Thanks for the reply. Your family history sounds fascinating and I have always wanted to visit Australia (relatives who have travelled there loved it).
You raised some very interesting points about Brit emigration in the 1950s. Would you agree though that part of the Aussie ‘Pom-bashing’ culture originated from Australia’s own desire for a national identity? By that, I mean that the Aussie Pom-bashing originated from a desire to grow away from the Empire and an indentity of a British possession to a true sense of nationhood.
No connection IMO. Australians, during that period, were overwhelmingly pro-Britain, they referred to England as the 'home country' and when Queen Elizabeth visited in the early fifties, they went nuts!
Australian attitutes toward England did not begin to cool until England joined the common market - in 1973 IIRC. Australia then had to market the products of its agriculture throughout the pacific rim, and we began to hear the rhetoric 'Australia is part of Asia'
It was as if 'Mother England' had abandoned her 'children' - suddenly, we needed to find outlets for all that butter, lamb and beef that once automatically went to feed the British. It came as a shock.
It wasn't just the Australians who used the term 'whinging pom' - the endless complaints that emanated from a large number of british migrants were also noticably derided by the rest of the migrant community. Greeks, Italians, Maltese, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles etc, they all noticed the culture of complaint and attitutes of entitlement the 'poms' brought with them.
I have not researched what might have been the reasons for this, but suspect a culture of 'welfare' dependence - that is anything BUT welfare, in fact.