By definition all migration which involves border crossings might be said to be transnational. The truism is so obvious that it’s arguable that simply affixing the ‘transnational’ label does not tell us anything new about meanings of migration, in terms of either collective identities or individual and group experience. Social historians of migration for years have, in effect, written transnational histories, recounting, in Oscar Handlin’s classic formulation, the epic stories of the uprooted and the transplanted, their stories of trauma, alienation and vindication in two countries, and subsequently the continuing contacts and networking of family members and communities between, at least, two countries.^[1] These were quintessentially transnational experiences.

So it seems legitimate to ask how much the addition of the term ‘transnational’ to migration history brings in the way of explanatory power or theoretical illumination. ‘Migration as Transnational Interaction’, the title of one recent article on the subject, seems on the surface to signify a quite straightforward process, but it is in this sense a tautology, since all migration since the formation of nation states has involved transnational interaction.^[2] Migration historians have thus perhaps felt less urgency to articulate explicitly transnational perspectives while others have been challenging histories based on narrow frameworks determined by the unitary nation state.^[3] While it is true that the history of migration policy and demography has conventionally been written within frameworks of the nation state and state formation, whether of the sending or receiving nations, in recent times migration historians have criticised and superseded this approach. Some have pointed to ways in which the modern ubiquity of global migration challenges the myths surrounding the grand master narrative of the culturally homogeneous and assimilating nation state.^[4] Indeed, writing on migrant life experience, on family and community networks and on individual trajectories of return migration, which has dominated recent research, rarely works within traditional assumptions of the assimilating nation state. So one might suggest that migration history, at least, has only in part been ‘handmaiden to the nation-state’, one of the guiding assumptions driving the turn to transnational perspectives. Nevertheless, there remains a useful purpose in exploring the broad spectrum between different modes of migration history, from the national to transnational, and the ways these are expressed in different aspects of migration. To paraphrase Richard White, some aspects of migration history lend themselves to national historical perspectives, and some demand a global or transnational approach.^[5]

These reflections arise from a shift in my own work from the study of one form of migration history to another, specifically from traditional ‘migrations of austerity’, broadly conceived, to more recent ‘migrations of prosperity’, in both cases from the perspective of migrant experience and memory and the meanings migrants make of them. Most of the migration histories still written today are, unsurprisingly, those of austerity and dislocation, since prosperity remains a minority and recent, though increasing, stimulus for migration, most obvious in population movement from developed countries in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The differences reflect variations in traditional ‘push-pull’ models of migration, although for the later twentieth century such models are too simplistic to explain the complexities of modern mobility.

My explicit focus on post World War II British migration to countries of the ‘Old Commonwealth’ illustrates this trajectory from migrations of austerity to prosperity. Between the 1940s and 1960s Australia’s ‘Ten Pound Poms’, about one million of them (and a similar number to Canada), were driven overwhelmingly by forces of austerity.^[6] Their migrations were in the classic mould of permanent transfer from one nation state to another, in subsidised schemes driven powerfully by national interests and policies in the sending and receiving countries. The large movement (sometimes, controversially, defined as a ‘diaspora’)^[7] was part of a larger set of postwar global population movements, but it was also framed and is best understood by its unique characteristics. The austerity migrations of the first postwar British generation, while not comparable to the conditions on the European continent which produced ten million refugees or ‘Displaced Persons’, were stimulated nevertheless by common conditions of postwar dislocation, of shortage and rationing – of food, consumer goods and housing. Their migration was thus deeply traditional, having much in common with the mass migrations of their nineteenth century ancestors. But these migrants – appropriately labelled ‘invisible’ because of their historiographical neglect and relative low profile as migrants in receiving societies – were privileged by the imperial heritage which shaped their mobility. A common language, ‘British subject’ status, the frequent official, and preferential, recognition of their occupational qualifications and the general presumption of a British ‘foundational culture’ in the new country made for an experience which one would expect to be significantly different, certainly easier, from that of most other postwar migrants carrying burdens like language, deep cultural differences and profound marginalisation.

