Tony Robinson Explores Australia

Welcome to Australia (1x5)

Air date: May 31, 2011

Tony does an entrance examination to see if he’d qualify as an acceptable migrant to Australia. Trouble is the 1930s dictation test is given in Gaelic! From its earliest days, Australia needed free migrants to grow and prosper, And it needed women. Schemes were devised to achieve both objectives, with bounties offered for bringing boatloads of human cargo from the UK and Ireland. But the people merchants got greedy, and the human toll was terrible. The gold rush brought people from a diversity of countries, and that led to conflict. There was a toll placed on the importation of people from China, so ship captains would dump them on the coast hundreds of kilometers from port. The Chinese would walk to the gold fields from there. Through all of this Australia started to take shape as a nation. Tony traces immigration and multi-culturalism from the early 1800s, through the White Australia Policy, to the first arrival of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s. He decides that the best way of exploring a country’s diversity is to talk to taxi drivers. Dozens of them.