Pom, Pommy

Pom and pommy are exclusive to Australian and New Zealand slang as disparaging terms for British immigrants, subsequently settlers. Various journalistic references show both forms suddenly springing into wide currency in 1912. The Sydney Truth of December 22 that year carried an explanatory report: “Now they call ‘em ’Pomegranates’ and the Jimmygrants don’t like it.” Xavier Herbert’s memoir of the period, Disturbing Element (1963), is one of several sources confirming this origin: “we kids … would yell at them ‘Jimmygrants, Pommygranates, Pommies’” (vi, 91). ( Jimmygrant is recorded much earlier, from ca. 1845 and the abbreviation Jimmy from ca. 1859.) Many British immigrants arrived after World War I, and the “pomegranate” reference could allude to their rosy cheeks, also found in Afrikaans rooinek (“red neck”) referring to British soldiers. There is an alternative convict explanation deriving the term from POME, an acronym for Prisoner of Mother England, a quasi-ironic title of some of the original convicts, found carved on the stone walls of the Port Arthur jail in Sydney from the 1830s. However, the semantic transfer whereby the term shifted from the convicts to the English colonists is obviously problematic.

Pom and pommy have maintained a thriving currency, being used with a mixture of hostility and affection, no doubt reflecting the ambivalent attitudes of the Australian settlers toward continuing immigration from Britain. The Australian National Dictionary (1988) notes that the word is often preceded by whingeing (complaining) and followed by bastard . It cites quotations from 1962 and 1954, respectively: “He would refer to him to his face as the ‘Pommy,’ once going so far as to call him a ‘Pommy Bastard.’” However, bastard also has an ambivalent quality in Australian English, shown in this quotation from 1957: “When I call you a Pommy bastard, sir, that’s meant to be friendly. But a Pommy bloody officer is differ- ent.” When the English moral crusader Mrs. Mary Whitehouse visited Australia in 1978, the attorney general of South Australia referred to her as “a notorious pom,” provoking the response in an editorial in The Australian newspaper that this was “A Stinkardly Insult.” In recent decades pom and pommy have started to develop currencies in South African English.