The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
I was a Ten Pound Pom in the Sixties
Graham Butcher, now 76, was 17 when he travelled to Australia on the working visa scheme in 1962. With a new version being revived this week, he recounts the experience
Being a “Ten Pound Pom” gave me a chance for a new start and to see the world for a bargain price. It was 1962, I was 17 and working as an office boy in Reigate, Surrey, for some chartered surveyors. I was paid £1 a week to cycle around collecting rents in all weathers and to stoke the boiler in the office basement every morning.
After a year I had requested a pay rise and when they offered me 10 pence more, I thought it was a bit of an insult, that I was worth more than that, so I decided to go to Australia for a couple of years and enjoy a nice boat trip on the way. I had read all about life in Australia and how you could go bush clearing in the north. My father had died when I was 14, which had disrupted my life entirely, and my older sister Derna had gone out as a Ten Pound Pom the previous year.
We left from Tilbury Docks, in London, bound for Melbourne. Ten pounds is roughly the equivalent of £250 today – and it was an absolute bargain. The Australian government wanted to increase the population, which was only about eight million at the time. The condition of the offer was that we had to remain working in Australia for two years. Derna had gone out the year before and suggested I do the same.
It was a one-class ship full of excited young people and families, and I shared a cabin with three other young chaps. The journey took about seven weeks and we went to Bilbao, through the Bay of Biscay and the Suez Canal to Aden, where I bought a pair of binoculars for £1 that I still have today. We stopped at seven or eight places, including Bombay [Mumbai], for about 24-48 hours a time, arriving in Fremantle first and then Melbourne, and encountering 40ft waves through the Great Australian Bight. It was a great adventure.
My uncle lived in Melbourne and he met me at the ship, so I stayed with family for a few days before I found a job as a jackaroo [farmhand] through an advert in the local paper.
I worked on various farms, fruit picking and doing a lot of travelling around, making some very good friends, before ending up as a dairyman on a farm in Numurkah, on the Victoria/New South Wales border. The owner, Reg Cowan, had been a Japanese prisoner of war on the Burma railway. I lived in a wooden hut with a tin roof – lots of snakes and spiders would get inside, and possums used to wake me up at night, scrambling over the roof. There were very warm nights, but it could be cold on winter mornings. I shared meals with the family, and worked 12-hour days, sometimes more, milking about 80 cows and helping Reg build the milking parlour, fencing and irrigation from the Murray River. They’re all skills I use on my own small farm today – milking aside.
The water for the irrigation system was stored in a dam, which we used as a swimming pool, and we caught redfin perch in the canals, which were delicious. There were orange, lemon and peach trees on the farm, too, and I used to particularly enjoy the fruit picking – I’d never tasted peaches like that before: they were huge, juicy and naturally ripe from the sun. There were grapes the size of golf balls, as well.
Numurkah was only two miles away but it was tiny, so for any social life we went to the bigger town of Shepparton, a 20-mile drive. I went with my best friend, Jim, who was a share farmer nearby, and also a Ten Pound Pom, but from Northern Ireland.
On Saturday nights, Jim and I would drive 100 miles, at 100mph, to Melbourne, getting back at 3am before starting work two hours later. Jim’s girlfriend, Julie, lived there – I was best man at their wedding in 1964 and we have remained friends ever since.
On Saturday nights, we would drive 100 miles, at 100mph, to Melbourne
Being in Australia was life-changing – it was the university of life, one of the best there is. I never phoned home – you just didn’t in those days – but wrote occasionally to my mother. Our family are farmers, so farming was in my background and I loved being there.
I bought my first car when I was out there, a Morris Minor, and went on road trips with another neighbour, Ian. We went to Surfers Paradise and around Byron Bay, and also drove inland for days on hot, tarmacked roads. We once bought a whole branch of bananas, which we put on the back seat of the car.
In Numurkah, when I was 20, I was called up for conscription. All young men received a ballot paper and it was the luck of the draw if you drew the number for Vietnam – some did go, but I was lucky to remain.
You didn’t need a visa back then, and I wish I had applied for citizenship and got a dual passport. I ended up staying for five years and was thinking about staying longer, but I became ill with brucellosis, a debilitating and infectious bacterial disease that made me very weak and attacked my immune system. I couldn’t work and had nowhere to live, so I had no choice but to return home at 22 for treatment. The disease made me depressed and I was very down to be leaving.
I took the boat home, which cost Aus$500 for another long journey through the Pacific and the Panama Canal, stopping along the way at places such as Curaçao, Barbados and Tahiti. I was able to sit in the sun and enjoy the voyage.
After a year recuperating in the UK, I met my now wife, Christine. We discussed going to live in Australia, but never did. It was a long way away and Christine’s family weren’t keen.
However, we eventually went back as tourists in January 2005, two years after I retired. It’s still the longest holiday we’ve ever had: over the course of a month, I took Christine everywhere I had been and to meet all my friends.
The difference was incredible – all the roads in Melbourne had been updated, and Surfers Paradise was built up – there was nothing there 40 years earlier. Back then, I could have bought a plot of land for Aus$40, but I didn’t have the money in those days.
Being a Ten Pound Pom changed the course of my life – you don’t get to know a vast country like Australia in a short amount of time on a holiday, and although things are different now, I’d do it all over again.