This was a perception often shared by British migrants themselves, at least before their arrival. Many of them observed that they regarded their migration as a move simply ‘from one part of Britain to another’ – a reason often invoked for not considering the United States.^[8] In the early postwar years in Australia the common currency of a British passport and British subject status made this virtually true, so that the sense of not even crossing an international boundary (as opposed, emphatically, to an unanticipated cultural boundary after arrival) was shared by most. At the outset, at least, they did not see their migration as a transnational experience so much as a translocal one, comparable in some ways to a move from Bradford to London. In these ways postwar British migrants continued to be beneficiaries of the ‘colonial dividend’, and this postcolonial advantage is what most distinguished them from their non-English speaking counterparts.

The British-Australian understanding of a virtually borderless movement within a postcolonial ‘British World’ chimed well with official views of postwar Australian and British migration policy and its ethnic goals. Arthur Calwell’s well known preference for the ‘British and Nordic races as first priority’ underlined a general consensus about the need to maintain Australia’s fundamental British character. The Menzies Liberals continued the policy seamlessly, echoed in Immigration Minister Harold Holt’s declaration that ‘this is a British community, and we want to keep it a British community, living under British standards and by the methods and ideals of British Parliamentary democracy’.^[9] Government advertising effectively propagated these policies and assumptions. A 1959 Australia House publication assured its readers that the half million Britons who had emigrated since the war had found a ‘British Way of Life’ among Australians ‘who are predominantly of British Isles stock’. In British Australia migrants could expect to join a familiar culture with the added advantage of superior living standards, enhanced opportunities for home ownership, good education and a sunny outdoor life far removed from Britain’s oppressive climate.^[10] In their expectations, at least, migrants demonstrated that they were reassured by propaganda which virtually declared that their migration would be borderless. Recalling their decision to leave in 1959, for example, English migrants Maureen and John Butts agreed that they could not have contemplated moving to a ‘foreign country’ like the United States, but their deeply held patriotism was unchallenged by a move to Australia. John recalled that ‘we didn’t think about it as a foreign country either … There was an association with English people that you were going to that you … felt comfortable with. Yes, yes.’^[11]

As is usual in migrant experience, however, the living out of migrant lives in the new country departed from the anticipation. Most of the British migrants of the 1950s and 1960s moved in nuclear family groups and left close kin behind with limited opportunities for revived contacts, and it is here that the notion of the ‘transnational family’ – sustained kinship communication across borders to the point of dependence and emotional expectation – becomes useful for understanding how the dominant stories of these ‘invisible migrants’ echoed those of migrants from other backgrounds. Their move to Australia, arguably to a greater degree than for their Canadian counterparts, involved a sharp and seemingly final break with family members left behind. This was often recalled in precise descriptions of a rich network of extended family who gathered together on the train platform or the ship to bid that vividly remembered final farewell. A Welsh woman, Maureen Carter, recalls:

One response to this loss of kin networks was to set about and valorise the creation of a new family network in Australia, palpably evident in the photograph displays of grandchildren and other new family at home at the time of interviews. The Australian family reunion on the twentieth or thirtieth anniversary of arrival could be a vivid ritual marker of that celebration of the new family. Another response, especially in later years, three or four decades after migration, was to revive contact with lost kin and neighbourhoods back ‘home’, which can involve the virtual creation of a transnational identity in later life, through frequent return visits and reverse visits, the cultivation of extensive and regular correspondence and, more recently, email exchanges. That is, what was structurally a simple matter of individualist relocation, and a sharp break with family, could give rise to a longer-term cultivation of transnational family links. But over time we can discern different degrees of transnational interaction.

