Peter Adkins
Ship name / Flight number TBC
Arrival date: 1972
I was born in in Winchester 1955, to an unmarried mother, never knowing my biological father, who left mum the day I was born. I grew up in Watford, Windsor and Wokingham, in a family with two sisters and a stepdad. My Stepfather was very scarred from growing up in a Dutch orphanage and then a German prison camp during the war, and when he and mum got together, he was still carrying many emotional scars, which were then inflicted upon us.
My confidence and behaviour were deeply affected, and I was restless and discontent, getting into some minor trouble with the police as a teenager.
I left school at the end of 5th form (year 10) and, not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life, began an apprenticeship as a plumber, but I was finding it boring and unstimulating.
One evening in 1971 some representatives came to the Youth Centre in Wokingham from the British Boys Movement (formerly called the Big Brother Movement) to talk about Australia welcoming young men to fill all the jobs available, and migration cost only £20!
A few of my mates got excited and said they would go.
I took a brochure home and immediately mum encouraged me to apply. She had wanted to emigrate as a young woman, but her mother would not sign her application. Thinking my mates would be going with me, I filled in the forms and sent them off. I had an interview and medical in Australia house in London – we could choose if we wanted to move to the country or to Sydney. BBM would get you a job and accommodation. So, in April 1972 a letter came to say I had been accepted, and I was given my date to fly out to Sydney on June 19th, 1972.
So, a few weeks after my 17th birthday, with £30 in my pocket, mum, dad and my sisters said goodbye at Heathrow where myself and the other young men emigrating that week were met by the British Boys Movement representative.
(Brian from Wokingham also came out with me, but he returned to the UK after 2 years).
Story from the Wokingham times 1972 (I’m on the right)
We excitedly and nervously boarded a jumbo jet bound for Sydney, Australia.
In those days smoking was permitted on planes and so, loaded with our duty-free cigarettes we smoked and drank the free booze and played cards as we flew around the world. Initially I was very concerned when I saw the plane wings wobbling - I had thought they were rigid! Well, it was my first flight ever!
One of my fellow migrants was a guy called Peter (we knew him as Roy), 21-year-old house painter from the Inch district in Edinburgh– he was going to Oz to join a couple of his mates who had already emigrated and they had told him it was great, that you could earn big money – the chicks were gorgeous, and the weather was fantastic. Roy was a real character, and we were to become housemates and friends for years. The Kangaroo route in those days made 5 stops to get to Sydney; Frankfurt, Beirut, Teheran, Bangkok, Singapore and lastly Darwin where we got off the plane briefly, near midnight in 30-degree heat and humidity, headed for the terminal and ordered a small beer-so cold we couldn’t drink it -before running back to the plane.
Arriving in Sydney, Australia was a surreal experience. We were all met by an ex-military man who left me the impression we were a bit of an inconvenience to him.
We got to the large, detached house in Burwood which had enough beds for about 20 people. Things that hit me were the large shop awnings, palm trees, the very different makes of cars and the lovely blue sky and warmth in the daytime even though it was mid-winter. We were given a briefing at the BBM office and told that there were plenty of jobs and they would try and match us with what we had already been doing in the UK, and we could stay at the hostel until we secured work.
BBM had contacts with several boarding houses they sent us to once we got a job.
It was quite cool at night and when I asked for another blanket the unsympathetic “Sergeant Major” told us we needed to toughen up if we were going to make it in Australia
One by one the other guys I’d flown with got jobs and left the hostel and finally I got a labouring job working for a ventilation firm installing air conditioning ducts in large city office blocks under construction.
I was sent to a large old boarding house in Lewisham – just a 15 min train trip from the city. I was delighted to find, beside Greeks, Croatians and a few other poms, my new Scottish friend Roy. There were two beds to a room, and breakfast and dinner were provided. The food was OK. We had sausages a lot which tasted much more spicy than English ones. I was earning about $60 a week and full board was $15 which left much more money to enjoy than I ever had back in the UK.
One sunny winter day I remember lying on the beach at Coogee wondering why I was the only one enjoying the 16-degree sunshine – English beaches would have been packed!
It only took a year or two to acclimatize and find winters as cold as the Aussies did.
We were probably a bit rowdy for the boarding house with our drinking and carrying on and after a few months 4 of us poms decided we would branch out and share a house to at Forest Lodge near Glebe.
I kept in touch with mum and enjoyed her long eloquent letters as I hope she did mine, telling her some of my new life and experiences down under.
I had changed jobs twice by then, first working on the NSW railways, as a junior station assistant at Roseville and then working for a lift construction company, earning much more money. However my restlessness and searching for meaning, that had led me to Australia, wasn’t left behind in the UK, and so sadly at that time and for a few years I sought to escape by indulging in a very hedonistic and at times self-destructive lifestyle.
