In the noun Pommy-bashing, also Pom-bashing:
• The Australian- and New-Zealand-English noun Pommy and the shortened form Pom designate:
– a British immigrant to Australia or New Zealand;
– a British (especially an English) person.
• The combining form -bashing refers to the activity of abusing or attacking the people mentioned just because they belong to a particular group or community.
—Cf. also the phrases:
– (as) dry as a Pommy’s towel;
– whingeing Pommy;
– Pommy shop steward.
The earliest occurrences of the noun Pommy-bashing, also Pom-bashing, that I have found are as follows, in chronological order:
1-: From TALK . . . of the City, published in The Scotsman (Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland) of Wednesday 19th August 1970:
Stock markets in Sydney and London are playing a strange game of cat-and-mouse with the shares of International Mining Corporation, the new Australian mining hope that shot into the spotlight last week after the announcement of a promising nickel find at Trough Wells in Western Australia.
[…]
There are only two things to be said. One is that Australia usually wins this game with its own shares, giving it the playful name of “pom bashing” when victory seems in sight. The other is that small investors should keep well away from International Mining shares while the experts have no idea what value to put on them.
2-: From Doble takes prize for common sense, by Michael Blair, published in The Birmingham Post (Birmingham, Warwickshire, England) of Saturday 1st September 1973—here, -bashing refers to physical attacks:
Can the rugby season really be upon us? Already?
[…]
[…] What a brilliant piece of planning it was to send the England side to that most physical of all rugby hell-holes, New-Zealand, out of season.
There are the All Blacks, primed for a bit of pommy-bashing, and there are England trying to find a formula for winning the international championship.
3-: From a letter to the Editor, by one ‘A. A. B.’, published in the Evening Mail (Birmingham, Warwickshire, England) of Monday 18th March 1974:
SO “Furious” is upset because of the possibility of Bloomer’s discotheque losing its licence.
[…]
If “Furious” does not wish to conform to a civilised way of behaviour, I suggest emigration to a place like New Zealand where, I believe, at present they are having a campaign of “pommy-bashing.”
This, I am sure, would help to cool “Furious.”
4-: From News Extra, published in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner (Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England) of Monday 8th April 1974:
‘Pommie bashing’ ends
THE New Zealand city of Auckland’s “pommie bashing” spree is over, the city’s race relations chief said today.
The statement was bad news for the English clothes manufacturer who cashed in on the wave of anti-British feeling by producing anti-Pommie B . . . d shirts and will probably mean the end of “Thump a Pom today” car stickers, popular for a time.
5-: From the Liverpool Daily Post (Liverpool, Lancashire, England) of Tuesday 9th April 1974:
Body blow for Pommie bashers
AUCKLAND’S “Pommie bashing” spree is over, the New Zealand city’s race relations chief said yesterday.
Mr Peter Sharples, head of Auckland’s Race Relations Conciliation Office, said his department’s tough action against the trend of anti-British feeling had checked a deteriorating situation.
He told a Commonwealth study group that race relations in New Zealand were generally good but an increasing number of complaints had indicated what seemed to be a growing feeling against English immigrants.
6-: From Hunt for gardening pen pals, by Sheila Robson, published in the Lincolnshire Free Press (Spalding, Lincolnshire, England) of Tuesday 16th April 1974:
New Zealand is a country recently in the limelight through the Commonwealth Games, stories of “Pommie bashing” and changes in the immigration laws.
But don’t worry that “Punch a Pom a Day” was anything more than a one-day joke that got the world-wide media treatment.
I’ve got this at first hand from my own correspondent in New Zealand who wrote me a mock piece saying that she was going to work by armoured car and manning the barricades because the natives were rising.
But then I take my pen pal with a pinch of salt because I’ve known her a long time. All her life in fact, as she’s my own daughter, happily settled in a new counry [sic] with her husband.
7-: From the Evening Standard (London, England) of Monday 6th May 1974:
Careful who you clobber, Cobber!
By LYNDA MURDINDOWN in Earl’s Court today, where “strine” is the local dialect, the few remaining Londoners were taking Australia’s latest attempts at Pommy-bashing with true British phlegm.
No matter that the Aussies now claim we are “lazy, dirty and unsexy.” Britons living and working in “Kangaroo Valley” think the Aussies are wonderful, or, at least, no worse than anyone else.
The latest attacks on the British appear in an article in Nation Review, which circulates throughout Australia.
8-: From Latest in London…, by Wayne Munro, published in The Sun-Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Sunday 12th May 1974:
If Londoners weren’t talking about “all that Pommy-bashing going on Down-Under” this week, chances are they were talking about strikes.
9-: From Majestic protest at spud bashers, published in the Grimsby Evening Telegraph (Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England) of Thursday 30th May 1974:
THE GREAT British potato was in danger of being mashed into oblivion, a councillor warned last night.
Coun. Walter Jewitt (Lib) sprang to the defence of “part of our British heritage” at the Grimsby Borough Council meeting after hearing of an EEC directive that several varieties would not be allowed to be planted after July. […]
[…]
It was bad enough that foreigners should tell us how to make the British banger and what size our pickled onions should be. But to dictate about potatoes was undermining our fundamental way of life, he maintained.
“It is pommy bashing at its worst. The potato cannot speak, but it does have eyes to see what is going on,” he said.
