Bowler hats and board shorts

The remnants of Australia’s English inheritance are everywhere. Australia’s language, legal system, politics and unions are all close facsimiles of their English counterparts. The English, by carrot (assisted passage) or by stick (forced transportation of convicts), have been coaxed to the opposite end of the Earth since Australia was discovered. They have consistently been Australia’s largest migrant group and a majority of Australians have English ancestors.

However, despite this pervasive influence, the role of people of English origin had never been extensively studied until Dr James Jupp published The English in Australia earlier this year.

“There has never been a book on the English because they have always been regarded as normal,” he says.

“They have been overlooked because they tend to assimilate quickly. The majority of the current crop of migrants are simply swapping one middle class suburban lifestyle for another.

“There are only two ways it’s different in Australia: one is the weather and the other is population density. If you come from the southeast of England, to become an Australian takes ten minutes.”

A definitive history, the book looks at who the English are, who they were, where they came from and at what point they became foreigners in Australia.

Dr Jupp, born in London and living in Canberra, with an Australian family and passport, looks specifically at the English — where possible separating them from the other British nations and even the Cornish.

English migration has changed from being forced, to being encouraged, to being refused unless strict skill requirements are met. Dr Jupp says the 1999 case of would-be Senator Heather Hill, whose dual nationality was seen by the High Court as “allegiance to a foreign power”, illustrates how foreign England has become.

“Until 1973, if you had a British Passport you could walk in. Today most of the people who came here in the 1960s wouldn’t get in.”

Immigration is now shifting, with Asia likely to dominate future migration statistics, but Dr Jupp believes links are sufficiently entrenched that English migration will never halt.

Dr Jupp also examines the origins of Australians’ ambivalence towards the English, which has its roots early in the country’s history (long before today’s passionate sporting rivalries), when young Australia needed a workforce and England herded its paupers, criminals and orphans onto ships bound for the antipodes in response.

“This created some resentment that Australia was being used as a dumping ground,” he says.

“For the first hundred years or so, the majority of the population were migrants, and they couldn’t very well dislike themselves. It starts to turnover between 1880 and 1901 to the adult population having an Australian-born majority with the idea that if you are born in a country you have more rights than someone born outside.”

Another factor is that many immigrants were people likely to have a dislike of the English establishment: from Irish Catholics to English trade unionists.