The ‘Bring out a Briton’ Campaign of 1957 and British Migration to Australia in the 1950s

Abstract

AbstractIn 1957, the Australian Government launched a new assisted migration scheme aimed at bolstering the proportion of British migrants entering Australia. The ‘Bring out a Briton’ campaign was directed at the Australian public rather than, as in previous migration campaigns, the potential migrants and the Government called on community groups to address public anxiety about the high proportion of non‐British European migrants entering Australia. The campaign focussed public debate on the future of Australia as a British country, with the Immigration Minister caught between an establishment intent on maintaining the British character of Australia through the inflow of people of ‘British stock’, and ‘New Australians’, Australians of European descent who objected to British preference. The debate reflected broader public uncertainty about Australia's place in the postwar world, and the pages of Australia's metropolitan daily newspapers witnessed the forging of the terms in which Australia's British values were recast as Australian Western values, enabling Australia to remain part of the British Commonwealth of Nations while developing a role independent of Britain within an anti‐Communist Western bloc.