I have OED2 on CD. It's the daddy, as somebody on another thread put it. Here is the entry for Pommy:
Pommy (gp#m=), n. (a.) Austral. and N.Z. colloq. Also Pommie and with lower-case initial.
[Origin obscure.]
A. n. A derogatory term for an immigrant from the United Kingdom; an Englishman or Englishwoman, a Briton.
B. attrib. or as adj. Of or pertaining to a Pommy; British, English, spec. (often as a term of affectionate abuse) in Pommy bastard. Cf. Pom2.
The most widely held derivation of this term, for which, however, there is no firm evidence, is that which connects it with pomegranate (see quots. 1923, 1963). A discussion of this and of other theories may be found in W. S. Ramson Australian English (1966) 63.
1915 in B. Gammage Broken Years (1974) 86 We call the Regulars---Indians and Australians---_British'---but Pommies are nondescript.
1916 in Ibid. 240 They're only a b---- lot of Pommie Jackeroos and just as hopeless.
1916 Anzac Bk. 31 A Pommy can't go wrong out there if he isn't too lazy to work.
1920 D. O'Reilly in Murdoch & Drake-Brockman Austral. Short Stories (1951) 144 The _Pommy' parson made good, as a good man always will.
1923 D. H. Lawrence Kangaroo vii. 162 Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood _thins down', by their round and ruddy cheeks. So we are told.
Ibid. 164 In this way Mr Somers had to take himself to task, for his Pommy stupidity.
1926 Galsworthy Silver Spoon ii. iv. 137 They call us Pommies and treat us as if we'd took a liberty in coming to their blooming country.
1933 _P. Cadey' Broken Pattern xii. 130 _You should have heard the English accent!' _Pommy gab, eh?' commented his mate.
1938 N. Marsh Artists in Crime ix. 128 She was always shooting off her mouth about the way the Aussies don't know a good thing when they see it. These pommies! She gave me the jitters.
1946 B. James in Coast to Coast 1945 63 He was an Englishman, not a _pommy', mind you. It seemed he hadn't even reached to that dignity.
1947 B. Mason in D. M. Davin N.Z. Short Stories (1953) 333 What time we had left was spent on fruitless errands for the Pommie matelots.
1949 F. Sargeson I saw in my Dream ii. xiii. 118 Look at Wally's ma---she got over her Pommy ways.
1951 D. Stivens Jimmy Brockett 214 Like most of these pommy bastards, he had funny ways but he wasn't a bad old bloke at heart.
1957 New Scientist 23 May 13/3 There is_an elusive background of strangeness, imbued with an element of timelessness, which comes home to the sensitive _new chum', or _pommy', only after he has lived for a while in this new-old southern continent.
1962 J. Frame Edge of Alphabet vii. 47 Look at the foreigners flooding the country on every immigrant ship, la-di-da Pommies and all.
1963 X. Herbert Disturbing Element vi. 91 He still wore the heavy clumsy British type of clothing of the day [before 1914]. When we kids saw people on the street dressed like that we would yell at them: _Jimmygrants, Pommygranates, Pommies!'
1966 R. D. Eagleson in Southerly XXVI. 200 Lest British readers should be misled, pommy is frequently pejorative.
1974 P. McCutchan Call for Simon Shard iv. 36 I'm Australian born and bred, not a pommie immigrant._ Now, grand-dad, 'e was a pommie bastard!
1975 Times 27 Aug 10/8 Colin Shaw_has just sent Ernest Whitehouse an explanation of how God came to be described in the television programme Beneath the News as a _Pommy bastard'._ Shaw adds that _Pommy bastard' is an _affectionate colloquialism' in Australia.
1979 Guardian 31 Oct. 3/2 British Leyland reacted angrily_to antipodean _pommy-bashing' about the quality of buses.
Hence
_Pommyland, Britain, England.
1957 R. Stow Bystander 21 I'm a Pommy. And going back to Pommy-land, after twenty-four years.
1967 F. Hardy Billy Borker yarns Again 61 Sir Robert himself wanted to be a whiskey-taster at the Melbourne show, but ended up as some kind of wharfie over in Pommy Land.
1973 Times 12 Oct. 15/7 An adaptation of Barry Humphries's cult strip cartoon about the life of darkest Pommie-land seen through the eyes of an antipodean innocent.
1979 M. Kaufman Container iii. 31, I suppose you'll head off back to Pommyland now?
