment and pain.53

From that day, Sushi said, ‘everything changed’, with icy disapproval and silence at home, until she obtained grudging blessing for a perfunctory and tense register office wedding ceremony in 1988. Her first years of marriage in London accompanied increasing parental distance. By 1991 Sushi was finding her feet in publishing; her husband, consumed with anger about life in ‘Thatcher’s Britain’, sought escape, which came with a job offer from a Melbourne university. Sushi was shocked. Her career was beckoning and ‘I was, for the first time, beginning to feel comfortable in my British skin’. So her migration remained a reluctant one. Family farewells were restrained, the cultural wars in Sushi’s family still simmering. In Melbourne, though, Sushi assuaged her homesickness by throwing herself into career ambitions. As a columnist, she wrote opinion pieces in the Melbourne Age, particularly around themes of race and multiculturalism, eventually becoming opinion editor. Just as this took off, in 1998, her husband was offered a better position in Sydney; she refused to join him, which resulted in friendly separation and ultimately divorce. For years she shrank from telling her parents. For a time she ‘went off the rails’, emotionally and socially, while still enjoying a flourishing career with ‘an enviable job’; she published bitter but penetrating critiques of

236  Life stories of modern migration the Indian arranged marriage system, well before her book. In 2004 she married again – an older colleague, a white Australian – and by 2006 had a baby daughter. Crucially, her second marriage in Melbourne crystallised a slow transnational reconciliation with her parents: ‘This time I was determined to acknowledge my roots and make a conciliatory gesture to my parents.’ Her parents and brother came to Melbourne for the wedding, ‘an amalgam of eastern and western ideas’, and warmed to her new husband, ‘charmed’ by him she thought, because ‘in my absence he had told them that I spoke highly of them’.54 So the family cultural divide which dominated Sushi’s journey to marriage and migration was ultimately resolved, arguably a product of the resilience she learned as a migrant and her desire for family connection in Britain. But her migrant identity remained deeply unresolved. Although it was a personal memoir, her book focused overwhelmingly on the evils of the arranged marriage system. It made little reference to what dominated our interview five years earlier, her reluctant migration and passionate attachment to Britain, more correctly England, and an English identity. On this she was consistent and uncompromising. Some examples should suffice to convey her passionate sense of that identity, significantly more passionate than found among most white British born migrants: Well, I’ve always felt British, I still feel British, I’ve been here 16 years and I reckon I’m going to feel British, until I die, because, my youth was there, and my teenage years were there, and those years I think are important, they form you, my 20s were there, and I think those years are important because they make you, in so many ways, they make, they mould the core of you. That’s why I think I’m always going to feel British, I think partly because I left reluctantly, with always a view to going back, and for me it feels unfulfilled, that I didn’t go back. I said I was going to go back, and my family’s always saying: ‘When are you coming back?’, my friends are always saying: ‘Are you ever going to come back?’, and I’m fearful of losing my British identity, I know I can never lose my Indian identity, because it’s in my skin, but I’m fearful of losing my British identity because well, that’s not on my face. So, I want to go back.

Significantly, her identity was forged not just through cultural immersion but through the catalyst of gradual defiance of the strict imperatives of her parents’ Indian culture. Her migration to Melbourne paradoxically helped to resolve some of the confusions it initially caused. She recalled that it just added to the confusion, but in a weird, weird way it also clarified things for me, in the sense that I came here, and for the first time I had to start

Changing faces of modern migration  237 thinking about identity properly, because up until then in England … I had been always clear in my mind I was going to be British. I didn’t sort of want to be Indian, I was always trying to, get rid of that part of me. And then I came to Australia, and people kept treating me like I was Indian and I sort of had to face it, that I was Indian, because I got this feeling of not being the Pom.

Since the birth of her daughter in 2006, while acculturated to Melbourne, but still longing to return to England, she admitted that the confusion had never resolved itself, and that it may well be an inevitable legacy of a migrant identity. Yes, I still feel trapped, I suppose, and I feel fear now, because I have to try and understand not only my identity but hers as well, … It’s the full-on migrant experience, yes, and I think that living with confusion, is perhaps what you might have to do, for ever.55

Family reconciliation, then, coexisted with ongoing confusion of Sushi’s migrant identity, but adaptation through the turbulent experience of mobility, which aggravated the conflict, ultimately furnished the resources for her to adapt to family emotional challenges. Was it significant, perhaps, that Sushi, with a highly formalised family background, was ultimately able to find family reconciliation, while lamenting removal from British ‘belonging’ and her British identity? But if ‘belonging’ is a condition for resolving migrant alienation, then for Sushi it remained a work in progress, like her identity, always in flux. That ‘fullon migrant experience, … that living with confusion is perhaps what you might have to do, for ever’, may be a clue to most migrant identities, just as Stuart Hall observed that identity itself is always in flux and transition, never fixed.56 Family complications might simply add to the confusion. The appearance of migrants of colour among the British diaspora is the most visible of innumerable changes to arise in migration practices and attitudes since the 1960s. Like other changes it is mediated by deeply traditional and familiar patterns, in Sushi’s case an unsettled identity and yearning for the British ‘homeland’. Similarly, Marilyn Chapman’s thoroughly conventional return migration gradually took on new meanings under the influence of global mobility; the new European turn in British migration was in some ways more traditional than new, especially for serial migrants like Charles Eugster; women faced with conventional gender challenges in new countries forged radical solutions and wrote about their shifting identities; and new ways emerged of ‘dabbling in Britishness’, like British goods shops and websites, but their proprietors and patrons displayed a traditional range of attitudes, from the deepest British loyalty to relative indifference and more globalised identities.

238  Life stories of modern migration Perhaps it is in those globalised identities where the most novel attitudinal changes have emerged throughout this book. While parallels and continuities are crucial in migration history, scrutiny of migrant testimony illustrates some vital differences setting in powerfully from about the 1980s. Pre-eminent among these is a transnational ‘citizen of the world’, and sometimes pan-European, outlook, which resists patriotic attachment, and in the 1980s context was fostered partly by political and cultural alienation. Since the 1980s global identities have been nurtured further by changing employment, family and marriage practices, also by environmental commitments of migrants, often in search of lifestyle transformations, evident even in the ‘grey nomad’ phenomenon, all of which can transcend national identities and attachments. Habits of a more modern migrant generation might suggest that alongside global identities the resilience of Britishness is soon diluted. These are some of the ways in which the mobility of modernity has brought new meanings, often at the expense of national and cultural identity, to the act of migration. They mark some dramatic shifts in how we have come to emigrate, and to reflect upon it, in the developed world over the last half-century. Notes   1 Streeter, interview.   2 Pacitti, interview and written account; Whiteside, interview and written accounts.   3 Chapman, interview and written account.   4 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, p. 264.   5 Communication with author, 18 June, 2015.   6 W. Maas, ‘The evolution of EU citizenship’, The state of the European Union, 8, 2005. www.princeton.edu/~smeunier/Maas%20Memo.pdf.   7 O’Reilly, The British on the Costa del Sol; C. Holbrook, Retiring to Spain: everything you need to know, London, Age Concern, 2004.   8 O’Reilly, The British on the Costa del Sol, pp. 60–2.   9 S. Scott, ‘The social morphology of skilled migration: the case of the British middle class in Paris’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32, 7, 2006, pp. 1105–29. 10 M. Benson, The British in rural France: lifestyle migration and the ongoing quest for a better way of life, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011. 11 M. Benson, and K. O’Reilly (eds), Lifestyle migration: expectations, aspirations and experience, Farnham, Ashgate, 2009. 12 O’Reilly, The British on the Costa del Sol, pp. 98–100, 153. 13 Benson, British in rural France, p. 80. 14 Salt, interview and written account; see Chapter 5. See the returnee migrant Joan Pickett’s taste for mobility acquired through European train travel, Thomson, Moving stories, pp. 104–5, 320.

