Ten Pound Poms

On an icy morning in January 1955, my parents began an adventure which determined the direction of the lives of all our family and of those generations which followed.  

There were five of us – my Mum and my Dad, thirteen year old sister Jean, five year old brother Phillip, and me.

We were “Ten Pound Poms” on our way to Australia on the P&O Liner, “Strathaird,” and I was an under-sized, openmouthed kid with few memories of being further from my front doorstep than the Barton bus depot a couple of hundred yards down the the road from the semi-detached house where I was born in Beeston, Nottinghamshire.

Having sold that same family home a few weeks earlier, we had started the year living in rented accommodation in Mapperley before embarking from Tilbury on that day in January.
The whole trip took about five weeks and started with the roughest of initiations as the ship navigated through the Bay of Biscay towards the sanctuary of the Mediterranean Sea calling briefly at Malta, where passengers were not permitted ashore.  A few days later the vessel was a true ship of the desert, gliding gently through the Suez after an earlier stop at Port Said where the bumboats came alongside, clinging like burrs as their traders went about their business of selling their collectables.  Brown-skinned men in baggy trousers wearing white taqiyah skullcaps, the boats looking like they had come straight from Ali Baba's warehouse, rocking from side to side while with ropes and baskets they passed up their wares and our passengers passed down their money. Mum bought a couple of wooden plates inlaid with shells. She said years later that the first thing the local vicar said, when he came to introduce himself as we settled to our new life in the far north of Australia, was what nice collection plates they would make.  

You might think that there is not a lot that a child of that age would remember of such a trip - but the memories of a long exciting sea voyage left an overwhelming impression, and I suspect were a major contributor to my decision to make a career myself as a seafarer a little over ten years later - a story for another day.

Strathaird was over 20 years old having been around since 1932. 200 metres long with a 24 metre beam, she weighed over 22,500 tons and cruised at 20 knots. She had a crew of nearly 500 and over 1,200 single class passengers. Like most of her kind she was a troop carrier during the war and along with her sisters, Stratheden, Strathmore and Strathnaver, these wonderful ships delivered a hundred thousand or more optimistic and sometimes war-weary immigrants to Australia during the fifties and the early sixties. She was retired from service in 1961 and sold to a Hong Kong breakers yard where I like to think she was recycled into something more dignified than razor blades or paper clips.

Our first opportunity to step on to foreign soil was at the port of Aden, now part of Yemen, but at that time a colony of the British Empire at the eastern approaches to the Red Sea. After that it was on to Colombo in Sri Lanka. Known in 1955 as the Dominion of Ceylon, it was a place of overwhelming smells, colours, and the intensity of the sub-continent at its most intoxicating. A multitude of vendors and beggars were on every street, in every doorway, and by every road. Traders thrust their treasure in our faces and followed us as we were hustled along the busy thoroughfares. The throng of humanity after the relative calm of shipboard life was overpowering.

Yet for a wide-eyed post-war schoolboy, the most exciting thing I remember to this day was the thrill of being in Aden and Ceylon and being able to buy postage stamps from those countries to add to my collection and I pestered the daylights out of my parents to let me spend some money to enhance my philatelic collection.
After Ceylon, we made the long trip across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle. Strathaird plowed through frightening monsoon weather which included a night when an unfortunate  passenger fell overboard. The ship circled for several hours to no avail - a dreadful way to go.
Shipboard life for the kids was wonderful. I'm sure it was for the adults as well, but I particularly liked sharing a dining table with other migrant kids and our steward, a Londoner who told us to call him Seb saying, “what you don’t want, don’t eat.” Heaven for us was no one telling us to eat our vegetables. We were even brought tea in bed at breakfast time.  Of course, we had to attend school lessons of a sort, but it was nothing like real school. We were taught songs about kookaburras in gum trees, shown pictures of kangaroos, and told things about the history of this great country we were about to call our new home.
We disembarked in Sydney on a hot February day and soon after were on a long train journey north to Brisbane. Together with other Queensland bound settlers, we were accommodated at the Yungaba Immigration Centre, our home for the next few weeks. Yungaba was the first port of call for many thousands of the migrants who came to Queensland. Situated on the tip of the Kangaroo Point peninsula at a sweeping bend in the Brisbane River and with three-sided water views, it was a wonderful location for such an establishment. Although it was a government-run institution, there was a welcoming concern for the comfort and welfare of its residents; not just for compassionate reasons, but also because of the competition that existed between the states as they each attempted to attract migrants who could boost their labour force. I think my parents were quite happy to be placed there even after the relative luxury of shipboard life.
With a job already lined up before leaving Britain, it was not long after arriving in Brisbane, that Dad flew to North Queensland where he was to start work as a garage motor mechanic in the small town of Mossman. His first assignment was to find a home for us to live in and to get settled into his new job. The rest of us would follow by train a few weeks later.
I have since thought what a harrowing experience it was for my 38 year old mother; fresh off the boat, having left a fairly comfortable (if cold) life in England,  boarding a train with three children to travel 1,000 miles north to God knows where.

