These mantras were ever-present in the mind of Sylvia Ennis when she first arrived in Australia in 1965. Pregnant and with two small children, she and her husband Bruce were “10-pound poms” fresh off the boat from London when they fetched up at the Wacol Hostel near Brisbane.

It was one of several such hostels around the country, bursting with thousands of migrants from across Europe. The Ennises found themselves living in a Nissen hut, and dining in a cafeteria with all the other families.

“It was pretty daunting, to say the least,” says Ennis. It’s been nearly 50 years since the family made the journey across the pond, but she says that, despite the early shock of arriving at the hostel, they never once regretted it.

“My husband had been in the merchant navy and he’d seen Australia more through the eyes of the traveller, and he thought that that would be a good place to come to live,” she says.

“I’d never been any further than Edinburgh and back again.”

But with the housing situation in 1960s London growing ever more dire, the family took advantage of the Australian government’s welcoming migrant policy, buying £10 boat tickets to make the six-week journey to Melbourne.

Their story is typical of the time, and many such experiences were held up by the Department of Immigration as evidence of Australia’s welcoming society in a prosperous nation. To further hammer home the message, government photographers took thousands of photographs between 1946 and 1999 to record the arrival and settlement of migrants after the Second World War – from the first major wave of European migrants, from 1927 onwards, through to the Vietnamese migrants of the 60s and 70s, and the later arrivals from Africa and the Middle East.

The collection documents a range of immigration activities, from citizenship and naturalisation ceremonies, to arrivals of “milestone” migrants, and entire journeys from Europe to Australia. The images were used in newspapers and magazines, posters and brochures to spread the word of Australia as a land of opportunity.

The department eventually gave the Immigration Photographic Archive – some 22,000 images - to the National Archives of Australia to help preserve the collection and prevent further damage to some of the deteriorating negatives.

Some of these images will form part of a new exhibition opening at the archives later this month – a show that is sure to rekindle memories, both good and bad, of the hostel experience. Although the official photographs are uniformly sunny and positive – smiling families learning English, children playing, proud citizenship ceremonies – they don’t show the inevitable flipside of loneliness, isolation and homesickness.

Exhibition curator Amy Lay says the images are striking in the message they were promoting at the time.

“You see all these beautiful clean locations that are designed to do a couple of things. They would encourage migrants to feel secure about going to a hostel, but they’d also show Australians quite austere furnishings so that Australians wouldn’t feel that their tax dollars are going to make migrants too comfortable, or more comfortable than them,” she says.

The exhibition contrasts these images with personal stories and photos about the lived experience.

“The official ones tell the story that the government want to tell, and it goes from these displaced persons being in spare, spartan hostels through to the more comfortable purpose-built ones, but also people’s photographs alongside showing what it was like to live in them,” she says.

“It’s a quite interesting flipside to what we see in the photographs. You don’t see photographs of people screaming at what they think are poisonous spiders but turn out to be huntsmans.”

You also don’t get to see the many migrants who decided, on sight, that Australia wasn’t for them, and got straight back on the next ship, or even the hardship or the early days for many families struggling to make the best of the often cramped conditions.

Not surprisingly, food featured heavily in the memories of hostel life; for every migrant who was overwhelmed to finally have food on the table and regular meals, there was another who developed a lifelong aversion to lamb and mutton.

Sylvia Ennis remembers how hard it was to see so many people around them decrying the conditions and talking endlessly of life back in Europe.

“There were quite a lot of them, and it was sad for us because we’d made this decision to come to Australia to make a home, and people kept on saying, ‘Back home we did this and back home we did that’,” she says.

“I said to Bruce, look, wherever we’re all together this is our home, we’re going to make the best of it and we’re not always going to be here, so that’s the way it was.”

The Ennis family stayed in their dome-shaped Nissen hut at the Wacol Hostel – unlike anything they’d ever seen before – for a year, until they were offered a housing commission house in the Brisbane suburb of Inala.

“That’s where we lived for 29 years,” she says.

“We’ve never regretted coming here. I really feel like I’m an Australian, I don’t feel like I’m a 10-pound pom. All the children have been brought up here and we have 10 grandchildren and five step-grandchildren.”

All the same, those practical, make-do sentiments rise straight up to the surface as soon as the Wacol Hostel is mentioned. She remembers, for instance, the frayed nerves during their early weeks there, and how difficult it was to have an argument in front of so many people.

And, when her husband got a job at a cement factory, he unwrapped his packed lunch on the first day to find a hostel-issued marmalade sandwich, while the rest of the men had huge slabs of meat.

“It was what it was, it was what you made of it, and in my mind, once we got over having our other son and everything like that, we had to try and look to the future, and when an opportunity came to get a housing commission house, we took it,” she says.

And, while the exhibition does not make a point of contrasting the early official attitude towards mass migration to Australia with today’s, Lay says the parallels will be unavoidable in the minds of viewers.

“Most of the [images featured] are in the 50s and 60s, there were different expectations of what migrants would do for the community,” she says.

“Lots of them are taken so that Australians would get the idea that these migrants were people who would benefit the community, were people you would want as part of the community. That’s why there are so many photos of children and activities like that – ‘They’re just like you, they’re just like us! These people are wholesome, you want them as part of your community!’ That message isn’t there now, is it?”

* A Place to Call Home: Migrant Hostel Memories opens at the National Archives of Australia on May 30 and runs until September 30.