Changing faces of modern migration  239 15 Ingram-Monk, interview and written account; see Chapter 5. 16 Blanchfield, interview. 17 For example Totten, interview; ‘Warwick’, interview; Spurgeon, interview. 18 Bullon interview and written account; see Chapter 5. 19 Catherine Taylor, interview and written accounts; see Chapter 6. 20 Eugster, interview. 21 www.quercyfgb.com/. The national association dates to its founding in 1916. 22 Benson, British in rural France, p. 160. 23 Bagehot, ‘Pity the Brexpats’, The Economist, 4 June 2016, p. 50. 24 Joan Pickett, documented in Thomson, Moving stories, wrote voluminous letters home, ‘my drawer of memories’, about her migration ‘adventures’, never quite realising her goal to write a book, which, she thought, would be better than others she had seen, pp. 234–5. 25 E. Gardner, The world at our feet: the story of two women who adventured halfway across the globe, London, Allen, 1957. 26 L. St Aubin de Teran, Off the rails: memoirs of a train addict, London, Bloomsbury, 1989. 27 Dobinson, written account and interview. 28 Communication with author, 21 June 2015. 29 Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 248–63. 30 R. C. Smith (ed.), Teaching English as a foreign language, 1936–1961: foundations of ELT, London, Routledge, 2005; A. P. R. Howatt, and R. Smith, ‘The history of teaching English as a foreign language, from a British and European perspective’, Language and History, 57, 1, 2014, pp. 75–95. 31 Stuart, written account and interview. 32 Chambers, interview and written account. 33 A. Stuart, The longest journey: finding the true self, Glen Waverley, Australia, Sid Harta, 2012. 34 Julie Watts, written account and interview. 35 Communication with author, 8 February 2016. 36 Daniel Watts, interview and written account. 37 Julie later noted that her mother softened in later years ‘as dementia encroached (she forgot to be angry)’, leading to better relations before her death in 2015. Communication with the author, 8 February 2016. 38 The process was common among women migrant writers. Alistair Thomson probes novelist Elizabeth Jolley’s challenges of her ‘exile’ in Western Australia ‘by articulating and controlling them through writing’. A. Thomson, ‘Landscapes of memory in the migrations of Elizabeth Jolley’, Meanjin, 61, 3, 2002, pp. 81–96. 39 A. de Botton, The art of travel, New York, Pantheon, 2002, p. 54. 40 For example Hammerton and Thomson, Ten pound Poms, pp. 331–7. 41 Rayment, interview and written account, MCP. 42 Bueltmann et al. (eds), Locating the English diaspora. 43 D. Kynaston, Family Britain, 1951–57, London, Bloomsbury, 2009, pp. 221–5. 44 ‘Carol’, interview. 45 Hayward, interview and written account. 46 Barton, interview and written account.

240  Life stories of modern migration 47 Blanchfield, interview and written account. 48 ‘Treats from Home’ website: www.treatsfromhome.com.au/webcontent1. htm. 49 Carr, interview and written account. 50 Howe and Hatfield, interview, and Howe written account. 51 Australian census, 2011: www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/4102.0 main+features102014#PERTH. 52 Das, interview. 53 S. Das, Deranged marriage: a memoir, Sydney, Bantam, 2012, pp. 195–6. 54 Das, Deranged marriage, pp. 265–6. 55 Sushi expanded on this identity confusion in a talk to a conference of English teachers, reprinted as ‘From national identity to global citizenry’, in Idiom, Journal of Victorian Association of Teachers of English, 43, 1, 2007, pp. 9–12. 56 S. Hall, ‘Introduction: who needs identity?’, in S. Hall, and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of cultural identity, London, Sage, 1996, pp. 3–4.

Appendix

British emigration statistics are notoriously unreliable, useful enough for estimating broad trends but far from exact, ‘abysmal’ according to one researcher.1 Modern statistics have rarely been based on total counts of departures but rather on the ‘International Passenger Survey’ (IPS), until recently small, based on declared intentions and limited for research purposes. Various researchers have adapted the data, leading to different counts in different sources, but despite inconsistencies the numbers shown below do give a rough guide to the state of the British diaspora over the last half-century or more, still useful for comparisons with the project interview collection.2 Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, provides a useful table of British migration flows from 1966 to 2005, but these differ from the official UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures.3 A further inconsistency, evident in Table 2, is that until 1975 emigration counts were based on all Commonwealth citizens rather than British citizens. Table 1, on comparable emigration rates of OECD countries is based on OECD data only, Table 2 on British emigration destinations is based on UK ONS figures from the IPS, Table 3 on the British living abroad from the Institute for Public Policy Research publication, Global Brit.4 Table 4 draws on various British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand sources for the distribution of British migrants in each country. Tables 5 to 8 provide various profiles of interviewees for the project, some with comparisons to official British statistics and other projects.

241

242  Appendix Table 1  Emigrants over 15 living in OECD countries by selected country of birth, 2010–115 Country of origin

Emigrant population (thousands)

Tertiary educated (thousands)

Emigration rate (%)

Emigration rate of the tertiary educated (%)

United Kingdom China India USA Ireland Poland Italy Australia Canada Mexico

3,505 3,862 3,441 1,224 679 3,195 2,309 317 1,163 11,249

1,384 1,655 2,080 590 227 884 401 157 566 867

 6.5  0.4  0.4  0.5 16.1  8.9  4.4  1.8  3.9 12.1

10.8  1.8  3.2  0.5 17.4 15.5  7.9  2.6  5.4  6.0

Table 2  Emigration destinations, select years to select countries, British citizens from UK6 (1949–70 all Commonwealth citizens)

1949 1953 1957 1960 1964 1966 1970 1975 1982 1988 1996 2001 2002 2004 2007

Old Common­ wealth

USA

European Union

New Common­ wealth

Other

Total

 83,200  86,000 104,700  56,600 126,700 163,000 125,000  65,000  61,000  48,000  38,000  47,000  44,000  62,000  54,000

16,200 16,200 15,200  7,800 22,000 19,000 14,000 11,000 15,000 15,000 16,000 15,000 18,000 16,000 12,000

N/A N/A N/A N/A 22,600 19,000 29,000 15,000 29,000 41,000 53,000 43,000 69,000 68,000 60,000

41,600 38,300 31,900 22,800 40,400 40,000 44,000 18,000 21,000 15,000 16,000  7,000 10,000 12,000  7,000

 3,500  3,700  1,800  1,400 20,500 22,000 36,000 60,000 62,000 24,000 21,000 22,000 24,000 27,000 27,000

144,500 144,100 153,600  88,600 232,200 263,000 248,000 169,000 188,000 143,000 144,000 134,000 165,000 185,000 160,000

