Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women Across Two Countries (review)

If oral history at its heart still depends on the relationship between interviewer and interviewee (Donald Ritchie, “What in the World? A Status Report on Oral History,” Words and Silences 6, 1 [2011]: 4), then Alistair Thomson’s latest book is itself a story of mutual trust. Not only does Moving Stories arguably delve more deeply than any prior work into memory, experience, and meaning for Britons who came to Australia as part of a postwar strategy to fill the nation with “white” migrants; it is also founded on a distinctive biographical collaboration between an historian and four ordinary women. Thomson repeatedly refers to the work as “our book.” In this respect, Moving Stories is underwritten by the significance of interdependency in oral-historical scholarship and the ways human relations can inspire new and more self-reflexive modes of historical representation.

The book follows on James Hammerton and Thomson’s definitive history of British citizens who immigrated to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s under an assisted passage scheme that cost ten pounds—people known colloquially as Australia’s Ten Pound Poms (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2005)—which added nuance and weight to James Jupp’s eminent history of The English in Australia (Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Moving Stories takes us further into the experiences of these migrants, honing in on the life stories of just four women born between 1928 and 1938 who came to Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. These are the stories of Dorothy Wright (nee Bailey), Joan Pickett, Phyllis Cave (nee Tompsett), and Gwen Good (nee Edwards), the only one who stayed permanently in Australia. Early chapters of the book are biographical, with each woman offering markedly different insights into the migratory experience. For Good, migration “cemented” her marriage while she created a family home and enjoyed success as a radio commentator (41). Wright discovered “an escape” from the expectations of English life, negotiating an inner conflict between domestic role models and personal interests as a mother, then career woman (59). Cave gained “a clean sheet” on life and greater confidence in her abilities, yet unlike Good and Wright she had to juggle a full-time job with housework and childcare (164). Meantime the ten-pound assisted-passage scheme enabled Pickett (and “a generation of young Britons”) to embark on an open-ended working holiday to the opposite side of the earth (100).

Of course, Thomson views Moving Stories as not only about migration. He wrote elsewhere of “the physical passage of migration from one place to another as only one event within a migratory experience which spans old and new worlds and which continues throughout the life of the migrant and into subsequent generations” (“Moving Stories: Oral History and Migration Studies,” Oral History 27, 1 [1999]: 24). Hence, the book hinges upon remarkable experiences of departure, separation, and rebirth—for example, “For each woman the outdoor lifestyle of their adopted country both enabled and symbolized a personal transformation” (80)—but it also broadens to explore wider social influences in the mid-twentieth century. In rich detail it traces the everyday, if too often overlooked, gendered aspects of the experience of Australian life, elevating its protagonists’ reflections on the tensions between family responsibility, career, or personal fulfilment to deepen our understanding of twentieth-century women’s history. These women may be “neither typical nor exceptional” yet their stories are valued for the ways they “complicate key themes in women’s lives” in the era just prior to the 1970s wave of feminism (14).

Arguably the book’s strength lies in its consideration of the complexity of telling life stories. Thomson’s sources include letters, photographs, diaries, audiotapes, and the women’s spoken and written testimonies, used deftly to craft their life narratives. It is clear that the book’s aim is to appeal not only to historians and history-lovers but also the British migrants themselves; indeed...