Ten-pound poms: the ‘invisible migrants’ who made Australia their home

Sylvia Brady stepped off the boat from the UK in Port Melbourne with her husband, Bill Jones, on 4 March 1960. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian

Sylvia Brady does not romanticise the state of her life as a newlywed in northern England in 1959.

“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.’”