Promised land The 10-pound poms who left UK for new life

Sylvia Brady does not romanticise her life as a newlywed in northern England in 1959

- Natasha May

“We’d get up in the morning and we’d go to work in the dark. We’d come home at night in the dark. It was always raining and there were these big posters everywhere: ‘Australia wants new migrants and it’s only 10 pounds.’”

So when her husband came home one evening and said: “Let’s give Australia a go,” she didn’t bat an eyelid. Brady was among more than one million Britons who migrated to Australia under the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme between 1945 and 1982, known colloquially as “10-pound poms”.