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.

It’s important for everyone with fair skin (and not so fair skin too) to take on board a simple fact. The UV from the sunshine in Australia will take the skin off you - literally.

People get sunburnt here much, much faster than in the Mediterranean. I’d say the sunshine in Australia is stronger than in the Greek Islands by the same amount as the Greek Islands are stronger than the south of England.

If you expose unprotected skin to the sun for half an hour here at midday here you could be burnt badly.

I’d never been a regular hat wearer until I came here. The first few days here - and ears and nose burnt so badly that the pain was excruciating - changed all that. At this time of year, I’ve learnt not to go outside for more than a few minutes between 9am and 3pm. If I really have to, I wear sunblock, hat and sunglasses and move quickly from one clump of shade to the next.

Fortunately the sun rises at around 5am in summer in Brisbane so you can get in plenty of outdoor activity before it gets really strong.

If you’re coming here in summer for the first time, please be safe rather than sorry. Cover up until you can judge safely for yourself the extreme effects of the Australian sun.

Immigration stats released in the last week show that Western Australia (Perth) is the most popular state for British immigration to Australia, followed by our very own Queensland. The numbers for 12 months were,

My take on the numbers is that a lot of Poms are choosing smaller cities for quality of life reasons while less than you might expect are heading for Australia’s big two - Sydney (New South Wales) and Melbourne (Victoria).

As 2005 draws to a close, I was thinking about the future - not just mine but my children’s.

Since we arrived in Brisbane, we’ve added to our family and our son is a little Aussie. We wondered though if, legally, he was also British. It turns out that he’s not completely British - he is British by descent. This means he has the right to live and work in Britain as a citizen. If, however, he does not live in Britain for at least three years, his children will have no right to be British or to live in Britain.

We prefer living in Australia but it seems strange to think of our “mother country” disowning people whose family’s association with the British Isles goes back thousands of years simply because their grandparents decided they would prefer to live in Australia.

I suppose that’s the situation many young Australians find themselves in today when they’re looking to work abroad for a few years. Their ancestry is entirely British but they are not British and, unless they follow the same immigration procedures as people whose anscestors have never had any association with Britain, they can never be British.