The air-conditioned Sunlander was still a few years in the future, as we headed north on a clattering old train into the North Queensland wet season. Even today, conventional rail travel in Queensland can be a slow experience with a frequent stops and starts as bogeys rattle along in narrow gauge 3 feet 6 inch tracks; although Queensland’s Tilt Train is one of the fastest trains in the world using a narrow gauge track. However, nothing was further away than the old rattler which took about a week to get us to Cairns. Stopping at sidings and stations for hours at a time, it was a slow, uncomfortable trip with Mum doing her best to look after and feed three kids. There were no sleeper cars - this was a journey where we were sitting up all the way.

Each time the train arrived at a station, passengers and locals would make their way to the railway bar, or if there was no bar on the platform, to the local pub where they would buy and consume more and more booze for the long trip north. No sleep then for others, if such a thing were even possible, with the sounds of raucous laughter, bawdy singing and the odd drunken squabble coming from up and down the train's carriages (at least this was the way my mother always told the story). 

At the Burdekin River which separates the towns of Home Hill on the south and Ayr on the north, the old rail bridge was under several feet of water and the train was unable to cross. Together with the other passengers, we gathered our luggage, including unnecessary hats and coats, and struggled from the train to line up in the rain and wait to cross the mile-wide fast flowing river.  As muddy water lapped the gunwales, we scrambled into tiny bobbing flat-bottom boats, not much more than fishing tinnies, and insecurely perched on benches and suitcases we were ferried across to the other shore. Once there we were squeezed into another even older train for the remaining 300 miles of the journey north.

We eventually arrived in Cairns, tired, hungry, sweaty and fed-up and no doubt doing our share of whining. Dad was there at the station waiting with Mr and Mrs Brunton, our sponsors and the owners of Brunton's Garage, where Dad was the newly installed foreman mechanic. 

We weren't done yet. There was another 50 miles of travel to go - north along the Cook Highway to our new home. We were piled into (or in my case on to) an ancient-looking International truck; Mum, Jean and Phillip in front with Mr Brunton driving and Dad and I on the back with Mrs B making sure I was hanging on tightly (no danger of anything else) while at the same time providing an ample supply of banana sandwiches and a strange but sweet tasting soft drink called creaming soda.

Out past Stratford, across the Barron River with fast-flowing water just beneath the bridge's noisy wooden planks and north past the turn offs to beach roads. We stopped frequently along the winding pot-holed coastal highway in order to ford another flooded creek or causeway. At least once I recall, we threw out a tow-line and pulled a smaller stranded vehicle through one of the flooded water crossings. After a journey which seemed as long and eventful, if much less comfortable than our earlier sea crossing, we eventually arrived in Mossman and our new home.

Mossman was a busy little cane town. Its sugar mill (which sadly closed in 2023) was not far from the middle of town and the little cane trains with their cargo of freshly cut cane would travel down the centre of Mill Street through the town several times a day, holding up what little traffic there was. The town had five pubs and a little picture theatre in a corrugated iron building with deck chairs for seating where we were to see such wonderful films as Magnificent Obsession and Dial M for Murder.

Our home was a tiny single-storey fibro dwelling a long long way from Beeston.  To say that Mum was less than impressed with the attractions of this hot, wet little town would have been much more than an understatement.  For the next nine months there was a bag packed in the hallway which belonged to my mother - I'm sure she must have come close on many occasions to picking it up and just walking out.
We didn't have a car, something which would have disappointed my father who was always an enthusiastic motorist. We did however, have use of that old International D2 flat-bed truck with a floor-mounted foot starter and a split windscreen which was wound open on hot days (which was most days). Dad painted it red.
We lived in Mossman for about a year and then moved back down the Cook Highway to the big smoke – Cairns, where Dad got a job as workshop foreman at the Cairns City Council. Cairns was not the modern tourist town it is now – just a few streets, a muddy esplanade, no traffic lights, no parking meters and lots of places for youngsters to go swimming and exploring.  There were many adventures to follow, and many memorable years but none perhaps as remarkable for me as 1955.