Mobilising across colour lines: Intimate encounters between Aboriginal women and African American and other allied servicemen on the World War II Australian home front

Abstract

3 The narrative of White Australia in relation to both Aboriginal peoples and non-northern European migrants impacted how Australian families formed, just as, in a different context, 'Jim Crow' segregation policies and anti-miscegenation laws shaped American family formation and life, especially in US southern states.4 Over the course of WWII's Pacific theatre, more than 1 million US military personnel and support units were successively stationed across Australia from 1941 until 1947, when the last US bases were dismantled.5 This included almost 9,000 African Americans, who were mostly segregated. Some accounts refer fleetingly to the African American husbands of a number of white Australian war brides, but the trajectory of these family formations is absent from the literature.10 Research into same-sex relationships in WWII in Brisbane significantly includes the experiences of African American servicemen.11 More recently, attention has focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women's service in the defence forces, building on an evolving body of scholarship investigating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander military service.12 Aboriginal women's emotional contributions on the WWII home front thus require far more nuanced exploration and centrality. The arrival of African Americans threatened to contravene the White Australia Policy and fuel populist fears of miscegenation.15 However, under the silence of wartime censorship, the first battalion of African Americans quietly slipped into Melbourne in February 1942.16 By 3 March that year, a strategic US naval submarine base was established in Fremantle, precipitated by the fall of Java.17 As their tight-knit units required a sophisticated degree of interdependency during dangerous missions, submarine crews were not radically segregated like most other branches of the US military.18 Also free from segregation, and under a blanket of secrecy, Catalina flying boat bases were located at Nedlands and Crawley in Perth, and further north at Geraldton, along with a submarine refueling station in the Exmouth Gulf.19 In Fremantle, the relocation of the Old Women's Home made way for the US Navy who were provided with the asylum and grounds for use as their Receiving Barracks for the duration of the war.20 Certain hotels in Fremantle and Perth were leased for submariners. 'The Aboriginal community, usually isolated, now found themselves exposed to other peoples, if not as equals, at least in a way that had certainly not occurred before the Second World War'.22 Kinnane takes us into the world of his grandmother Auntie Jessie Smith's home in inner city Perth where 'at any one of the all-nightlong marathon card games you could find British servicemen, Dutch submariners, Aboriginal diggers and Black US sailors sitting around the table'.23 War temporarily overshadowed some of the Western Australian Government's larger concerns of controlling Aboriginal peoples, and relationships formed that crossed prescribed boundaries established by the White Australia Policy and the Jim Crow laws of the US south.