10-: From I need £21,850 by 1978, or else . . ., an article about emigration, by Bernard Hollowood, published in The Daily Telegraph (London, England) of Saturday 8th June 1974—the following is about Saul G. and his family, who emigrated to New Zealand:
He […] managed almost immediately to land an excellent job in Auckland, where he and his family found the climate and the food much to their liking. Saul was reasonably thick-skinned and philosophical and being frequently addressed as a “Pom bastard” did not worry him unduly. His wife, Mona, however, had led a sheltered life and Pom bashing shocked and distressed her. On her first shopping jaunt a female counterhand pushed a leg of lamb at her with the remark “That’ll be $2.75, you stuck-up, illegit Pommie” and a parking attendant called her a “misbegot Pom immigrant.”
[…]
Would emigration work for me? Practically every country is ruled out of consideration by some major handicap. Of the major cricketing nations South Africa is objectionable on account of apartheid, India because it now has the bomb, Pakistan because it is geographically contiguous with India, and Australia and New Zealand because of their Pom-bashing.
11-: From the Sunday People (London, England) of Sunday 9th June 1974:
POMMY-BASHING!
Newscaster’s wife lands in court—over an apple
By ARNOLD WILSONFORMER B.B.C. newsreader Robert Dougall flew back from a world trip yesterday claiming that he and his wife, Nan, had been the victims of “Pommy-bashing” in New Zealand.
Typically British Mr. Dougall said the incident happened in Auckland when his wife was charged by Customs men with a “serious offence”—bringing an apple into the country without declaring it.
“It was sheer Pommy-bashing,” said Mr. Dougall yesterday. “My wife was hauled in front of court for an hour before the case was dismissed.”
12-: From the Evening Post (Bristol, England) of Thursday 27th June 1974:
‘Pom bash’ not reason for loss
“Pommy-bashing” cannot be blamed for the dent in Britain’s trade figures with New Zealand, a business expert said in Bristol today.
Mr. Laurie Crompton, British Trade Association of New Zealand director, was in the city today to see how trade prospects are shaping-up.
Sales between Britain and New Zealand have dipped. Mr. Crompton, visiting Bristol Chamber of Commerce, said he put the figure of lost business at around £180m.
Britain once had a 40 per cent share of New Zealand’s market, now the figure was down to around 28 per cent.
But he was adamant the current “bash-a-pom” cult had nothing to do with it.
There was no anti-British feelings as far as commerce was concerned.
“The bash-a-pom business would not in any way be the result of your Common Market entry, nor would it affect trade,” he said.
“This was purely a psychological exercise and a gimmick in the first place, which was grossly overpublicised.”
13-: From a correspondence from Auckland, New Zealand, by ‘Plain John Smith’, published in the Sunday People (London, England) of Sunday 22nd September 1974:
THE POMMY-BASHERS
Why we’re the guys they love to hate in ‘God’s own country’THEY’VE a four-letter word for us British blokes down under. It is “Poms.”
Thus, in a halo of spilling beer and tobacco breath, a barside Kiwi gentleman last night informed me I was nothing but a “Pommy bastard.”
Not only that, said his staggering friend, but I was also a “bloody whingeing Pom.”
For students of the international insult (Empire Division) it will be of interest to note that to “whinge” is to complain, gripe, express constant dissatisfaction or otherwise indulge in a right old moan.
[…]
To call someone a Pommy Bastard here used to be a rough form of affection.
Now it’s often delivered by a far from matey islander who looks as if he’d like to run you through the nearest sheep-dip.
[…]
Mr. Sims, a beetle-browed man in a suede coat, looked up from his New Zealand lamb dinner.
“Know what I’d do? I’d round up the troublemakers and put ’em all on the next boat back to Britain.”
John Doran, a genial British worker who emigrated to New Zealand from Manchester 20 years ago, smiled knowingly when I told him Mr. Sims’s views.
“New Zealand has become a nation of blamers,” he said. “Get a bit of a punch-up and they blame it on the Maoris. Get a bit of drunkenness and they blame it on the Samoans who’ve come here. Get industrial disputes, and they blame it on the Poms. But it’s nonsense to suggest we go around stirring up trouble.”
In Auckland this week-end, T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Pommy Bastards” are doing a brisk trade.
Ironically, they were produced by a 28-year-old English immigrant, John Staniford, from Richmond, Surrey.
“It was just a bit of a joke, really,” he said. “There was all this talk about Pommy-bashing going around. I thought that if they were going to call us Pommy bastards, we might as well let them know we’re proud to be Poms. We’ve shifted 7,000.” The punch-a-Pom craze really began in March this year when an Auckland radio talk-in show exploded in a rash of anti-British banter:
Q. What do you get when you cross a Pom with a pig? A. Either a very dirty Pom or a mentally retarded pig.
14-: From Ma’am, you’re still Beaut in peanut land, by ‘Plain John Smith’, reporting from Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, published in the Sunday People (London, England) of Sunday 29th September 1974:
There’s no mistaking the sentiment. A lot of people out here may well be tired of Britain, and would prefer to turn the old “Mother Country” into nothing more than a distant relative.
But here in Queensland “God Save The Queen” still outsells “Waltzing Matilda,” and the only Pommy-bashing I’ve met is a bone-crunching slap on the back from a huge cattleman who wanted to buy me a beer.
“G’day, mate, fancy a grog?” was the exact invitation.
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