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Ten Pound Pom

This travel memoir concerns a trip Griffiths took back to Australia with his brother in 2007; they had lived there for 3 years as children, as part of the assisted passage scheme. Given the autobiographical nature of the work, research was centred on Griffiths’s mother’s diaries from the 1970s, and from interviews with her and his father. Griffiths also collected information on the social and political changes that Australia has undergone since the 1970s, and how the Ten Pound Pom scheme contributed to Australian history, so to that end such books as Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore were indispensable, as were conversations with expatriates in the country. Additionally, while the book itself does not in any great depth explore Aboriginal issues, these had to be addressed; again, Griffiths interviewed native Australians in the country and read Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man and many newspaper and magazine articles associated with the events she examines. Griffiths also researched modern Australian literature – e.g. the works of Tim Winton, Richard Flanagan, Luke Davies, and Andrew McGahan. The story of Ned Kelly, and the vast differences in the depictions of him between the 1970s and now, can be read as an encapsulation of the modern evolution of Australia – then he was a cause for national shame, now he is seen as a folk hero – so Griffiths read Peter Carey, and Kelly’s The Jerilderie Letter, and other germane works. Following his usual practice in constructing a sense of place in his fiction and travel writings, Griffiths also amassed and studied hundreds of pamphlets, guidebooks, and printouts from tourist websites.