Health advocates do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission

[Rev. Rye]

And insert obvious remark about how many of those “pure” Aussies were descended from British criminals here.

What do you say to an Australian on holiday in the UK?

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’Welcome back!’

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Boru

And the surprising thing is that enough Australians came back to Blighty that 1 in 30 Brits are descended from Australians. And surprisingly, only 22% of Australia's population were descended from convicts. A percentage like this is a hell of a lot lower than I expected. Not gonna lie, I would have expected something like at least half. Then again, it turns out that there was a big influx of people welcomed by the Australians in ways that would have seemed very similar to the narrative right-wingers have been pushing about Angela Merkel and the Syrian migrants, except A) this is actually accurate, B) the impetus was a desire to create a surplus population for defense purposes after WW2 [including the Japanese attack on Darwin] and the new policy was even justified (by the first Minister for Immigration) on the grounds that "We have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down on us," and C) until 1973, they were expected to be white.

Frankly, Australia's so out of the way, with an inhospitable outback that makes up the bulk of the continent, and with much of the native wildlife dangerous or at least annoying to humans, that I would not have expected there'd have been much immigration between the end of sending convicts there and refugees in neighbouring Pacific islands fleeing there. Naturally, I was wrong.