30 April 2024 Australians British Ancestry

Between 1788 and 1868 around 162,000 convicts were transported from Britain and Ireland. A further wave of immigration, over a million and a half strong, were the “£10 poms” who for that fee received an assisted passage to a new life in Australia between 1945 and 1982. The policy was that only white people need apply. This was planned migration was the result of the governments of the two countries sharing a desire to populate the vast country. Many returned to Britain after 2 years, shocked by some of the conditions they found and the attitude of the existing Australians to “whingeing poms”. Many, many stayed and they and their descendants still have living relatives in the UK. So it is that a over 10,000,000 of the present day population claim to have British or Irish ancestry. This is probably nearer double this number since although a large number identified as Australian in the 2016 census the official census bureau has stated that most of these are of Anglo-Celtic colonial stock.