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University of Notre Dame Australia ResearchOnline@ND Theses 2007 From Dream to Reality: A study of British migration to Western Australia in the 1960s, with special emphasis on those who travelled on the SS Castel Felice Hilda June Caunt University of Notre Dame Australia Follow this and additional works at: http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING The am terial in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further copying or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. Publication Details Caunt, H. J. (2007). From Dream to Reality: A study of British migration to Western Australia in the 1960s, with special emphasis on those who travelled on the SS Castel Felice (Master of Arts (MA)). University of Notre Dame Australia. http://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/34 This dissertation/thesis is brought to you by ResearchOnline@ND. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses by an authorized administrator of ResearchOnline@ND. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INTRODUCTION To construct this unique contribution to the history of Western Australia I have used the words of over 100 British migrants who came here in the 1960s. Over a million people left the British Isles to migrate to Australia during the 1960s1. Over one hundred thousand migrants, not all of whom were British, came to Australia on the Castel Felice between 1959 and 1969. 2 She was one of the many ships travelling the route between Europe and Australia in the great post-war movement of peoples. The British migrants were labelled by many as ‘whingeing Poms’, but more recently Hammerton and Thomson have written of them as ‘Australia’s invisible migrants’.3 My study is important and timely because many of the people who experienced the event are now senior citizens whose memories need to be recorded while it remains possible to do so. In exploring the experiences of over 100 British migrants who settled in Western Australia in the 1960s the thesis gives personal stories that have not been written before. Scholars have explored the experiences of other ethnic groups in Western Australia such as the Irish and Dutch as well as the displaced persons of Europe more generally.4 The British post-war migration to Australia had been recorded mostly in general terms.5 This thesis concentrates on the decision by Britons to migrate to Western Australia in the 1960s, their sea 1 A. James Hammerton, and Alistair Thomson, Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s invisible migrants, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2005, p. ix. 2 Peter Plowman, Passenger Emigrant Ships and Luxury Liners: Ships to Australia and New Zealand, 1945- 1970, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1992, p. 152. 3 Hammerton and Thomson, passim. 4 Jean Chetkovich, The New Irish in Australia, PhD Thesis, Department of History, University of Western Australia, Nedlands, 2003; Nonja Peters, Milk , Honey but no Gold: Post-war migration to Western Australia 1945-1964, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 2001. 5 James Jupp, various titles; Allen Richardson, various titles; Appleyard, various titles; Hammerton and Thomson, various titles. 1 Introduction passage to Fremantle and the varying experiences of those who chose to settle here. Many British migrants of this period came as part of the greatest and last sea-borne movements of willing peoples in the world. Towards the end of the 1960s the airplane took the place of the ship, to a large degree, as the means of bringing migrants to Australia. This important research has allowed the participants to tell, in their own words, the story of why they decided to come to Australia (and more particularly to Western Australia), the experiences of their travel to Australia and their arrival and settling in, and, in the end, why some chose to return to live in Britain. To define the term British can be problematical; even the dictionaries cannot agree on a shared definition. One believes the British are ‘people of Great Britain or of the British Empire but more especially the English’. 6 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is more specific, suggesting that the British are the descendants of the ancient Britons, and Britain is said to be ‘the whole island containing England, Wales and Scotland more fully called Great Britain’. 7 Chetkovich also expresses the difficulty in defining the term ‘British’ for her doctoral thesis in 2003. She says that in modern usage ‘Britain is commonly used for the United Kingdom, a political entity in which England is the dominant part’. 8 According to the Australian Department of Immigration, the United Kingdom was created in 1801 and comprised England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and such off-shore islands as the Isle of Wight. In the 1920s the primarily Catholic states of southern Ireland were partitioned and became known as the Irish Free State. In 1948 these states became the Irish Republic and left the British Commonwealth. Since then Irish Republicans are not be considered ‘British’, unlike the citizens of Northern Ireland. 9 The majority of my respondents departed from what might be more specifically called Great Britain, the largest island of the British Isles. In all, though, participants 6 Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Desk Dictionary, Volume 1 A–M, Harper and Row, New York, 1985. 7 C. T. Onions (ed.), The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary , Oxford at the Clarendon Press, London, 1973. 8 Chetkovich, ‘The New Irish in Australia’, p. 10. 9 Australian Government, Department of Immigration, Immigration: Federation to Century’s End , October 2001, http://www.immi.gov.au./media/publications/statistics , 12/09/06; Hammerton and Thomson, pp. ix-x. 2 Introduction originated from Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland and also the Irish Republic. They seem to have used the terms English, British and ‘from the U.K.’ indiscriminately in their responses. It is also apparent that the place from which they say they left on their migration journey was not necessarily their place of birth or where they were ‘from’. Many respondents had travelled around the United Kingdom for work, after marriage and for other reasons, especially those who had served in the armed forces. It remains particularly difficult to determine exactly how many of the post-war British migrants to Australia were in fact Irish. Official records of the time make no distinction between the nationalities of those passengers who left British ports, but list only the port of departure. Chetkovich notes that the £10 assisted migration scheme was only extended to the Irish in the late 1960s, and that up to that time those Irish who wished to participate were forced to take up residency in England for six months before being considered eligible. 10 The significance of this is that while this study examines the British experiences of migration to Australia, it is possible that some of the participants were of Irish origin, just as some of the thousands who left Britain for Australia on the Castel Felice were also Irish. It is impossible to guess at what those numbers might be. This thesis looks at the dreams, hopes and expectations of some of the thousands of assisted British migrants who came to Western Australia during the 1960s. They left a country which had a National Health and Insurance Scheme with free medical and welfare benefits, often in a time of booming employment, to travel 12,000 miles to the other side of the world either on their own or with their families. The decision to emigrate was often based on expectations raised by promises they found in migrant information publications. Some found their new life in Australia was all they had hoped for—and more. Others found their expectations were not fulfilled immediately and so were very unhappy when they tried to settle in Australia. It has been estimated that over 25% of all people who migrated to 10 Chetkovich, ‘The New Irish in Australia’, p. 65. 3 Introduction Australia from the United Kingdom (and all parts of Europe) in the 1960s returned to their homelands. 11 The major part of the thesis uses the words of over 100 Britons to tell of their decision to migrate, their voyage and their early years in Western Australia in the 1960s. To give depth to the work the actual words and phraseology of the responses have been used. Most travelled on the Castel Felice , the ship which brought my family here; thirty of them came in the same year, 1966. Some of the accounts are humorous, some are poignant, but all reflect the different experiences of those £10 Poms. It is unquestionably an immigration history. Thomson, who researched the accounts of post-war British migrants in the archival holdings at the State Library of Victoria and the University of Sussex in England, says there are noticeable differences in the accounts of the migrants made at the time of migration and those that were made later. 12 It may therefore be true, that had my participants been surveyed upon arrival in the 1960s, their responses might then have been different. The study of immigration in Australia has been extensive, which is not surprising given the vast influence which assisted and unassisted migration has had on the nation since colonisation. (It is also true that Australia’s immigration story pre-dates 1788). Yet there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the large numbers of British migrants who arrived by ship in Western Australia during the period of the 1960s. Lost in the story of the declining White Australia Policy, these migrants were considered to be most acceptable because it was thought that they would blend invisibly and culturally into the Australian nation without effort.

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