Appendix  243 Table 3  Estimates of British citizens registered living abroad, over 12 months, by country of residence, 2000–7 (top 13 countries)7 Australia USA Spain Canada Ireland New Zealand France South Africa Germany Switzerland United Arab Emirates Cyprus Turkey

1,072,000 829,000 808,000 611,000 299,000 257,000 253,000 219,000 97,000 66,000 66,000 59,000 51,000

Table 4  British migrants to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, select years (thousands)8 1953 1958 1963 1968 1973 1978 1983 1987 1988 1997 2003

Australia

Canada

New Zealand

30.2 37.4 44.0 82.9 55.3 74.0 72.0 37.0 38.2  9.6 16.9

41.3 16.0 10.3 39.2 27.9 25.0 28.0 12.0  9.0  5.0  4.5

14.5 10.8 14.0  8.0 25.4 14.0  6.0  8.0 N/A N/A N/A

Table 5  Gender of interviewees (no. (%)) Full database One person Married couple Total interviews interviews9 Male Female

83 (45.6) 99 (54.4)

43 (40.2) 64 (59.8)

14 14

British home population (1996)

57 (42.2) 49.07 78 (57.8) 50.93

244  Appendix Table 6  Social class of interviewees by occupation classifications (%)10 Prior to first departure

First job in new country

Current at interview/ retirement

UK total 1951

UK total 1981

UK total 2001

Professional/   managerial (I) Semi-professional/   intermediate (II) Sub totals I & II

 9.4

 8.7

23.6

 3.3

 5.7

16.0

38.0

50.4

49.6

14.4

22.4

30.6

47.2

59.1

73.4

17.7

28.1

46.6

Skilled (III) Semi-skilled (IV) Unskilled (V) Sub totals III-V

44.0  8.6  0.0 52.6

36.2  3.9  0.8 41.9

25.2  1.6  0 26.8

52.7 16.4 13.2 82.3

48.8 16.9  6.2 61.9

27.2 11.6 14.6 53.4

Table 7  British region of origin of emigrants and population (%) 11

Scotland London/South-east Midlands North South-west East Anglia Wales Northern Ireland

Project interviewees

Brits abroad online survey (2006)

UK home population (1991)

 7.1 38.3 20.6 21.9  5.0  5.7  1.4 N/A

 7.5 45.0 11.6 17.7 11.3  4.1  2.2  0.6

 8.8 30.5 16.1 25.0  8.2  3.6  5.0  2.8

Table 8  Last residence of interviewees (no., %) Australia Canada New Zealand Britain France Hong Kong USA

78 20 15  5  1  1  1

Notes  1 Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, p. 1.  2 Finch et al., Global Brit, p. 21.

64.5 16.5 12.4  4.2  0.08  0.08  0.08

Appendix  245  3 Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, p. 104.  4 Finch et al., Global Brit, pp. 148–55.  5 OECD, World migration in figures, p. 6, Annex 2, www.oecd.org/els/mig/ World-Migration-in-Figures.pdf.   6 Great Britain, ONS, Annual abstract of statistics, 1974, p. 22, 1990, p. 18–21, 1996, p. 25, 2004, p. 35, 2006, p. 38, 2010, p. 38. The numbers to all destinations fell during peak years of the global financial crisis after 2007 and are yet to recover fully. Finch et al., Global Brit, p. 7. ‘Old Commonwealth’ denotes Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Figures for ‘New Commonwealth’ countries (after postwar decolonisation) and ‘Other Countries’ include UK immigrants returning to their home countries and others on short-term expatriate employment; they cast limited light on the wider trends of longerterm British emigration.   7 Finch et al., Global Brit, pp. 148–55, appendix C. The estimates were derived from a variety of official census and unofficial sources, from varying years between 2000 and 2007, and increased in some countries like the USA and Europe to account for so-called ‘swallows’ who maintain two permanent residences, one in the UK. They should be taken as a rough guide only.   8 Compiled from various census and national statistical records. Great Britain, ONS, Annual abstract of statistics, 1965, table 17; 1974, table 19; 1982, table 2.11, 1988, table 2.10; Australian Bureau of Statistics, overseas Arrivals and Departures Australia, 1993. Catalogue 3404, p. 7, February 1999, Catalogue 3401, p. 7, June 2005, Catalogue 3401, p. 19; communication from Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration, 2006. New Zealand figures unavailable from 1988.  9 Most couples were interviewed jointly but here are counted twice. 10 The occupational categories derive from the traditional system in UK censuses used from the early twentieth century. The categories have been revised since, to the point of greater complexity, to account for significant changes, but here the system is reduced to its most simple structure to maintain consistency over time. As in the censuses, some occupational allocations to the different groups (I to V) are somewhat arbitrary. Group I includes the senior tertiary-educated professions and senior management; group II other professions like teaching, social work and small business managers; group III both manual and non-manual skills, from electricians to photographers and civil servants below the senior levels; group IV junior retail and childcare workers. See D. Rose, Social research update, 9 July 1995, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SRU9.html. UK total percentages for 1951, 1981 and 2001 from JISC, A vision of Britain through time between 1801 and 2001, Portsmouth, 2014, www.visionofbritain.org.uk/ unit/10090283/cube/SOC_GEN. 11 Project interviewees excluded Northern Ireland so percentages are based on Great Britain totals. Brits abroad and UK census percentages are based on UK official statistics. Brits abroad numbers were drawn from 13 focus groups and ten interviews in five countries. Sriskandarajah and Drew, Brits abroad, pp. 10–11, 118. For UK figures Great Britain, ONS, Annual abstract of statistics, 145, 2009, p. 35, table 5.5.

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Index

Note: literary works can be found under authors’ names. accountancy 88, 100–1 Adelaide 59, 65, 98, 137–8, 201, 208 Aden 49 adultery 165, 170, 178, 203, 222, 224 see also divorce; marriage, dysfunctional; sex and sexual relationships Africa 10, 38, 40, 43, 49–51, 57, 60–2, 99, 116, 126–7, 200, 210 age and generation 5–6, 17, 19–21, 27, 46, 52, 56, 59–61, 66, 69, 86, 89–91, 106–7, 115, 118–20, 124, 130, 135, 162, 188, 192–3, 216, 234, 236 alcohol see drinking Aldershot 145 Alexander Pushkin 202 Alexander technique 121–2 alienation 68, 72, 83–4, 86, 88, 115, 135, 145, 164, 177, 180, 221, 225, 235, 237–8, 235, 237–8 see also homesickness ALP see Australian Labor Party Amnesty International 130 anti-British attitudes 35, 177, 196, 221 apartheid 10–11, 61, 93, 127, 175 Arcadia 202–3 archaeology 99–100, 102 Armati, Jenny and Douglas 1–7, 10–11, 14 Arnhem Land 116 Arosa Star 36 Association France-Grande Bretagne 215