But I did take up surfing. It was a gift and a healthy way to temporarily fulfil my sense of searching and it provided many hours of freedom from life’s worries. For someone still uncomfortable in many social and personal situations, surfing gave me many, many hours of peace, enjoyment and recreation in the years ahead.
My pale, pommie late pubescent body was now tanned, my shoulders filled out and hair had gone blond, and my teenage acne had all but disappeared.
Yet despite living in a new country far better than the UK, I couldn’t shake the nagging, bigger questions of life: What is life all about and why are we all here?
I then got a job working for Ansett Airlines as a ground crew worker. Perks included 90% off domestic air travel and 75% off international. We would clean out domestic and international planes when they arrived. But cleaning galley’s, toilets and seat pockets and replacing pillowcases and head rests on 350 jumbo jet seats became very tedious, very quickly, and I found the job rather mind-numbing. When no planes were in, we were sent to hangers to sweep up the floors for hours and as I watched planes take off and land, I longed to be on one of them, to expand my horizons which I felt were closing in again.
My annual holidays were due so with my staff discount I booked a return flight to the UK for $250 and decided not to tell mum I was coming. When this bronzed, fair haired muscly young man with a suitcase arrived on her doorstep, mum said she wasn’t interested in buying anything, until she finally realised it was her son, followed by big hugs and tears.
However, after a few weeks reuniting with family and old friends, whose lives seemed so unchanged and confined in the UK, I was looking forward to my return to Australia which was feeling more and more like where I belonged.
On my return I began a new job driving a butcher’s van for Tancred meats at Pyrmont and later moved to Perth with a girlfriend and worked over there for the State Energy Commission fixing and laying gas pipes. I also played football for Graylands Hostel team. My girlfriend and I married rather too hastily. Then we travelled to the UK for a year, but I missed Australia terribly, and so we returned to live at Fairlight near Manly, but our relationship was deteriorating rapidly.
During the next year several life-altering things occurred: Our marriage broke up and my nagging questions about life’s bigger purpose became even more urgent.
I began reading self-help books like “The power of positive thinking” which led me to begin a deeper spiritual search.
After a difficult period of unemployment, I passed my taxi license test and got a job driving taxis for ABC cabs in Sydney, and began attending a local church, St Matthews Manly, sitting down the back and leaving before anyone tried to talk to me.
For the first time in my life, I began reading the world’s best-selling book- The Bible- with an open mind. I also prayed a very heartfelt prayer: “God if you are real, please reveal yourself to me”
To cut a very long story short, one night a few months later, in my bedsit at North Manly I read a verse of scripture which opened my eyes to the very personal and wonderful love of God which he has shown in the cross of Jesus. At that moment, many years of regret and shame for things I had done, the loneliness I had often experienced, the trauma from earlier home life and later drug abuse were washed away with many tears which turned to joy.
A whole new life opened for me. I knew I was fully known yet forgiven and loved unconditionally by the creator of the universe.
God felt so wonderfully real, so close, and I felt like I had found the last piece of a jigsaw of my life that has been missing and my big questions about life’s purpose were finally answered.
My nightly job driving cabs became at times like a counselling job as I lovingly listened to peoples hopes and struggles, dreams and difficulties and sought to share my new- found hope and faith with them. I could tell many stories from my cab driving days of the characters I met and situations I encountered.
I also became increasingly involved in the life of the church at Manly and eventually began a live-in job working as the Church Verger (caretaker), as well as doing some youth work and Scripture teaching in the local primary school.
At St Matthews I met Gwen who was running the church’s after-school care group.
We fell in love, and we were married in January 1985. A year later we entered two years of training at the Church Army College at Belrose. Church Army was an Anglican Evangelistic organisation which had begun in the UK in the 1880’s and as well as its many other Welfare and Evangelistic ministries in the UK, was involved in arranging and supporting young migrants to Australia in the 1920’s. Church Army Australia began in 1932 when a team of Church Amry officers from the UK were invited by Australian Bishops to begin a work here.
There is a link on Church Army Australia’s website to a video of my story here: https://churcharmy.com.au/videos
Our first son Tim was born in 1987 while we were at college, and having completed my training, I was commissioned as a lay Church Army Captain at St Matthews Manly and we moved to Bundaberg to begin my first post as a youth and family worker. Mum was able to fulfil her dream and finally get to visit Australia for the first time where she drove with me from Sydney to Bundaberg and enjoyed getting to know her 1st Aussie grandson. Our second son Joshua was also born at Bundaberg in 1989. We would take our 2 young sons to watch the spectacular sight of the sugar cane being burned off at harvest time and we enjoyed the climate of the sub-tropics and the warm ocean at Bargara. My role consisted of scripture classes at primary and high school and youth work at the church. After 3 years “cutting our teeth” there, we returned to Sydney to St Pauls Chatswood, where I worked as Associate Minister, and our daughter Emily was born in 1992. I also took my oaths and became an Australian citizen around that time.
