Migration Fever

Aboard the P. & O.'s newest luxury liner Canberra, when she sailed from Southampton one afternoon last week, were 1,700 Britons who had paid only $28 each for the 21-day, 12,000-mile voyage to Australia. If the tourist-class passengers were getting a bargain, they represented an even greater boon for population-hungry Australia, which still likes to boast that it is "more purely British than Britain" and has spent $128 million since 1945 to lure close to a million emigrants from the mother country.

Historically, as "assisted" emigrants, the Canberra's passengers were only following in the wake of the first shipload of British convicts who sailed somewhat less stylishly into Sydney Cove in January 1788. What has astonished officials in Whitehall and Sydney is that Britons are leaving their affluent isle for Australia in greater numbers today than at any time since 1949, when their country was at the grey nadir of postwar austerity. In the first four months of 1963, London's Australia House has received more applications for exile-made-easy than it got in all of 1962. Altogether, counting emigrants who pay their way, a record 55,000 "Pommies," as Britons are called Down Under, are expected to join the ranks of New Australians by the end of the fiscal year.

Australia woos "new blokes" through lavish advertising campaigns and a big network of immigration officers throughout Britain. But this does not explain the British migration fever. Canada, which actively solicits only professional workers such as nurses and scientists and does not subsidize their passage, expects the 1963 influx from Britain to be double or triple last year's 16,055 total. New Zealand immigration officials say that they too have had a "fantastic" surge of applications. "We're just trying to hold them off," says one. "We just don't have all that much room." One-third more Britons have also applied for permanent visas to the U.S., though in the past they have filled only 35% of their annual immigration quota.

Over the years, nine of every ten British emigrants have said they wanted to give their children a better chance in life.

These days, they blame Britain's cruel winter of 1962-63, its housing shortage (which is little better in Australia) and the recent economic slump (though few who leave are unemployed). But the biggest single reason for the exodus seems simply to be that the young and the talented feel restive and repressed in today's diminished Britain. For them, as for their ancestors who set out to conquer an empire, opportunity is a ship that leaves Southampton.

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