Auckland 87, 107, 114, 154, 167, 177, 180 Auckland Symphony Orchestra 181n.18 austerity 7, 27–9, 33, 39, 207 see also employment and unemployment; migration, of austerity Australia 1–9, 11, 17–20, 29–33, 35–6, 38, 42, 46–9, 51, 54–7, 59–67, 69–71, 77–9, 84–7, 92–103, 105, 107, 115–17, 122–5, 129–30, 136, 138, 140, 142, 147–8, 150–1, 169–76, 182, 183, 200, 204, 220, 226, 228, 231 republicanism 102, 130, 191 Australian Jewish News 150 Australian Jewish Times 149–50 Australian Labor Party (ALP) 85, 141 Australian Orthopaedic Association 145 Austria 193 autobiography 12, 20–1, 70, 216–18, 220, 223–4, 228, 237, 239n.24 Ayers Rock 116 Ayrshire 161–2, 164, 166, 169 backpackers 6, 32, 38, 82, 99–100, 151, 205, 208 see also nomads; sojourners Bahamas 48 Bahrain 6 Bali 12, 111, 143 Barrow-in-Furness 136–9

255

256  Index Barton, Doreen and Tom 230–1 Barwell, Renita 63, 69–74 Bassindale, Maurice 75–9 BBC see British Broadcasting Corporation Benson, Michaela 212 Berlin 126, 155 Bermuda 200 Best of British 232–4 Beverley, Graeme 182–3 BHP see Broken Hill Proprietary Limited Birmingham 60, 165 Blackburn, Rod 174–6 Blanchfield, Claire 212, 231 Bournemouth 47 Bradford 58 ‘Brexit’ 193, 216 ‘Brexpats’ 216 Briers, Richard 137, 159n.5 Brighton, England 99 Brisbane 140 Bristol 55 Britain 7–8, 11, 20, 29, 119, 128, 130, 135, 142, 144, 147, 150, 152, 172 ‘bad Britain’ image 115, 147, 150, 212 ‘British disease’ 140, 142 British Empire 8, 28, 38–43, 47–51, 70, 74, 80, 154 British world 32, 38, 47, 51, 207 immigration 57–8, 61–2 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 117, 130, 131n.14, 170 British Columbia 122, 155, 183–8, 194–5, 200 British Council 219–20 Brits abroad 17 Brixton 59 Broken Hill Proprietary Limited (BHP) 97, 141 Bromfield, Valerie and Geoffrey, 54–5 Brook, Zoe 166–9, 180 Broome, Western Australia 216, 218 Brunei 10, 86, 118–20 Brussels 127–9 Bueltmann, Tanja 10 Bullon, Gerry 148–51, 212–13 Byron Bay, Australia 116, 197–9 Cain, John 85 Cairns 124

Cairo 219 Callaghan, James 89 Canada 6, 8–9, 11–12, 18, 20, 28–38, 41, 47–8, 51, 55–7, 59–60, 66, 73, 75, 78–9, 93, 115, 122–3, 129, 145, 148, 153, 156–7, 162, 165, 174, 182–8, 200, 202, 213–16 Québec separatism 41, 52n.13 Canberra 182 Cape Town 11, 60, 175 Capper, Philip 67–9, 73 careers 55–6, 89–91, 96, 98, 100–3, 126, 135–59, 161, 170, 174–6, 180, 193, 195–6, 210, 214, 223, 227–8, 235 see also employment and unemployment ‘Carol’ 229 Carr, Alison and Paul 231 Carthew, Jessica 164–6 Centre for Policy Studies 89 Ceylon 39 Chambers, Peter 48, 222 change and continuity 21–2, 32, 54, 56, 79–80, 82, 96, 103, 106, 130, 207–8, 211, 216, 237–8 Chapman, Marilyn 208–11 Chapman, Phil 211–12 Charles-Jones, Sue 42, 52n.15 Chelmsford 122 children 3, 5–7, 11, 20, 27–30, 32–3, 37, 40–4, 95, 98, 108, 115, 123–4, 126–9, 137–41, 143–5, 151, 153–4, 157, 162, 164–6, 168–9, 184–5, 188–94, 208–10, 214, 219, 225–7, 231 see also family; marriage Chopra, Depak 197 Christchurch, New Zealand 50–1 Christie, Jennie 200–5 ‘citizen of the world’ see citizenship, global; identity, global; migration, serial citizenship 5, 36, 71, 78–9, 110, 125, 129, 147, 154–5, 166, 191–3, 214, 220, 229–30, 241 dual 74, 86, 96, 102, 105, 118, 151, 192 global 21, 103, 120–1, 125, 130, 151, 155, 208 Civil Service 137, 234 Clark, Rachel 170–3

Index  257 class 7, 13, 16–17, 21, 27–8, 38–41, 44, 48, 56, 64, 74, 86–8, 99, 107, 109, 116–18, 121–2, 136–7, 140, 142–3, 156–7, 176, 190–1, 193, 195, 207–8, 211–13, 221, 224, 226, 244, 245n.10 see also mobility, social climate 9, 35, 54, 64, 82, 93–4, 110, 117, 121, 127, 141, 182, 201, 208, 225 clubs and societies 10, 39, 49, 128, 175, 201, 229–30, 234 Cobourg, Ontario 41–2 Colbourne, Debbie 99–103 Colchester 144 Cold War 111 Collins, Nicholas 153 colonial dividend, anglophone 8, 21, 33, 51 Commonwealth 8–10, 21, 27, 36, 51, 52n.1, 56–7, 80, 80n.1, 82, 91, 98, 211–12, 229, 231, 241, 245n.6 community 35, 76, 115, 128–9, 131n.14, 148–9, 151, 158, 165, 183–4, 186–91, 199, 208–9, 212, 228–9 computer technology see Information Technology (IT) Conservation Volunteers Australia 116 Conservative Party 88 consumerism 14, 36, 51, 55, 87, 91, 103, 106–7, 119, 231 continuity see change and continuity Cool Britannia 231 Cornwall 18 cosmopolitanism 7–8, 13, 21, 62–3, 87, 96, 103, 106, 110, 118, 120, 125, 158, 165–6, 195–5 light cosmopolitanism 117, 121 see also identity, global; mobility cost of living see living standards counter-culture 196–9 culture shock see homesickness Daintree Forest 116 Daley, Marcus 192–3 Dangar Island 183, 188–92, 206n.10 Darwin 100–1 Das, Sushi 234–7, 240n.55 Deranged Marriage 234–5 De Botton, Alain 228

decolonisation 39–41 Depression, 1930s 29, 33 depression, psychological 1, 3, 50, 95, 138, 141, 162, 178–9, 209–10, 225–6 see also alienation; homesickness Derby 89–91 Devon 165 diaspora 9–11, 32, 168 Australian 3 British 3, 8–11, 15, 18, 21, 38, 42, 211–12, 237, 241 English 18 Scottish 18 divorce 3, 17, 66, 68–9, 75, 77, 79, 81n.26, 89, 129, 150, 154, 161–6, 176, 178, 180, 180n.2, 181n.14, 188–9, 210, 218, 224, 227, 235 see also adultery; family, dysfunctional; marriage, dysfunctional Dobinson, Toni 217–20 domestic violence 167–8, 224 domesticity 90, 94 Dorset 201, 208 drinking 34, 67, 90, 95, 102, 119, 127, 167–8, 170–1, 173, 176, 178, 218, 221–2 Durham, Paul 57–9, 140–2 ecology see environment and ecology Edinburgh 85, 93, 122 education 6–9, 13, 16, 27–9, 33, 39, 42–4, 47–8, 56, 59, 61–3, 65, 67, 69, 72–3, 75, 83–4, 86, 92–4, 98–101, 108, 116, 118, 122, 124, 126, 128–9, 136–7, 143–4, 146, 148, 151–9, 163–4, 166–7, 170, 173–4, 176–8, 184, 188–9, 193, 195, 205, 207–8, 213–14, 216, 218–24, 226, 234, 242 see also universities Edwards, Barbara 12, 59 Egypt 51, 131n.14 Ellinis 145 emotions 12, 20, 68–71, 73, 100, 102, 105–6, 111, 118, 129, 161, 164, 166–8, 170, 172–4, 176, 180, 210, 212, 223, 226, 228–9, 231, 235, 237 see also homesickness; love

