Ten-pounders and other poms.(Book Review)

The English in Australia, by James Jupp; Cambridge University Press, 2004, $37.50.

THE ENGLISH have contributed perhaps half the national gene pool and the basic culture, but this is the first comprehensive study of them as a distinctive immigrant group. And a fine, fact-packed but concise study it is.

The author traces in a wealth of detail two centuries of English immigration into Australia: the geographic origins of the main immigration streams, their reasons for leaving England and how it all played out in the Antipodes. He also squeezes in a succinct outline of the social and economic histories of both countries in the periods covered. His years as editor of The Australian People, the massive and masterly encyclopaedia of contributions to the Australian population published for the Bicentennial (and again in 2001) appear to have prepared the way for this precise grasp of detail.

Jupp's approach contrasts with that of another major immigrant chronicler, Patrick O'Farrell in his books on the Irish, though each is good in its own way. O'Farrell's books were more impressionistic; he predigested the raw information and wrote with lively feeling for a subject that fascinated him. Jupp's emphasis is more analytical, as spare on emotion as it is rich in facts and figures.

Much of the broad outline will not be new to readers reasonably familiar with Australian history and attentive to their society; the strength rather than the devil is in the detail. The English have been by far the biggest immigrant group since 1788, and the working class has been overwhelmingly numerically dominant among them (as with most other immigrant groups). The culture they brought has dominated in Australia, all social classes contributing.

English immigrants were leaders along the path to parliamentary democracy (though along with most others) and especially influenced by the Chartist movement for parliamentary democracy in the 1840s. This was one of several areas where Australian society moved ahead of most other countries, including Britain.

Jupp reminds us of the numerical importance of agricultural labourer immigrants in the nineteenth century, to the south-east in the 1830s and 1840s and Queensland in the 1880s, their fares paid by sales of public land. Often be-smocked and illiterate, overwhelmingly they were from the south-east around London or the south-west around Bristol, frequently reacting against the impoverished, regimented and crowded life under the landlords and yeoman farmers of the day.