AUTHOR'S NOTES; Niall Griffiths was a Ten Pound Pom for three years. He went back to Oz to see what he's missing now.

Byline: Niall Griffiths

In the decade following the Second World War the Australian government decided to entice people to their country, to settle and work there, drawn largely from the Mother Country, or, more precisely, Mother Countries, of Britain.

They wanted sturdy, healthy stock, so would only accept those who could prove that they were of a robust weight when born; hence Ten Pound Pom.

No, that's a joke. The term is a monetary one, of course; if you worked in a profession that the Oz government wanted more of, then you could transport your entire family there, by sea or air, for a tenner.

My dad was a brickie, and Oz cities were rapidly expanding, so we went.

An age in the air, it seemed. A feeling of floating off the jumbo jet in Brisbane, exhausted, into a wild heat, and the whoops and squawks of strange creatures and giant green prehistoric leaves.

Long time ago when I was a boy. Many years later, I'm at a table in a square in Barcelona, eating tapas and drinking beer with Rich Lewis of Parthian, who's been a friend for a couple of years.

He asks me if I'd like to do a bit of work for Parthian and tells me that he's got an idea. I ask him what it is. Well, he says, you told me once that you emigrated to Australia when you were a kid, so...

In truth, I'd been wanting to go back to Oz for quite some time.

I'd been trying to wrangle an invitation from someone, anyone, over there to do a reading, and had secured one to a festival in Queensland somewhere but I couldn't go; I'd already agreed to visit another country.

My books were doing well in New Zealand, apparently, but the expense of flying people over there is prohibitive, so festivals in that country tended not to invite guests from Wales.

But I'd been wondering about Oz, how it had changed, what I'd feel when I revisited my old schools, that kind of thing.

And the video to the Manics song Australia had me enraptured; the landscape, the sense of open-ness, the endless red desert.

Tall and shining cities with dusty shanties at their edges.

Storms, heat, cockatoos. Great big lizards and spiders. And the shadow of my childhood self amongst it all. I pounced on Rich's inspired suggestion.

Started making plans. A huge problem was that I've never learnt to drive, and the idea was to re-trace the route we made in the 1970s, when my dad turned a Holden station wagon into a little moving house and drove us from Brisbane to Perth. How was I going to do that? I started studying rail and bus routes online, across Australia, ascertaining whether they stopped at the little towns I'd stopped at 30 years earlier and which were punctuation marks in that past and personal narrative.

Whether they had places to stay, too; some of them were little more than hamlets in 1977, and were probably much the same in 2007.

The logistics began to confuse, at first, then frustrate, then appal.

I'd never be able to do it. I was going to have to miss many places out, which would weaken the planned book's schematics to such an extent as to render it almost pointlessly self-indulgent. But then my older brother stepped in.

I'll come with you, he said. I'll pay my airfare, you hire the camper van and pay for accommodation.

It was the sensible and, really, only thing to do.

And that was it. We went. Six weeks in Oz.

I've of course written at length about the experience in Ten Pound Pom so I'm not going to repeat myself, but I will say this; there were many times on the journey when I wished I was back in that square in Barcelona.

Many, many times. Mainly because if I was, then that would mean that I was no longer in Australia.

I'm immensely glad that I made the trip, for thousands of reasons, one being that now I've exorcised the urge to re-visit and have no need to go there again.

Two day's travel? If I'm going to sit and stew in a plane for that long I'll go elsewhere; South America, say.

Re-visiting the areas on the other side of the planet where I lived and schooled and played 30 years earlier stirred up an emotional hurricane, which I'm not knocking; it's been hugely beneficial, I feel.

And it made me more appreciative of my life's trajectory so far; what I've done, who I've done it with, etc.

How differently it could've all turned out, if my mum hadn't got homesick, if her mother left behind in Liverpool hadn't persuaded her to return.

For the sake of one decision, not mine, I might've ended up more or less Australian, and could now, in an alternative history, be working behind a bar in Earl's Court. No worries, mate.

Niall Griffiths will be talking about Ten Pound Poms with Susie Wild at the Hay Festival on June 2.

Ten Pound Pom is published by Parthian, pounds 8.99

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Title Annotation:	Features
Publication:	Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales)
Geographic Code:	8AUST
Date:	May 14, 2011
Words:	867
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