258  Index employment and unemployment 6–7, 13–14, 16, 21, 29–37, 45–6, 56, 62, 64–5, 68, 70–1, 73–6, 79–80, 82–4, 89, 92, 97–101, 107–8, 116–18, 121, 123–4, 127–9, 135–59, 149, 155, 162, 167, 172, 174, 184–5, 190, 193, 196, 202–4, 207, 209–10, 213–14, 216, 221–3, 226, 231–2, 234, 238, 245n.10 professional 7, 9, 16–17, 21, 30, 39, 73–4, 83, 86, 88, 94, 101, 116–17, 120, 122, 126, 136, 143–4, 152–9, 174–7, 192, 211, 223 skilled 8, 16–17, 21, 27–9, 34, 36–9, 51, 56, 62, 74, 91, 97, 135–42, 153, 165, 200–1, 208–9, 218, 220 see also austerity; entrepreneurs; work ethic; working conditions Empress of Canada 155 engineering 122–4, 146, 162 England 61, 66, 101, 110–11, 117, 120, 125, 146–7, 158, 165, 173, 178, 200 ‘English disease’ see Britain, ‘British disease’ see also Englishness; identity, English; migrants, English English language 6, 8, 36, 43, 51, 211 see also teaching, English as a foreign language Englishness 35, 38, 105, 118 see also identity, English entrepreneurs 3, 5, 29, 37, 88, 94, 136, 139–40, 143, 162, 208 environment and ecology, attitudes to 22, 101–3, 116, 155, 174, 177–8, 182, 185–8, 191, 194–5, 238 ‘Eric’ 176 Eugster, Charles 19, 213–16, 237 Europe 9, 18–19, 22, 32 36, 38, 100, 107, 151–2, 154–5, 211–16, 237 European Union (EU) 8, 84, 86, 151, 207, 211–12, 216, 241n.7 expatriates 7, 11, 62, 69, 74–8, 115, 119–21, 126–30, 144–6, 154, 212–15, 229, 231–2, 241n.6 employment of 6–7, 21, 74, 79, 89, 119, 125–6, 153, 175, 207, 211 ‘trailing spouses’ 126–30, 145

Falklands War 86 family 5, 13–14, 16–17, 22, 35–7, 45, 51, 54, 62–9, 74–5, 77–9, 90–1, 95–6, 98, 103, 107–8, 123–5, 128, 130, 136–9, 140–1, 145, 148, 150–2, 155–7, 159, 161–80, 184–6, 188–93, 195, 201, 204, 210, 213–16, 218–20, 223–9, 231, 234–8 dysfunctional 1, 66–9, 79, 99, 141, 161, 172–3, 176, 221–6 law 14, 81n.26 see also children; divorce; gender; marriage; men; women farming 33–6, 40–1, 43, 48, 105, 112–14 feminism 210 Fielding, Keith and Olive 200 food 3, 14, 59, 95, 108, 184 Fort William, Ontario 34 France 3, 5, 19, 84, 108, 150–1, 153, 162, 164, 171, 192–3, 211–16 Fraser, Malcolm 85

Facebook 107 Fairsky 148

Haggard, Lilias 51 Haggard, Rider 48, 51

Galbraith, Margaret and Ron 97–8, 102 Gardner, Eunice 216–18 The world at our feet 216 Gaskin, Catherine 48 Sara Dane 48, 53n.21 gender 5, 7, 15–17, 22, 24n.27, 24n.30, 42, 44, 46–7, 50, 88, 167, 173–4, 176, 210, 216, 220, 228, 237, 243 see also family; feminism; men; women generation see age and generation Germany 40, 153–5, 157, 193 Gilbraltar 39, 145 Gittins, Richard 151–2 Glasgow 60, 67, 97, 125, 148–52, 161–2, 167–9 globalisation 8, 38, 74, 106, 151, 237–8 Gloucestershire 108 Grassby, Al 64 Great Barrier Reef 116 Greece 188, 224 grey nomads 200–5, 206n.17 Guelph, Ontario 37, 122 ‘Gypsies’ 69, 73, 140, 201, 206n.21

Index  259 hairdressing 88, 197, 220, 231 Halifax, Nova Scotia 145 Hall, Stuart 237 Hamilton, Australia 221 Hamilton, New Zealand 154, 179–80, 194 Hamilton, Ontario 60, 125 Hammerton, A. J. and Thomson, A. Ten pound Poms 11, 20, 232 Hamson, Rob and Beth 5–6, 10 Handlin, Oscar, The uprooted 15 Hatfield Ian 231–4 Hawke, Bob 85, 141 Hayward, Stephanie 131n.8, 229–30 health 31, 37, 50, 67, 72–3, 89, 92, 95, 117, 138, 140–2, 163, 179, 204, 209, 219, 225–7 dementia 140, 142, 239n.37 see also depression, psychological; medicine Heath, Edward 88 Hennessey, Vincent 29–32 heritage 18, 86, 96, 102, 115, 152, 163–4, 198 see also identity Higgs, Robin and Judith 144–8, 151 High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire 128 history 7, 10, 12–18, 20–1, 27–8, 32, 38, 46–8, 61, 66, 99, 102, 107, 115, 118, 127, 130, 154, 200 Hobart 5, 59, 178, 209–10 Holland, Peter 47–8 Holland, Richard 47–8 home 5, 38, 46, 62–4, 66, 73, 77–8, 90, 116–17, 120–1, 151, 164, 166, 168–9, 199–200, 210–11, 213, 222–4, 229 see also family home ownership see housing homesickness 32, 43–4, 50, 62, 72–3, 90, 94, 96, 102, 112, 118, 138, 146, 152, 172–4, 176, 180, 196, 202, 204, 207–10, 221–2, 224–5, 229, 231, 235 see also alienation; depression Hong Kong 1, 10, 39, 42, 144, 227 housing 27, 37, 67, 72, 92–3, 101, 107, 109–10, 116–17, 123, 136–41, 146–7, 151, 157, 163, 167–8, 169, 178, 186, 189–90, 200, 208, 211, 214, 225, 231 see also home

