The first shiploads of post-war British immigrants began arriving late in 1946. They were mainly ex-servicemen and women or building tradesmen and their families.

There was full employment in Britain but rationing persisted in some items until 1952 and was imposed on bread, which had never been rationed during the war. Those from Scotland, Wales and the northern English depressed areas feared a return to pre-war unemployment, and the Labour Party had won its landslide victory in June 1945 by appealing to that fear and promising that unemployment would not return. A similar promise of ‘homes fit for heroes’, made by Prime Minister David Lloyd George after the First World War, had proved illusory. But it was mainly post-war exhaustion which drove the earliest arrivals. The Orion arrived in Sydney in July 1947 from Tilbury with 173 assisted migrants, including dentists, nurses, architects, farm workers, electricians and building tradesmen. A painter and decorator claimed that ‘red tape and regulations are strangling British ability and will to work. It is heartbreaking to try to bring up a family in England now … English people are pessimistic about conditions for the next five years’.