Australias New Deputy PM from Barry

Julia Gillard

Australia’s new prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has appointed Julia Gillard as his deputy prime minister who will take the ministerial portfolios of both education and workplace relations in a combined role in a bid to make Australia more competitive by improving educational standards.

Ms Gillard emigrated from Barry at the age of five. She was born in a terraced home in Queen Street on September 29 1961 but now lives in a smart suburb of Victoria Australia.

Seen as the rising star of Australian politics, she was also voted Australia’s sexiest woman politician last year and has come a long way from her humble beginnings in Wales. She was famously thrown out of the Australian parliament in 2006 for calling Health Minister Tony Abbott “a snivelling little grub”. She is a former lawyer who fights passionately for union rights and has been an Australian Labor Party member of the House of Representatives since October 1998, representing the Division of Lalor, Victoria.

Her father John Gillard, originally a policeman also worked as a British Rail booking clerk. He came from Cwmgwrach, near Neath, and was the eldest of seven brothers and sisters. He and her mother Moira (nee. MacKenzie) a cook, emigrated to Australia in the 1960s as part of the “ten pound pom” scheme whereby the Australian government paid the #10 passage fare to encourage migration from Britain. Ms Gillard has said “Like so many family histories my family history is built around stories of our migration but my family’s story is one of no regrets.” She went on to say “We were originally due to settle in Melbourne but on the boat coming out my parents met some Welsh people who had settled in Adelaide. So my parents thought, ‘Well, the only people we know in Australia are these two people we’ve met on the boat, so we might as well go to the city they live in,’ and so we settled in Adelaide.”

Talking about her elder sister she says “Alison remembers a little bit more. She particularly remembers being on the boat. But I think in some ways it was probably harder on her because she was that bit older. She went to school with a Welsh accent, all of that kind of stuff. She’d been in school in Wales, and so the difference in schooling and losing her school friends and all of that sort of thing, struck her. I think I probably got it a bit easier than she did.”

My mother remembers a family of Gillards who ran a corner shop in Forster Street, Cadoxton in the late forties and early fifties.

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