Growing Up in “White Bread” England in the Sixties I Might as Well Have Come From Mars’

Abstract

A recurring theme in the testimony of British migrants to Australia in the two decades following World War Two, especially those from London and industrial cities, is the disappointment, often scorn, which they expressed for the quality of urban life in their new country. Amenities they had taken for granted, even in war damaged and austerity ravaged cities at home, seemed to be absent or inferior in Australian capital cities (as in the equivalent cities in Canada), and they prompted critical comments on issues ranging from the quality of public transport to restrictive liquor laws. Disappointment with the urban setting was one of the reasons why these migrants opted to settle in middle and outer suburbs. By the 1970s this critique began to give way to a more positive outlook among a younger generation, more intent on a search for ‘adventure’ and more cosmopolitan in inclination. For many of these migrants Australian cities represented a degree of excitement and challenge they had not known in the ‘white bread’ towns of their upbringing; by the 1990s the city centre living some of them chose was a celebration of a form of cosmopolitanism they had never experienced in Britain. The article draws on two oral history projects on post-war British migration to Australia, and one from Canada, to illuminate the changing meaning of the city in migrant life stories.