Howe, Ann 231–4 Hunt, John 17 IBM see International Business Machines Iceland 67 identity 8, 14, 20, 79, 90–1, 96, 106, 108, 115, 121, 125, 146, 151, 153–4, 212, 231, 237, 240n.55 Australian 102, 140, 151, 157, 164, 191–2, 228 British 18, 38, 70, 86, 91, 110, 121, 135, 164, 208, 229–31, 234, 236–7 Canadian 38, 41–2, 165–6 Christian 158 collective 10, 229 English 10, 51, 102, 135, 157, 173, 199–200, 230–1, 236 European 166, 238 global 5, 7, 10, 13, 21, 91, 103, 107, 118, 120–1, 125, 130, 151, 155, 166, 188, 195, 199, 204–5, 208, 210–11, 220, 237–8 Indian 237 Jewish 149, 151 local 90–1, 118, 120–1, 130, 142, 155, 165, 172, 191–2 migrant 11, 77, 115, 118, 194, 199, 229–30, 237 national 21, 91, 96, 102–3, 120, 125, 154–5, 157, 199 New Zealand 115, 154 Scottish 10, 96, 98, 103, 151, 164, 166 see also heritage; status anxiety illness see health immigration regulations 6, 9, 13, 16, 21, 36–7, 51–2, 56–8, 69–72, 79, 91–3, 96–8, 100, 110, 116, 138, 151–2, 165, 171, 174–5, 185, 190, 196, 202, 208, 216, 220, 231–2 see also patriality Imperial Service College 39 incomes 7, 27, 52n.1, 74, 83, 200 see also employment and unemployment India 38–9, 42–3, 60, 64, 75, 101, 196, 210, 227, 234 Indian subcontinent 57

260  Index individualism 12–15, 32, 91, 106–7, 228–9 Information Technology (IT) 3–4, 89, 98, 104n.21, 108, 114, 136, 143, 152, 175, 192, 208 Ingram-Monk, Barbara 105–15, 118 Institute of Engineers, Melbourne 123 International Business Machines (IBM) 149, 175 International Express 232 IRA see Irish Republican Army Iran 67 Ireland 51, 129 Irish Republican Army (IRA) 145 island living 123, 183–92, 224 Israel 51, 99 IT see Information Technology Italy 39, 84, 99, 105, 109–10, 115, 151, 221, 223 Jamaica 165 Janes, Jenny see Armati, Jenny Jefford, Elaine 182 Jehovah’s Witnesses 138–9 Jones, Stan 153–5 Jordan 119 journalism 3, 11, 55, 149–50, 220, 222, 224, 234–5 Kashmir 45 Kent 59, 108, 110 Kenya 40–1, 46, 50 Kerr, Jan 48, 60, 125 King, Viviane 84–8, 90, 102 Kipling, Rudyard 48 Kopsch, Hartmut and Jane 155–8 Lancashire 75, 155, 193 language skills 4, 8, 109, 128, 153–5, 212, 213–15, 219, 221 letter-writing 23n.21, 131n.17, 141, 170–1, 202, 239n.24 librarians 98, 120, 222 life stories 11–15, 18–21, 48, 79, 148, 161, 193, 208, 218, 220, 228 see also memory; oral history lifestyle 90–1, 116, 124–5, 127, 129, 159n.5, 211, 215 and identity 115 see also migration, lifestyle

‘limeys’ 35 Lincolnshire 61, 75 Liverpool 67 living standards 1, 27, 54, 74, 101 London 20, 36, 42, 44–6, 57, 61, 64, 69–72, 74, 85, 87, 89–90, 115–17, 121, 125–6, 129, 144, 152, 155–6, 164, 178–80, 182–3, 227 ‘swinging sixties’ 1, 46, 54–5 London, Ontario 34, 165 London Free Press 34 love 17, 22, 35, 45, 64–6, 91, 98, 161, 169–80, 193, 207, 222, 231–2 see also emotions; marriage Luton 108 Macdonald, Patricia 44–7 McIntosh, Beth 195–200 Mackie, Andrew 121–5 Maidenhead 86 Major, John 119, 121 Malaya 39, 144–6 Malta 145 Manchester 28–32, 47, 82–3, 86, 103, 119 Manchester Evening News 52n.8 Manchester Mariner 29 Mandela, Nelson 175 Manning, Olivia ‘Fortunes of war’ trilogies, 119–20, 131n.14 Marechaux, Jan 48 marriage 11, 13, 17, 22, 28–9, 31, 35, 37, 43, 48–9, 67–9, 71, 75, 88, 90, 93, 97, 100, 108–9, 116, 120, 126, 137–8, 149, 152–3, 161–80, 185, 209–10, 218–25, 227, 231, 234–6, 238 dysfunctional 221–4, 231–2 transnational 3, 11, 37, 46, 49–50, 62–3, 71, 86, 90–1, 120, 151–4, 159n.23, 169–72, 175–8, 181n.14, 184–5, 197, 203, 220–3, 227, 231, 235–6 see also adultery; divorce; family; sex and sexual relationships Marshall, Miles 33–8 media 11, 49, 106, 110, 141–2, 231, 233–4 medicine 11, 62, 143–6, 197 see also health; nursing

Index  261 Melbourne 5, 6, 11, 20, 31, 36, 46, 62–5, 69–73, 84–7, 89–92, 94, 99, 120–1, 123–5, 129–30, 148–9, 151–2, 170–1, 173–5, 196, 220, 224, 235–7 memory 12–13, 33, 47, 48, 55, 60–1, 65, 67–8, 87, 90, 92, 96, 100–2, 106, 121, 161, 166–9, 171, 177, 182, 186, 200, 207, 221, 228, 238n.24 239n.38 see also oral history men 15–16, 24n.30, 40, 62, 173–4, 216 parenting 108, 137–9, 141, 147, 214, 227 see also education; employment, family; gender; identity, women Middle East 74–7 Midlands 57, 89 migrants academics 21, 152–9 Asian 8, 57–65, 142, 234–8 Caribbean 57, 61 correspondence 23n.21 English 9–10, 18, 47, 59, 115, 229 European 8, 36, 50, 56, 59, 62, 104n.19, 115, 157 generations of 6 Irish 8 Lebanese 57 mentalities 7, 20, 51, 106, 125, 129–30 Mexican 8 political attitudes 61 regional origins 9, 15, 17–18, 20 reluctant 9, 50, 64–5, 67, 125–9, 162, 172–3, 176–7, 235–6 Scottish 9–10, 12, 18, 92, 148, 152, 161, 164, 166, 229 as story tellers 106–7, 201, 216–28 passim Welsh 9, 18 migration 5, 7–9, 11, 15–16, 18, 20, 27–9, 32–3, 38, 48, 51–2, 54–7, 65, 69, 75, 79, 82–3, 86, 103, 107, 130, 135, 152, 161, 169, 174, 180, 182–3, 188, 200, 205, 207, 215–16, 220, 229, 234, 238, 241, 245n.6 as adventure 5, 7, 21, 28, 30, 34, 36, 39, 46, 48–52, 54–6, 67–9, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98–9, 107, 115, 119, 122,