Life history sources like autobiographical writings and oral testimony help to convey the nature and effects of this transnational interaction. Pat Drohan’s story illustrates the process.^[13] Pat was single and twenty-four when she emigrated from Wolverhampton in 1958, with prearranged secretarial work in Ballarat, Victoria. She set out as a classic ‘sojourner’, intent on an adventurous two-year working holiday, but left behind a large, close-knit and convivial family, none of whom ever emigrated. She was one of those thousands of young single people, fairly comfortably employed in Britain, who in a sense ‘piggy backed’ on a subsidised migration scheme aimed primarily at young fertile families. Her plans shifted dramatically when, before the end of her two years, she met and married an Australian husband and settled in Ballarat. At the time it did not matter to Pat that marriage to an Australian set her on an unanticipated course to permanent Australian residence. But it did mark the beginning of her long struggle to maintain family links, intensified for her by the fact that she left behind a close twin sister. In the early years much of her life in Australia was defined by being apart from her family, especially during critical moments like childbirth. Lacking physical contact, over the years she relied on the telephone for the contact which eluded her. Her heartfelt words on the subject betray the emotional depth and family bond which survived the long years apart.

From 1973 (after 15 years) Pat was able to begin making return visits, mostly with her husband, to the family in Wolverhampton. These visits became a stimulus for an increasing sense of ambivalence in her attitude to her emigration, encompassing the idea that she has become closer to the family than before leaving. She was struck by the way her family confirmed her development of independence in Australia, especially in relation to her twin sister, with whom her earlier identity had been submerged. ‘When I went back, after 15 years, the family said: “My word, you’ve changed!” … They said I’d, I’d become so much more assertive and outspoken … And I said: “Well you know”, I said: “When you go out somewhere that’s so far away from home, and you’re on your own, you haven’t got anybody to, to stand up and speak for you”.’

In effect Pat re-fashioned her English identity in her later years through being away from family, through contact and return visits. Reflecting about the interview, in which she began to explore some of these feelings in deeper ways than before, she admitted ‘I’m more English now than I was when I left!’ As the years have passed and her family have aged, the realisation of distance and frequent farewells has brought a new poignancy to her mobility.

While there is evidence here of a gradual generational weakening of transnational family links over time, even as the emotional burden they bear strengthens, there is also stark evidence of the fashioning, in later life, of a transnational identity deeply attached to family and hyper-conscious of loss – in essence a migrant identity – which is a characteristic feature of that first generation of postwar British migrants; it was shared, to a degree, by postwar migrants from other backgrounds like the Italians from San Fior in Perth, written about by Loretta Baldassar, who juggle their loyalty to family and place through return visits and serial relocation.^[14]

Pat Drohan began her travels as an intentional sojourner, and many like her managed to continue their travels without being interrupted – or hijacked! – by marriage. They provide a rather different illustration of the evolving nature of ‘transnational interaction’ for British migrants, and underline ways in which it was informed by its postcolonial shadow. These itinerants of the 1950s bear some resemblance to the sojourning mentality of today’s highly mobile backpackers; they are their precursors in a sense, and a prophetically significant by-product of the assisted passage scheme – the ultimate transnationals. Eunice Gardner chronicled her adventures in an aptly titled volume, The World at Our Feet: The Story of Two Women Who Adventured Halfway Across the Globe, published in 1957.^[15] Leaving Kent alone on the ten-pound passage in the early 1950s, Eunice, a hairdresser, soon met her English companion, Diana Williams. The pair worked in Sydney, hitch hiked around Australia, complete with Union Jacks on their rucksacks, and encountered a succession of like-minded single British itinerants on the move. Eunice’s illustrated ‘memories of Australia’, including a ‘Central Australian bush native’ and ‘making a boomerang from a solid log’, hinted at their comfortable though stereotypical engagement with local populations.^[16] Otherness thus served the time-worn purpose of picture postcard memory. Their adventures continued on the overland journey home through India, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Europe, the increasingly popular itinerary of budget-conscious young travellers. In Afghanistan, with the advantage of British embassy contact, the hairdresser from Maidstone danced with the King’s nephew at an ‘International Club’ party, and narrowly evaded having to be escorted by him the next day while wearing a bhurkha.^[17] These sojourners palpably claimed the benefits of Empire and a relatively politically docile Third World rendered their global travel relatively safe; like their nineteenth century world traveller forebears they engaged easily, although from less of a position of clear authority and superiority, with people of other races. The ‘world at our feet’ was symbolically illustrated for them by their wave on the cover – in actuality a wave at a Malayan pearl cutter in Broome, WA. Eunice had never contemplated permanent migration; her travels were motivated by what she described as ‘the wander bug’, a notion which set her apart from her friends at home, but it took an assisted migration scheme for her, and Diana, to realise their mobility.

