A Journey to Down Under

By Ian McLean

This memoir/biography is about growing up in England during the fifties and sixties and some experiences I encountered living there during this period. It also describes what influenced me in deciding to migrate to Australia in 1973.

Having migrated, it tells the story of the little adventures that happened after arriving in Sydney.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Dec 16, 2022

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Copyright © 2022 by Ian McLean

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-8348-7 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-8347-0 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-8349-4 (eBook)

To my late mother who held a family together.

And Suzanne who was more than just an important person on this journey.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1   Moving on

Chapter 2   Auntie Mary

Chapter 3   On to high school

Chapter 4   Thoughts about emigrating

Chapter 5   Life begins at sixteen

Chapter 6   Spain

Chapter 7   Time to act

Chapter 8   Australia

Chapter 9   Sydney

Chapter 10   On the road

Chapter 11   Canberra

Chapter 12   Country NSW and the ACT

Chapter 13   Wedding Bells and Things Political

Chapter 14   A trip back

Chapter 15   Fire

Chapter 16   First Nations People

Chapter 17   Back to Sydney

Chapter 18   Urunga

Chapter 19   Looking back and moving forward

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Since migrating from England in 1973, I have occasionally been asked by friends or people I’ve met what made me come to Australia. I would give an answer as best I could and that was that, but it occurred to me that one day one of my grandchildren, nephews or nieces might also be curious. My granddaughter, who lives not far away, also recently asked me what made me come to Australia. So, this memoir is an attempt to show what it was like growing up in England, why and how I came to Australia, and what my life has been like since, as I’ve loved Australia since the day I landed.

Everyone has a different reason to leave the country of their birth and upbringing to settle in a new land. Many are refugees who were glad to get out of war-torn countries. Others want a new life in a place where they might be materially better off and that offers a better future for their children. Still others move because the climate is better than their home country. Whatever the reason, at some stage in their lives, some people simply decide to move to another country.

I grew up in a good family which my mother called lower working middle class—whatever that meant, Mum—in peaceful times, at least on British soil. I would later learn that many migrants I met from the UK came from similar families.

Australia launched an active immigration programme when I was growing up in the UK in the sixties and seventies. Television commercials promoted Australia as a desirable place to live, with its wide-open spaces and lots of sunshine. At school, we learnt about Australia and New Zealand, which seemed the more attractive place to live mainly because of its size and temperate climate not that dissimilar to England’s. However, New Zealand had no immigration programme as far as we knew, and if it did, it was nothing like Australia’s.

So, this simple, short story is told in case other family members, friends or anyone else might wonder why I came to Australia.

Chapter 1

Moving on

Any journey must start somewhere, and mine began in West Hartlepool, County Durham, where I was born on 23 December 1954. When I was three, my father moved the family to Carlisle in Cumbria after landing a job as a Labour Party organizer there. Up until then he worked as a coal miner and then as a metal machinist.

His father, my grandfather Robert McLean, spent all his working life as a miner, interrupted only by serving in the army, first in the final Boer War and then in World War I. At the end of WWI, the government of the day claimed the troops would come home to ‘a land fit for heroes.’ When my grandfather returned after being wounded, he was so disgusted with the pitiful pension the government offered he sent his service medals back. Decades later, my nephew Daniel retrieved them from the Imperial War Museum, and keeps them today.

All I remember about the move to Carlisle was sitting in a black car looking at our front door in West Hartlepool before we drove off. It was in Carlisle that I started school in September 1959, about three months before I turned five. I remember happy days and making new friends, particularly with a boy called Simon who lived in the lane close by. He was born in Carlisle, which is in the county of Cumbria and about 10 miles from the border with Scotland, and as we had similar northern English accents as the other students, we both fitted in well at school.

I also remember my nana, who was reluctant to leave her village of Horden in Durham, and only came over for a visit once, as far as I remember. But I do think she enjoyed the experience, and seeing her grandchildren. All the family—Mum, Dad and my sisters Sandra (the eldest), Pamela, Barbara and Nana and I all went down to the Lake District for a day trip. Somehow, we all managed to squeeze into Dad’s little car. But it was a great day out, and a lot of fun playing games like I Spy in the car on the drive home.

The next summer, after I had turned six, my father got another job working for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), this time based in Fleet Street London. So, in December 1961, the family moved down to our new house in Maidstone, Kent, about an hour’s commute by train to London. The girls went down by train with Nana, who was becoming quite the traveller by now. Dad, Mum, my two-week-old identical twin brothers, Nick and John, and I made the 330-mile journey over night by car. That’s a long way in the UK, and I don’t think the road network was as good as it is now. The twins slept the whole way, including when we stopped at Doncaster to visit relatives, and I would be sent out to the car to regularly check on them. Eventually, the whole family arrived at our new home at 49 Hayle Road, a typical English semidetached with four bedrooms upstairs. A double brick single building was divided into two homes by one shared internal wall. My parents were in the front bedroom with the twin babies, and I was on my own at first before sharing with the twins when they got older. Pamela and Barbara were in the next bedroom that was across the bathroom, and Sandra had the back room overlooking the garden.

Sandra and I started at All Saints Primary School, which was Church of England (C of E). The fact we were both Catholics didn’t seem to bother Dad nor, for that matter, the school itself. But I was not sure how Mum felt at the time as she had won a scholarship to a convent school and had a strong Catholic family background. Well, I suppose she married an agnostic who had a weak Protestant background, so it couldn’t have been that much of an issue.

Anyway, my problems were just beginning. With our broad Cumbrian-Durham accents, we were not accepted easily by our fellow students in Maidstone.