In addition to oral histories, interviewees revived some fascinating material for public consumption, including letters, postcards, diaries and scrapbooks. While reading Ten Pound Poms I frequently felt transported to the lounge rooms and porches of those interviewed, an observer of their embodied story-telling techniques and their non-verbal responses to the interviewers' investigations. In joining forces with Hammerton, Thomson further extends the argument for the importance of oral history, both its content as transcribed and interpreted, and analyses of its performance. Thomson's Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (1994) is one of the most moving examples of Australian war history and relies heavily on interviews for its considerable insights. This is not the first time Hammerton and Thomson have shown us their abilities to use oral history in sensitive and revealing ways. Sustained sensitivity to differences of age and sex are a feature of their broad sweep. They are alert to inconsistencies and defensiveness, as Wills and Darian-Smith are, but are more concerned with the emotional journeys of a broad cross-section of this migrant population. Hammerton and Thomson are slightly less critical, perhaps one small cost of them casting their net so widely. This enables the kind of sustained and contained analysis that, in its best incarnation, develops a very critical and detailed engagement with individual and community practices as it comes to terms with the inconsistencies, impositions and divisions entailed in the performance of British identities. The anchoring of its discussions in one community, and in particular the event of Britfest, organised primarily by and for this community, is one of its strengths. Their work offers sophisticated theorisation of the ongoing processes of identity formation and relies less on interview material than Ten Pound Poms. (2) Wills and Darian-Smith use the British community in Frankston, outer Melbourne, as a case study. Sara Wills and Kate Darian-Smith have published a number of articles, which share Hammerton and Thomson's interest in ethnic and national identity. (1) Thomson and Hammerton add detail and nuance to this analysis, giving Jupp's conclusions weight in the form of a collection of complex narratives, which also point to the mix of motivations for coming to Britain and to the varying value placed on the skills that British migrants brought with them. He argues that a form of post-war exhaustion drove those who escaped Britain for Australia soonest after the war and that members of this relatively recent cohort were more skilled than many of those who had gone before them. Jupp's work places post-war British migration in two contexts: that of migration from other countries and a longer history of British free-settlers in Australia. This reveals much about twentieth-century phases in the British-Australian alliance, which is so often taken for granted. In Ten Pound Poms their life stories, complex both in their own fashioning and retelling and in the authors' piecing together of biographical evidence, people this history in a way that defies conventional assumptions about the ease with which Britons adapted to life in Australia. However, an account of the aspirations, satisfactions and disappointments of the individuals for whom the effects of these machinations became most meaningful are necessary for fleshing out Jupp's historical framework. His chapter 'Bringing out the Britons' comes closest to Ten Pound Poms in terms of offering an overview of the postwar migration scheme, and provides important analysis of the machinations of politicised Britons and the Australian politicians instrumental in shaping the services and opportunities they received. James Jupp, the pre-eminent scholar of the history of Australian immigration, published The English in Australia in 2004. Although not the first of these publications, the breadth and quality of research in Ten Pound Poms will ensure that it becomes an essential point of reference both for scholars of postwar British migration to Australia and for those pursuing oral history. By contrast, published research focused on British immigrants to Australia – the largest cohort of arrivals in this period – has only recently begun to appear. Since the 1970s the experiences of those who came to Australia from Europe in the postwar migration boom have been studied at length. The speakers' programme for this event boasted the names of most of the significant researchers in this emerging field: Sara Wills, James Jupp and Mark Peel, to name half of them. The Australian launch of Hammerton's and Thomson's history of postwar British migrants to Australia took place at the end of a one-day symposium held at the Migration Museum in Melbourne.
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