It’s a story told time and again: Australia is the lucky country where anyone can make it, so long as they put in the effort.It’s the reason, we’re told, so many Brits and Irish folk especially flock to our shores every year and why so many stay and eventually call Australia home.MORE: Aussies flee housing market for overseas bargainsEarlier this, year, data released by realestate.com.au showed a staggering 28 per cent jump in Poms searching for rental properties in Australia in the 12 months to March, revealing a significant jump in Brits considering a move Down Under.But it turns out that not every pale-faced backpacker or bikini-clad tourist who comes, stays.Recent figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows in 2024/25, the UK was among the top five countries of birth for migrants leaving Australia.UK-born migrant departures consisted mostly of Australian citizens, working holiday makers, permanent visa holders and temporary skilled visa holders.In June 2025, at least 14,000 Brits left Australia. This is low compared to the number of Aussies – above 59,000 – leaving the country, but it is still significant. And while migration to Australia has historically been dominated by people from the United Kingdom and Ireland, a study carried out in 2008 estimated more than 25 per cent of post-war British migrants to Australia returned to the UK at some point after arrival, although not always permanently.Known as Ping-Pong Poms, these itinerate Brits listed three “emotional factors” for their return: a need to be near family, feelings of homesickness or lack of belonging – and a disappointment that the “dream life” they migrated in search of had not materialised.Research on British migration to and from Australia has remained scant since then, but online forums and social media groups are rife with Brits deciding to move back home after a stint in Australia – at least temporarily.So what happens when the Australian dream fades?‘I was inconsolable’For factory worker Angela Hill, who has called Australia home for 19 years, it was for deeply personal reasons.Ms Hill, who has adult kids in the UK, said she has missed almost every one of her eldest granddaughter’s birthdays and couldn’t fathom another passing by.“They’ve missed out and we’ve all missed out on so much. I just want to try and get some time together before they’re too old and they’re off to do their own thing,” she told news.com.au.It wasn’t until her daughter visited her Queanbeyan home in February this year that Ms Hill realised it was time to go back for good.“When she went back, I don’t know, it’s like I was hit by a sledgehammer. I was just inconsolable,” she said. “I just said, ‘I need to go, I just need to go’. And that was it.”So strong are her ties to the island nation that the 63-year-old refuses to get Australian citizenship.“I just didn’t want to be a dual citizen, I just want to be British,” she said, pointing out her fondness of the UK’s free universal healthcare system, the National Health Service, British culture, food and cheap travel.“I know the National Health Service has got a lot of bad points but I went to see a doctor (in Australia) two weeks ago and just for a five minute visit, it’s $200,” she said.“I’m lucky that I don’t go very often. For these people that are on medications constantly that have to see doctors, it’s costing them a fortune. “I’m thinking I’m not getting any younger. There may be a time when I actually need to have this kind of thing.”‘It was the Aussie dream’Emma Lake and Jacob Robbens, both 33, moved back to the UK in May after five-plus years in Australia.With a kid in tow and another on the way, the British couple felt now was a better time than ever to be closer to family.But that wasn’t always the plan, they told news.com.au. Rather, a “confluence of things” – such as the rising cost of living, property prices, visa rules and a great job opportunity – eventually pushed them over the edge.“[We’ve] put down roots. We’ve had an offer accepted on a house, we bought a car – all the things that we weren’t in a position to do in Australia because we didn’t have our permanent residency,” Ms Lake said. “It stopped us being able to buy the house, to do the little things that we wanted. We’ve only been here less than two weeks and we’ve already kind of really got things moving. That felt really nice.”Mr Robbens said he loved Aussie culture, but lacked a “cultural rooting”.“We drove past Stonehenge the other day and it’s such a cultural rooting. When you go past Stonehenge, or you go past a beautiful Georgian terrace, or something like that, or you see a Tudor house that’s all wonky and has this big chunky chimney out the top; I don’t know, there’s something about just being amongst that when you’re brought up with it all your life,” he said. “It’s really grounding.”Caoimhe Tierney moved back to her native Derry in Northern Ireland after almost four years in Australia.What initially started as a whim on a gap year turned into a long layover to soak up the Aussie lifestyle and weather, Ms Tierney said.But it was when friends started moving away from Sydney that “all roads led to home”. “I was beginning to feel a sense of grief for what I was missing back home. My support network in Sydney also started to deplete as loads others were moving state or also moving home and I wasn’t enjoying my job as much anymore,” she said.But her biggest bugbear was Australia’s strict visa system and the costs associated with applying for one.