We can see here how, over time, the postwar scheme’s embodiment of a migration of austerity progressively took on features of the more modern version of the West’s postcolonial migration of prosperity; this was underlined by the large return rate of British migrants generally – ranging over time from 20 per cent to 30 per cent.^[18] By the 1980s, with the cessation of subsidised passages and new entrance rules, British migrants to Australia were losing their traditional privilege of access, but they also enjoyed easier mobility and were more easily open to ‘serial migration’ between countries of the ‘Old Commonwealth’, as well as return migration.^[19] Commentators by the mid 1960s were convinced that Western migration was beginning to reveal new characteristics. Most of these are obvious to us now. The half-century after the war coincided with the dawning and consolidation of the jet age, when what had been until recently a momentous and not easily reversible journey across the world, for most became an investment in recreational globe-trotting. The process was reinforced by corporate employment practices which encouraged staff mobility. British migrants, with transnational links and associations with the ‘Old Commonwealth’ still fresh, were among the first to benefit from this; besides contemplating a return to Britain after an unsettling spell in the new country, they often remained open to re-migration back to their original destination, even from far distant Australia (a more difficult proposition than the so-called ‘$1000 cure’ back from Canada). Anthony Richmond, the Canadian migration sociologist, described these migrants in 1967 as ‘transilients’, reflecting the nature of modern urban industrial societies ‘whose populations are increasingly mobile, both geographically and socially’. Unlike earlier migrations their movements implied no inadequacy on the part of either country since there was an international market for their skills. These modern migrants ‘enjoy travel for its own sake, they find little difficulty making friends wherever they go, and they lack strong family or community ties that might compel them to become sedentary’.^[20] The British, of course, were not alone in enjoying the benefits of the new mobility, but in their easy access to the old ‘British world’ they continued to enjoy the benefits of the colonial dividend. And as the fiction of ‘moving from one part of Britain to another’ became harder to sustain, these serial migrants became more willing to include the United States among their migrant destinations.

According to this view then, the 1960s, the crucial ‘transnational moment’ in migration, witnessed some fundamental transformations in patterns of Western migration in the direction of a ‘mobility of modernity’. This was not just an increased predilection towards the youthful and carefree backpacking of sojourners like Eunice and Diana. For the British it brought more complex patterns of ‘transnational family’ contact, which in one way or another has always been a product of migration. The sheer scale of physical family movement, once cheaper air travel began to free up mobility, could involve a staggeringly complex set of international family links. One such revealing case is Doug Benson, who first went to Australia at nineteen with his parents and five siblings in 1961. As a young man enjoying the greater freedoms of the 1960s he soon left his family, travelled Australia and the world, and returned to South Australia with a Scottish girl friend who he married in 1967. Homesick for Britain, they returned in 1969 to Somerset where they settled and raised a family, often playing host to other visiting family members, the British headquarters of the mobile Bensons. Doug’s description of wider family movements since captures the dizzying moves of his wider family, more reminiscent, perhaps, of migrant cultures like those from the Mediterranean more known for chain migration practices in extended families.

It is undoubtedly true that the kind of shifts in the 1960s pointed to by commentators like Richmond signified some deep transformations in migration in the Western world, best understood as a move from migrations of austerity to migrations of prosperity. By the 1980s these patterns had become ingrained, and there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate the depth and extent of the way that ‘transnational moment’ of the 1960s marked a fundamental divide in migration practices. It is worth remembering, though, that historians are concerned not only with ‘fundamental divides’ but also with continuities and the ways that major shifts are prefigured in earlier experience. We know, for example, that nineteenth century assisted migration to Australia was accompanied by a substantial element of return and itinerant migration among colonial migrants, not least among single women domestic servants.^[22] But it was the mid twentieth century before these minority practices became a prominent trend. In this sense the first generation of postwar British migrants were, from the late 1940s, precursors of the mobility of modernity, embodying what became more characteristic of Western migration from the later 1960s.