135–7, 143, 148, 161, 166, 176–7, 180, 202, 209, 216, 220, 225, 228 advertising 11, 34, 49, 74, 92–3, 119, 137, 145, 182, 232 assisted passages 1, 7, 9, 16, 19–21, 34, 36, 55, 64, 67–9, 82, 92, 96–8, 145, 148, 209, 216, 220–1, 225 of austerity 7, 21, 27, 52n.2, 54, 79, 82, 182 chain 7, 30–2, 38, 161 and child custody 68, 164–6 discretionary 7, 9, 14, 20–2, 82, 91, 135, 161, 169, 174, 180, 207 lifestyle 7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 21–2, 55, 85–91, 93, 96, 98, 102–3, 106–7, 114–15, 118, 120, 127, 135, 149, 161, 169, 180, 182–205, 207–8, 211–12, 214–16, 238 motivations for 7–9, 11–15, 18, 22, 27, 38, 52n.2, 54–6, 84, 91, 93, 107, 116, 123, 161–2, 180 of prosperity 7, 9, 17, 21, 54, 87, 107, 182, 195, 200, 207 ‘push and pull’ factors 21–2, 74, 98, 107, 109, 115, 135, 161, 164, 178, 180, 182, 185, 194, 204, 214 retirement 48, 107, 161, 211, 230–1 return 4–5, 6, 18, 19, 22, 32–5, 37, 67–9, 71–4, 95–6, 108, 120, 125, 138, 140–2, 146–7, 149, 168–9, 175, 194, 200, 208–13, 216, 222–3, 225, 227, 237, 238n.14 return visits 32, 35, 38, 60, 73–6, 78, 87, 90–1, 95, 101, 105–6, 112, 120, 142, 147, 149, 151, 154, 163–5, 169, 171, 178, 193, 195, 197, 199, 208, 210, 212–15, 218, 222, 227, 232 serial 5–8, 10–11, 14, 17–20, 31–8, 75, 79, 106, 115, 118, 125, 129, 152, 155, 158–9, 174–8, 192–3, 200, 204, 207–8, 220 statistics 8–9, 11, 15–17, 22n.5, 27, 54, 56–7, 83, 103, 104n.24, 107, 159n.23, 190, 206n.10, 241–5 working holidays 34–5, 46, 69, 84, 98, 119, 125, 151, 168, 193 see also austerity; backpackers; lifestyle; mobility; sojourners military service 29, 34–5, 38–40, 43–5, 48, 62, 75, 144–6, 213, 221

262  Index mobility 5–6, 11–12, 19–22, 28, 30, 33, 38–9, 45, 48, 52, 75, 78–9, 88, 108, 125, 150, 152–4, 156, 164, 169, 188, 198, 207, 212, 215–16, 218, 220 geographical 5, 14, 32, 36, 42–3, 46, 54, 57, 62, 74–5, 78–9, 82, 84, 90, 98, 100–1, 107–8, 118–21, 123, 125, 130, 143–5, 149, 152–3, 156, 165–6, 174, 188, 192–4, 201–5, 213, 216, 227, 229, 237, 238n.14 occupational 6–7, 13, 16–17, 21, 29, 83, 98, 100, 136, 143, 149, 152–4, 159, 166, 172, 220, 227 ‘seachange’ 73, 87, 114, 192, 206n.11 social 5–7, 13, 16–17, 20–1, 28–30, 48, 56, 59, 61, 66, 82–3, 136, 143–4, 149, 152–3, 172, 176, 192, 207–8 ‘treechange’ 87, 102, 114, 191 modernity 5, 7, 79–80, 96, 115, 125, 238 Mongolia 151 Montreal 41, 52n.13, 213–14 Murphy, Peter 19 multiculturalism 41, 59, 61–5, 71, 87, 117–18, 153, 190, 202, 235 narcissism 106, 131n.4 National Front 58 Netherlands 137, 165, 220–1 New Caledonia 122, 124 New South Wales, 35, 116, 139, 143, 167–9, 189, 197 New York 33, 45 New Zealand 6, 8–9, 17–18, 33, 35–8, 42, 49–50, 54, 56–7, 59, 61, 66–8, 105–8, 110–18, 129, 140, 148, 153–5, 164, 167–9, 174, 177–80, 182, 193–5, 200–1, 229 nomads 10, 12, 14, 22, 31, 40, 42–3, 103, 118, 147, 182, 188, 191–2, 207, 210–11 grey nomads 22, 147, 200–5, 206n.17, 238 see also backpackers; sojourners Norfolk 48, 51 North America 15, 153, 156, 200 Northampton 122 Northern Ireland 18, 40, 96, 245n.11 Northumberland 167–8

Norway 193 Nottingham 108 nursing 6, 88, 93–4, 98, 100–1, 122–3, 143–4, 182, 188–91, 220 see also health; medicine; physiotherapy Nyerere, Julius 50 OECD see Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ‘Olivia’ 176–80 Olivier, Laurence 208 Oman 219 O’Neill, Sandra 59–60 oral history 1–16, 60–1, 75, 89, 125 see also life stories; memory O’Reilly, Karen 212 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 8, 22n.5, 241 Oriana 221 Otranto 36 Pacitti, Mark 152, 208 Pakistan 39, 58, 142 Pan American Airways 126 Papua New Guinea 10, 51 Pargiter, Betty 57–9 Paris 44, 211 patriality 57 see also immigration regulations patriotism 5, 21, 37, 86, 91, 102, 120, 125, 140, 208–9, 231, 238 Payne, Michelle 63–5, 234 personal testimony see oral history Perth 3, 5, 11–12, 60, 66, 87, 143, 146, 162–3, 178, 200–1, 209–10, 219, 231–4 physiotherapy 88, 98, 220 see also nursing Pickett, Joan 238n.14, 239n.24 Piejus, Tanya 105–10, 115–18 Pilott, Brenda 61 Plowright, Joan 208 Poland 8, 148, 242 political attitudes 1, 13, 58–61, 84–9, 91, 119–21, 123, 140–1, 150–1, 175 Pollitt, Barry viii, 82–3 Porritt, Jonathon 185 Port Lincoln, South Australia 99–100 Portland, Victoria 31

Index  263 Portsmouth 43 Powell, Enoch 57–8, 61 pregnancy 30–1, 127–8, 190 see also women, childbirth psychotherapy 72, 176, 209–10, 223 Pudsey 57–8, 140 Québec 214, 216 Québec City 36 Queensland 101, 124, 142, 201, 204, 230 race 10–11, 22, 40, 46, 56–65, 79, 110–11, 142, 153, 234–7 Rand Daily Mail 11 Rangers News 149 Rayment, Gail 229 Reading 144 recessions 35, 37, 82, 86, 97, 109, 148, 213 refugees 6, 56–7, 60, 130, 148 religion 47, 60, 64, 91, 96, 157–8 see also identity, Christian; Jehovah’s Witnesses Repatriation Hospital, Sydney 146 respectability 27, 52n.2, 137, 234 retirement 16–18, 29–30, 32, 37, 40–1, 48, 51, 78, 107, 116, 124, 141–2, 158, 161, 164, 179, 183, 185, 190, 200, 205, 211, 228, 230 see also age and generation Rhodes, Christine 59 Richards, Eric 13 Robinson, Larry 28–9 Rooke, Susan 61–2 Royal College of Music 176 Rumsey, Michele 183, 188–92 rural living 4, 22, 27, 33, 35, 51, 60, 87–8, 100, 114, 158, 166–7, 173, 183–4, 192, 200, 212, 214–15, 225 see also suburban living; urban living Russia 148 sailing 108, 122–5 St Aubin de Teran, Lisa 216 Off the rails 216 Salt, Adam 86, 118–21, 212 Salt Spring Island 182–8 Sandhurst Military Academy 39 Saudi Arabia 10, 75–7 Sayer, Heather 193–5

