White, British and racially pure.(Likely Lads and Lasses: Youth Migration to Australia, 1911-1983)(Book review)

Likely Lads and Lasses: Youth Migration to Australia 1911-1983, by Alan Gill; BBM Ltd, 2005, $30.

NOWADAYS WE SHRUG OFF the White Australia policy, at least with the benefit of hindsight, as a politically defensible foundation--in its time--of Australia's immigration policy. One of the pillars of this policy, chiefly between the two world wars, was the enthusiastic support by several organisations eager to bring to Australia youngsters, school leavers ready for work, who had to be white, British and "racially pure"--mainly to work on farms or in outback domestic service. These organisations were working independently of any official government immigration policy, such as it was. Until the axe fell.

Alan Gill has now completed what he calls an unintentional trilogy about this lengthy episode. His first volume was Orphans of the Empire, about child migrants from the orphanages and children's homes of Britain. The second volume was Interrupted Journeys: Young Refugees from Hitler's Reich which concerned the Kindertransport and similar schemes mainly in the late 1930s. Now we have the third book, and a conscientiously researched one it is, about such projects as the Dreadnought Scheme, the Big Brother Movement (which has supported the book's publication), Barnardo's, the Young Australia League, the Millions Club (renamed Sydney Club in 1962, then fused with the University and Schools Club), the Salvation Army, and other bodies.

The heyday of these movements for filling our empty spaces with good pure British stock was between the wars, and this obviously means that actual interviews with these immigrants now depend on quickly diminishing opportunities for oral contact rather than relying on hearsay or historical notes.

Indeed, one of this book's strengths lies in its case histories. There are many of these, somewhat indiscriminately spread throughout the text. Many emphasise hardships for new arrivals--extremely primitive conditions on remote outback properties which to young arrivals must have seemed like the portals of another world, inevitably homesickness, isolation from their friends and in some cases even siblings, lack of enough money even to buy a stamp for postage home, something akin to "slave labour" (a six-and-a-half-day week on farms), in some cases insinuations of sexual impropriety and physical or emotional abuse. In quite a few cases these things left a scar for life, but in many others they were eventually relegated to the history of growing up under special conditions, and many young immigrants "made good", indeed prospered, in important careers.

A major hurdle was the Depression from 1929 when government financial support ceased; on one hand, farmers left entirely without money could not pay even a pittance to the immigrant lads, and on the other hand there was a potent move to stop all such immigration because it was taking away the few jobs left for Australians. Many immigrants joined the defence forces in 1939 as an escape from what looked like a hopeless future.

The Dreadnought Scheme, which came first, owes its peculiar name to a 1909 plan in Sydney to raise funds for buying a Dreadnought battleship as a present to Britain in a gesture of support for British naval supremacy. This idea was scuttled when the federal government announced its intention to establish an Australian navy, making the Dreadnought ("fear God and dread nought") plan superfluous. So the substantial amount of money already raised was split down the middle: half for a Naval College at Jervis Bay, half to encourage British immigration, partly by buying a farm at Pitt Town, north-west of Sydney, for British youths "of good character and physique". There was some dismay in Britain, called "the only nation to export its children"; in Australia, the phrase "Pommie bastards" was bandied around.