The life history of Jackie Smith, a woman who now lives in Toronto, and whose migration experience spans the two generations, points the way.^[23] On the surface she is a perfect illustration of Richmond’s ‘transilient’, freely traversing continents. In 1959, at the age of thirteen, she and her parents left a rich South London network of working-class neighbours and extended family for Adelaide. She subsequently trained as a nurse, travelled extensively through Europe, back to Australia, then to Africa, married a Canadian (briefly) and eventually settled in Canada, with a young son, where she went to University, became a successful journalist and settled with a Jewish American. A precursor of the late twentieth century ‘serial migrant’ in every respect, her geographical mobility was matched by her occupational mobility. Yet the modern form of Jackie’s life story belies the apparent modernity of her ease of movement and adaptability. The eve of her family’s London departure was clouded by a bitter quarrel between her mother and her sisters over an inheritance, so the ritual emotional farewells at the station or ship were replaced by a gloomy and subdued nuclear family departure. For Jackie this family estrangement was compounded by the total loss of all connection with wider family, community and friends, which she had enjoyed in London. Her sense of that permanent loss was crystallised for her by the dramatic moment of departure:

The fracture in family relations was compounded in Australia by the sensory shock of their new environment. Jackie likened the new outer suburb of Elizabeth, physically and figuratively, to a desert: ‘There was nothing there. It was dust storms, right? The hellish heat, dust storms, this house with cracks, not a lot of money.’ The memories of her early years are dominated by a sense of recollected alienation which recurs in migrant stories of their ‘shock of the new’. At school her Englishness became a liability, as she and her brother tried to evade the discrimination that newly arrived ‘poms’ experienced alongside non-English speakers.

Jackie remembered her early years in Australia as desperately unhappy ones, as her memories of close-knit family intimacy in London yielded to recollections of a dysfunctional and isolated nuclear family in Adelaide and idealisation of the lost network of close relations in London. It is reflected in the extent to which the past continued to govern her attitude to festivities:

Although Jackie eventually overcame her culture shock in Australia and developed a deep affection for the country, as well as pride in an Australian rather than a Canadian identity – she spoke, in familiar Australian inflection, of her attachment to ‘the land’ – the emotional scars of those early years of alienation were enduring. They drove her first into therapy, then into an urge to reconnect with English survivors of her extended family, although she was disappointed both with the old family as well as the old country: ‘I would never want to live in England, and I am so grateful that my parents emigrated.’ The frequent disillusion with the idealised homeland decades after leaving is often accompanied by disappointment with close family connections in this way. Significantly, it coexists with a seemingly contradictory conviction that migration is unnatural and emotionally traumatic, in conflict with a ‘sense of belonging’ to family networks:

From reluctant and traumatised child migrant, to rootless and itinerant young single, to sophisticated and cosmopolitan serial migrant traversing the ‘old Empire’, but with a lifelong yearning for enduring ‘belonging’ to deep family networks, Jackie Smith’s life story embodies both traditional and modern modes of migration. For the British the ease of movement which has enabled them to be in the forefront of modern modes of mobility, like Jackie’s, has been facilitated by the continuing ‘colonial dividend’ of prior settlement. But such apparent privileges do not necessarily make for any less painful personal experiences of migration, with ongoing effects on subjective constructions of identity. The stories glimpsed here hint at the multiple ways in which single families can exhibit different aspects of migration simultaneously – permanent one-way migration, serial migration and return migration, all of them carrying their own burdens of personal pain and alienation alongside celebration. The same complexity and contradiction applies to time span; just as we can find precursors of the ‘mobility of modernity’ among British migrants of the 1950s, like Eunice Gardner, many of their 1980s successors have more in common with traditional permanent settler migrants of the 1950s, or for that matter the 1850s. The ‘transnational moment’, in this sense, has been a much more drawn out process than imagined by sociologists in the 1960s.