The group has taken its complaint to the Australian Advertising Standards Board. English-born Australians and British immigrants were being unfairly singled out for abuse, said Thomason, a gas fitter who moved to Australia from Birmingham more than 35 years ago. The issue has sparked a lively online debate in blogs and chatrooms, with many Australians and English saying they regard Pom as a term of endearment and criticising the group's complaint as an overreaction.
Chanted by Australian crowds at cricket and rugby matches, Pom and its variants - Pommy git and whingeing Pom - encapsulate the year-old love-hate relationship between Britain and its former colony.
Anglo-Australian sport is invariably played with unusual and sometimes disturbing fervour. Defeat cuts extraordinarily deep. It really matters, even though Australia is a nation with its own identity and problems, federated and independent since But in sport, Australia has a tendency to revert to a kind of spiritual adolescence while England, in turn, drops into comfortable senility.
Sport allows both nations to become their own caricatures. The First World War is generally seen as the first time that Australia was involved in world affairs as an autonomous nation. The popular narrative of its involvement centres on Gallipoli: Anzac Day, observed on 25 April each year, commemorates the invasion by the Allies of that Turkish peninsula in What happened is less significant than what people believe happened. According to New Zealand government figures, 9, Australians died at Gallipoli, along with 3, New Zealanders, 10, Frenchmen and 21, from Britain and Ireland.
But the notion of the English upper classes and their indifference to Australian suffering and death became an archetype of national life, and so inevitably it fed the sporting rivalry.
The need for Australia to measure itself against the mother country — the one that established the first penal colony in Australia in — is less urgent than it used to be in most walks of life. The Australian players pride themselves on their robustness, never confined by public school notions of how cricket should be played.
Gentlemanliness is out of place here. So deal with it. But then, on the tour of , England used a tactic of fast bowling aimed at the body, and Australia complained bitterly. It was all about Don Bradman. Australia, hammered by the Great Depression and struggling for national identity, had at least the consolation of a genuine world-beater; Bradman is still regarded as the finest batsman ever. In a time of mass unemployment 25 per cent or higher and national self-doubt, Bradman offered a certain certainty.
If Australia could produce Bradman, then at heart Australia was all right. The England captain, Douglas Jardine, thought that he spotted a flaw in Bradman. The England attack was led by Harold Larwood, a former miner.
It became a diplomatic incident and the politicians stepped in, fearing a British boycott of Australian produce. Later, the laws of cricket were changed. Bodyline is now illegal. It has been variously regarded as the longest whinge in sporting history and as a classic example of a colonising nation bullying its colonies. Either way, the collision of sport and politics was remarkable. It was ironic, then, that in the s cricket was dominated by the Australian fast bowlers Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson, who habitually bowled fast bouncers directed at the body.
All of which neatly reversed the moral stance the two nations had held four decades earlier. The Australians were no longer victims: they were the swaggering larrikins who let tradition go hang. Ian Botham, always a man with a taste for conflict, once walked out of an event in Australia at which the Queen had been mocked. There are lots of suggestions out there.
Perhaps it is an acronym for Prisoner of Millbank, where many convicts were held before deportation, or Prisoner of His Majesty, or Prisoner of Mother England?
The latter two are particularly unconvincing as an additional letter has to be swallowed up in the process. Another theory is that it derives from Portsmouth, the port from which the convict ships set out, a city often known as Pompey. Perhaps the first syllable of the nickname gave rise to the term for Brits?
Alternatively, it could be a reference to their port of arrival, Port of Melbourne? I am troubled by these explanations. Why would the early settlers, the majority of whom were British, use a term which is intended to differentiate incomers from those who had been born and raised Down Under? It smacks of convenient retro-fitting to me. Moving away from the world of convicts, another theory is that it is an abbreviation of pommes de terre , the spud being a staple and favourite part of the diet of the British troops during the First World War.
Granted it was the first occasion that men from the two nations spent much time in close proximity but it requires a stretch of the imagination to think that the Aussies, inventive in their use of language as they are, made this linguistic jump. And, anyway, the term Pom was used before the Great War, the earliest instances cited in the Oxford English Dictionary dating to But if it is not the potato, it may well be another species of the plant world: Punica granatum — or the pomegranate, to you and I.
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