Life In Australia

Fortunately, British immigrants don’t need to sit a driving test – my wife was especially relieved about this. It took her three attempts to get her driving licence in the UK and she was dreading having to sit a driving test in Brisbane.

All you have to do here is sit a reasonably easy driving theory test – which costs around $16.

You need to answer 30 questions about driving and traffic laws. I don’t know the pass rate but I would think it’s pretty high. Before you sit the test, it’s best to read through a little book called “Your Keys to Driving in Queensland”.

Some Poms are happiest moving where there are plenty of other Poms. Others prefer getting away from other Brits completely. If you’re one of the latter, most places in Australia are not for you.

Poms are everywhere in Australia. In Brisbane alone there’s almost 100,000 people who have emigrated from Britain. Most of us have gone native so you’ll find it difficult to tell us from the Aussies – until we open our mouths .

You’ll find that the vast majority of Aussies are very welcoming and friendly to Poms, so don’t worry about opening your mouth and revealing your Pommieness.

Many people say Pom (or Pome) stands for “Prisoner of Mother England”. This is just an urban myth. It rings true – and so it is a successful urban myth – because many of the first European Australians truly were convicts sent out of London.

According to the Australian National Museum the word only came into use in 1912 – long after the era of convict deportations.

Pom and Pommy came about because the hot Australian sun turned most of the people arriving from the UK as red as the inside of pomegranates. So instead of calling UK migrants ‘immigrants’, they were jokingly called ‘pomigrants’.

Pomigrant was then shortened to Pom or Pommy and the nickname stuck.