Scientology 224 Scotland 17–18, 34, 42, 66, 92–6, 129, 148–51, 161–4, 167–8, 179, 195 Second World War 9, 14, 28–30, 33, 39, 42, 47, 91, 120, 125, 188, 207, 213 secretarial employment 69, 71, 88, 97, 156, 193, 220, 224 self-improvement ethos 15, 27–8, 51, 52n.2, 54, 64–5, 91, 102, 123, 135 sex and sexual relationships 14, 165, 170 see also adultery; divorce; marriage Sharpe, June and Tony 66 Shropshire 42 Sigma Pharmaceuticals 150 Singapore 39, 43, 51, 138, 144, 196 Skinner, Peter 48–51 Smith, Ros, 11–2, 63 Snowy River project 33, 36 social engineering 174 societies see clubs and societies sojourners 20–1, 34–8, 42, 45–7, 51, 55, 68, 71, 90, 99, 101–2, 119, 121, 146, 153, 205, 208–10, 213, 220 see also backpackers; nomads Somerset 170–3 South Africa 10–11, 22n.5, 42, 45, 47, 51, 54, 93, 126–9, 130, 137, 174–5, 182 South America 8, 45, 63, 101, 151, 200 Southern Cross 49 Southport 33, 35 Soviet Union 106 Spain 19, 51, 84, 107, 109, 115, 128–9, 153, 211–12 spirituality see religion sport 89, 91, 105, 140, 149, 229–31 Stafford, John and Helena 29–32 Stafford, Leslie and Vera 29–32 Staffordshire 118, 193 status anxiety 35, 127, 146 Streeter, Caroline 126, 207–8 Stuart, Amanda 220–24, 227–8 The longest journey 223 suburban living 41, 51, 59, 63–5, 72, 86–7, 95, 117, 120, 124, 129, 138, 147, 149, 151, 153, 157, 175, 183, 195, 200, 203–4, 221, 228, 232, 234 see also rural living; urban living

264  Index Suez crisis, 1956 41, 49, 111, 213 suicide 142, 226 Sunday Times 111 Surrey 126, 195 ‘swinging London’, see London, ‘swinging sixties’ Switzerland 33 Sydney 1, 29, 35, 55, 59–60, 63, 66, 77–8, 84, 86–8, 99–101, 116, 123, 145, 147, 149, 157, 166–8, 202–4 Symphonia of Auckland 176–8, 181n.18 Syria 119 Tasmania 55, 201, 209 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra 177 Taylor, Catherine 85, 92–6, 143 Taylor, Elizabeth 169–74, 180, 213 teaching 44, 47, 59, 67–8, 86, 118–20, 153, 156–7, 172, 179, 188, 194, 220, 222–3, 225–7 English as a foreign language 6, 98, 179, 219–20 see also education; universities technology 28, 89, 106 ‘ten pound Poms’ 17, 21, 31, 216, 225, 232 see also migration, assisted passages terrorist attacks, Bali, 2002–3 111 terrorist attacks, New York 11 September 2001, 111, 131n.8 Thatcher, Margaret 13, 82–3, 88–9, 93, 103, 105, 109, 115, 121, 137, 140, 150, 179 ‘Thatcher’s beneficiaries’ 88–91 ‘Thatcher’s refugees’ 21, 84–90, 101–2, 109, 119, 151 ‘Thatcherism’ 89, 102, 109, 234–5 Thomson, Alistair 11, 20 Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina 166 Toronto 29–31, 34, 36–7, 41, 87, 200, 202, 204, 213 Totten, Barbara 12 trade unions 21, 68, 83, 121, 140–2, 189 travel and tourism 4–7, 13–14, 19, 30, 32–4, 36, 42, 44–6, 49–52, 67, 89–91, 96, 98–102, 117–19, 122, 126–7, 129–30, 140–1, 150–2, 168–9, 183–4, 187, 189–91, 194–5, 197, 200, 204,

208, 211–14, 216, 218, 226–7, 229, 231 Treats from Home 231, 234 Trudeau, Pierre 66 Tucker, David 62–3 Turkey 32, 99, 219 unemployment see employment and unemployment United States of America 4–5, 8–9, 18–20, 32–3, 42–3, 45–6, 68, 75–8, 84, 106, 120, 122, 137, 151, 155, 165, 194–6, 200, 208–9, 241n.7 universities 146, 152–9, 167 American 153, 156 Australian 31, 94, 98, 124, 143, 151, 156, 178, 196, 219, 223 British 28, 99, 105, 109, 118, 122, 126, 143, 151–2, 154–6, 165, 193, 202 Canadian 21, 29, 156, 214 New Zealand 153–4, 177 urban living 5, 17, 27, 40, 51, 63, 69–70, 72, 86–8, 114, 121, 182–4, 192, 200, 211, 214, 221 see also rural living; suburban living Vancouver 31, 35, 78, 87, 153, 155–7 Vancouver Island 78, 122, 183, 186 Vanuatu 124 Victoria, Australia 101, 123, 201 Victoria, British Columbia 78, 183 Vietnam War 60, 156 visas see immigration regulations Waite, Mark 89–91, 102–3 Wales 18, 34, 42, 66 wanderlust 30, 43, 51, 67, 90, 93, 98–9, 102–3, 125, 151, 193, 209 ‘war brides’ 174, 180n.7 Warrnambool, Victoria 32 Waterloo, Ontario 33 Watts, Daniel 227 Watts, Julie 224–8 Wellington 36–7, 87, 106, 111–12, 117–18, 231 Western Australia 51, 190, 218–19, 233, 239n.38 Wheeler, Barry 55–6 White Australia Policy 56, 60, 64 Whitear, Mark 182–8

Index  265 Whiteside, John and Ann 17, 86, 136–40, 142, 208 Whitlam Labor government 64 Whitley, Michael 88–9 Whyalla, South Australia 97–8 Wilmer, Hugh 39–42 Wilson, Harold 88–9 Wiltshire 44 Wimbledon 108 Winter, Professor James 20–1 women 5, 7, 15–17, 20, 22, 29, 42, 45–6, 50, 88, 98–9, 107, 125–8, 143, 167, 173–4, 176, 194, 207, 210, 216–28, 237, 239n.38 childbirth 30, 37, 42–3, 123, 125, 127–8, 143–5, 157, 165, 170, 185, 189, 193, 203, 209–10, 219–20, 222, 225 parenting 3, 11, 41, 44, 95, 98, 108, 124, 128–9, 138–9, 141, 144, 147, 163–5, 170, 173, 185, 189–90, 194, 204, 209–10, 221–2, 226, 237

work 1–4, 12, 28–9, 42, 45–6, 61–2, 69–73, 84–6, 88, 94–5, 98–9, 101, 108–9, 116–17, 127, 137, 143, 149, 156, 163, 165, 167–8, 170–1, 176–8, 188, 191–6, 201–4, 208, 210, 219, 220–4, 226–8, 231–6 see also education; employment and unemployment; family; gender; identity; men; pregnancy Wood, Fiona 11–12, 143–4 Wood, Thomas, Cobbers 48 Worcester 165 work ethic 1, 96, 123, 226 working conditions 58–9, 68, 86, 136, 142, 145, 138, 158, 196 see also employment and unemployment Yelling, Cindy 17 Yorkshire 57, 140, 142–3, 153–5, 193, 195, 231