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

Stationed at General Douglas MacArthur’s Australian headquarters, the famous black war correspondent Vincent Tubbs reported in the Baltimore Afro-American, 25 March 1944: ‘I know of 10 cases in which our boys have married Australian girls. In eight instances the girls are of mixed blood. In the other two, they are so called “pure Australian girls”’, adding, ‘They have real concern as to how they will get their wives home on one of Uncle Sam’s ships’.1