A POMS’ PARADISE?
Michelle Keegan stars in a captivating new drama about Brits promised a sun-drenched new life in Australia for just £10 – but the reality was very different from their dreams
After the Second World War, the Australian government initiated a scheme to attract Britons to live there. The aim was to increase the population and help provide a workforce for Australia’s rapidly expanding industries.
Adults were charged just £10 to travel to the country and huge numbers were only too happy to leave depressed post-war Britain in search of a better way of life. They were nicknamed ‘Ten Pound Poms’. Many of them did thrive in their new home. The Gibb brothers, who became the Bee Gees, were one famous example, as was Julia Gillard, prime minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013. But not all flourished.
The BBC’s new six-part drama follows the fortunes of a number of migrants who leave northern England in 1956 for a fresh start in Sydney.
Terry Roberts (Warren Brown) is a builder who suffers from PTSD after his wartime experiences – he was a prisoner in Dresden when it was bombed. The first episode opens with him drinking his week’s wages and passing out in the street before being dragged home by his wife Annie
(Faye Marsay).
It’s Annie who sees a colourful newspaper advert inviting people to ‘Build a new life in sunny Australia’ and claiming that a mere ‘£10 can take you to the land of tomorrow’. Together with their two children, they make the trip.
On the same boat to Sydney is a young nurse Kate (Michelle Keegan), who was meant to be travelling with her fiance. She says he changed his mind, although we quickly learn that there is much more to it than that.
However, they are all in for a shock upon arrival. Rather than the proper houses with white picket fences they expected, they’re billeted in grim one-bedroom Nissen huts with paper-thin walls. The site is more like a prison camp than a housing estate.
Nor are they universally welcomed. Although Terry is a skilled tradesman, the only job he is able to get is ‘digging holes’ for gas pipes to be laid in and his co-workers aren’t happy with a
Pom taking a job that could have gone to an Aussie.
Kate fares slightly better, working as a nurse, but she is pursuing her own agenda, and by the end of the first episode both she and Terry find themselves in serious situations.
Created by Bafta-winning writer
Danny Brocklehurst (Brassic, Ordinary Lies) and filmed in New South Wales,
Ten Pound Poms offers an engaging insight into a slice of social history many viewers will know little about, and enough ordinary-people-inextraordinary-circumstances drama and intrigue to keep them tuning in.