Australia's Latest Jobs Drive Evokes Spirit of £10 Poms

Bungil Shire is one of Australia's almost-there places. Two-thirds the size of Wales and home to 1,951 people, it sits on the edge of the country's arid centre five hours' drive north-west of Brisbane.

The closest it has come to international attention was when Prince Harry spent a few months as a jackeroo on one of its cattle stations last year. But for builders, dentists, engineers and mechanics planning a move to Australia, Bungil Shire could represent a pot of gold.

The four professions are in short supply and under rules introduced by Canberra yesterday those willing to spend time working in such neglected parts of the country will get priority treatment from the immigration department.

Stuart Johnson runs one of the six service stations in Roma, a town of 7,000 surrounded by the shire. He seems baffled that the car trade is felt to be in such dire straits.

"There's a changing population, a lot of turnover. People come here because the government offers work, then they move back to the coast and get the jobs they wanted in the first place."

The auto trade gets plenty of business from traffic passing through on the road from Brisbane to Darwin, a 2,000-mile stretch of highway. Yesterday the London to Sydney rally passed; local panelbeaters got the chance to fix up a Porsche that had hit a bull.

Hundreds of such towns across Australia are to be the focus of the new programme, which will relax migration requirements for 5,000 people each year if they are prepared to spend time living and working in the more flyblown corners of the country.

In a country known for locking up refugees, the policy seems out of place. But the search for skilled migrants to plug the brain drain from regional Australia towards Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth is forcing governments to tout for new talent. Britain is Australia's biggest single source of emigrants - 12,500 Britons arrived last year. South Australia has a representative in London to drum up interest in emigrating to the state.

Australia has tried such schemes before. In the 1950s and 1960s "£10 Poms" were enticed to migrate and since the late 1990s the medical profession has promoted work in the outback.

Roger Todd moved to Australia in 2000 and works as medical officer for the hospital in Port Hedland, a mining port in the country's far north-west. The 48-bed hospital which he said "wouldn't rate as a cottage hospital in England," serves a population of 16,000 spread across an area bigger than the UK. Most patients are flown in by the flying doctor.

He has just applied for residency, but seems happy to stay in Port Hedland despite the fact that his work prospects will improve alongside his immigration status.

"Of course people see this as a stepping stone, but in a town like this there are a lot of people who come for three weeks and find themselves still here three years later," he said.

David Russell-Weisz of the Rural Doctors' Association estimates that one in ten doctors in Western Australia's far north is British-trained.

He himself trained in Dundee before coming out in 1993 when he saw a job advert for work as a flying doctor in the western New South Wales town of Broken Hill, and now lives in the West Australian town of Broome, 1,000 miles north of Perth.

"I went straight from London to Broken Hill, so it was a shock at first," he said. "But I've fallen in love with this part of the world, and now I'm an Australian citizen. I wouldn't go back if you paid me."