After 8 years at Chatswood, I was led to apply to study a master’s degree In evangelism at Cliff Methodist College in the Peak District. So, ready for fun and adventure, we sent off 12 tea chests and hopped on a plane back to the Uk for 3 years from 1999-2002. Gwen and I shared a position at St Margarets parish in Edgware, London, while I studied my degree part time. Gwen and the children enjoyed experiencing the country of my birth and its long history while also getting to know their English grandparents, aunties and cousins.
After completing my study, we were offered positions to extend our stay, but we decided to return to Australia, especially because Gwen’s Mum was struggling with sudden hearing loss.
On our return to Oz, I took a position in North and West Tasmania, building and supporting ministry teams in four rural Anglican parishes in the towns of Sheffield, Penguin, Smithton and the remote West Coast. I was ordained in Tasmania as an Anglican Priest in 2003. We also planned and built our first home at Turners beach. After 3 years of challenging ministry, and much travel, we were then invited in 2006 to come and run the new Church Army Global Gap Year program for young people at “Kihilla,” an historic house at Lawson in the Blue mountains, NSW. We also led a new community church plant, which included clients from the onsite Church Army drug and alcohol recovery program. It was a crazy mix of young people just out of home and school, recovering addicts, and beautiful mature servant hearted Christians. In addition, we had our teenage niece living with us, a young aboriginal girl from Lightening Ridge. During that time our son Joshua, one of the gap year participants, when on placement in Yellowknife, Canada had a life-threatening heart episode from which he was mercifully spared and now, like me, lives with a pacemaker. After living on site with students and men in recovery for a couple of years, unsurprisingly we decided to move off site, so we sold our Tasmanian house and bought one down the road in Lawson.
When our roles with Church Army came to an end in 2013, I then served with the Bush Church Aid society as the regional officer for NSW/ACT. My job was to speak at a different church every week to fund raise and promote the work of the society, which supported the ministry of men and women serving in churches which could not afford full time minister, in isolated towns in remote and regional Australia. I also pastorally cared for field staff across my region. This meant an annual road trip all around NSW’s vast distances, where I met many wonderful people doing much needed pastoral and outreach work in small outback towns and enjoyed seeing swathes of NSW’s diverse and at times harsh beauty.
The peripatetic nature of the job became very tiring however, so in 2017 at 62 I commenced my final full-time position as Rector to the parish of Buladelah/ Tea Gardens on the NSW mid north coast. I was very blessed to serve such a wonderfully loving group of people in a location that has become my favourite place in Australia. We still holiday there regularly.
In Jan 2022 I retired from full time ministry and we returned to our home in the Blue Mountains, closer to our 3 children and our two beautiful grandkids.
Since “retirement” I have done short term Locums at Coober Pedy (a very interesting place worth visiting) and to the lovely town of Deloraine in Tasmania, and I now serve in our local church as an occasional volunteer preacher and musician. I am also currently the secretary of the Central Mountains men’s shed. Regularly babysitting our lively grandkids keeps us on our toes!
As I look back and reflect upon my life and the profound influence that emigrating to Australia had on me, I am thankful on two levels:
If I had not had the opportunity at 17 to leave my difficult family life and juvenile delinquency, who knows where I might have ended up.
So, I am very thankful to the BBM for giving me the opportunity to come and make a new start and to live in and raise a family in the best country in the world.
My Aussie family, Christmas 2024
In addition I believe there is a bigger picture, which is contained in two scriptures that resonate strongly with my migration experience (and I paraphrase the first) “God made all nations, and people across the earth and determined exactly where they live, so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.” (Acts 17)
So I now firmly believe coming to Australia was part of God’s sovereign plan for my life.
While my emigration was a chance for a new start, it was also in some sense an attempt to flee from my past: from not knowing my biological father to whom I was simply an inconvenience -from a difficult stepfather -from not knowing myself - and from not knowing what life was ultimately about. However in an ancient Hebrew song the songwriter, King David asks God two questions, and then discovers answers that are very relevant to anyone who like me, went across the seas searching for something, only to eventually be found by the One who is not far from any of us: Where can I flee from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the furthest side of the sea, (and you can’t get much further than Australia!) even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast… For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb… I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. (Psalm 139)
Thanks for reading my story.
If you would like to read a fuller autobiography of my life “The Downs and Ups of a £10 Pom” Then please email me at peteradkins58@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to send you a copy.