“The financial side of having to save not only for the visa but for immigration agent fees, skills assessment fees, English language skill testing … It all adds up and in the end, it’s weighing up the pros and cons: was it worth it for me to pay $10,000 in fees for me to eventually move home to Ireland [while my] permanent residency was accepted, not knowing if I would ever move back to Australia again?” she told news.com.au.“Also, after a while, the weather started to wear off and I was getting really sick of the humidity.”For Sue McDonnell, an executive coach and psychotherapist from Ireland who has lived in Sydney for 26 years, there is a deep calling to return to her roots.She told news.com.au she has no plans to permanently move to Ireland, but wants to spend more time there.“The longer I’m away from my homeland, the more I feel the need to kind of put my feet on Irish soil and just spend a little bit more time there reconnecting to the land,” she said.Ms McDonnell said she loves Australian culture but felt it didn’t quite compare to Ireland’s.“When you’re from a culture that’s so rich in literature, in playwriting, in music, it’s kind of in our soul and it’s just different,” she said.‘The UK is a s**thole’These complaints are as common as they come on Facebook groups for Brits either arriving or leaving Australia.“Just because it’s sunny, doesn’t mean your life will miraculously change, unless you do,” one Facebook user wrote in a group dedicated to British expats.“People think that because it’s warmer, it gives a better lifestyle by default. That’s just not the case and can be a tough one for people to swallow,” another wrote.A third said many Brits are shocked to find their UK qualifications don’t count as much in Australia.But for professor Roger Burrows, one of two academics behind the 2008 study on British migration to Australia, moving back to the UK is not as attractive as it once was.He said the number of Poms returning home from Australia had actually declined since Covid, and he puts this down to the country’s economic and political woes, such as Brexit and the Covid-19 fallout.“The UK is a sh**hole. I mean, we’re on the cusp of fascism and nothing works and I do think a lot of the outward migration does appear to be people who have been encouraged to move to Australia to work in the health service. So we’ve seen a big outflow of medics, of doctors, of nurses, of midwives,” he told news.com.au.“The opportunities in Australia are far greater than they are in the UK at the moment. People coming back to the UK, they’re stuck with the UK. They haven’t got the opportunity to go and work and live in the rest of Europe. So I think that the opportunity structure has changed.”The professor, who spends half the year in Australia and half in England, said social media and communication platforms like FaceTime have made connecting with family and friends over long distances much easier, shrinking the sense of distance between Brits in Australia and their families in the UK.“For people in the 1970s and 1980s, going away was really going away. You didn’t know when you’d see friends and family, whereas now you can talk to them nearly every day. You can see the kids growing up and so on,” he said.But changes in the way we communicate hasn’t necessarily made the move across plain sailing.“One of the complaints about moving to Australia was people felt sometimes that they had been miss-sold the dream and they were spending huge amounts of time living in nondescript suburbs, commuting in to work,” he said.“Perhaps that’s no longer the case anymore. I think with hybrid working and the changes in commuting patterns post-Covid, people don’t have to experience two hours on hot trains anymore.”His research found Brits who took the plunge only to move back to the UK often found themselves returning to Australia, or seeking greener pastures elsewhere.“It was far more common than we ever imagined. I think there are still a whole bunch of people who literally are neither here nor there, they can’t decide where they want to be and they have this pattern of return,” he said.He also said the quality of Australian TV programming has improved massively since 2008, along with transport, food, retail outlets and cultural offerings.“Australian media is full of aspirational housing programs and aspirational cooking shows. I think there is a real sense of advancement and of aspiration that isn’t here [in the UK],” he said.“I mean, we were just laughing the other day because we happened to catch the new series over here of Location, Location, Location. They were showing these poor characters around these real s**thole places, compared to the Australian version where you’ve got these amazing places with pools. It just seemed like, my God, [the UK] feels like a kind of a developing country.“When I look at our apartment in Melbourne, there are cranes everywhere, there are roads being built, there’s new metros. There’s nothing like that happening over here [in the UK]. We can’t even build a train from London to Birmingham,” he added.He said for a younger generation of Brits who are finding it hard to enter the job market, Australia feels like a much more hopeful place.“England, in particular, feels like an old country at the moment. Coming to Australia, it does feel young, more vibrant, and there’s still huge infrastructure investment,” he said.“Certainly for young people, Australia feels a much more hopeful place.”