And without centralised powers, Aborigines would remain in the shadows. From living at Yirrkala and from reading, Whitlam believed that power over Aboriginal issues should be centralised. Before serving in the RAAF, he had met no Indigenous Australians. But in Cooktown and the Gove–Yirrkala area, he witnessed the habitual forms of discrimination. He disliked missionaries, and was pleased that the Indigenous people at Gove had only had them for the past ten years, because missionaries, he argued, ‘destroyed Aborigines’ self-respect. Now these are strong words. But I knew, I saw it.’ It was at Yirrkala too that Whitlam first met the Yunupingu family, whose members would play a crucial role in the agitation for Aboriginal civic recognition and land rights.
But the referendum proposal, rather pushed at the Australian people by Evatt, failed to gain a majority vote nationally, and though carried in two states, was supported by only 46 per cent of voters. Still, it obtained majority support within the armed forces, and 13th Squadron, no doubt instructed by Whitlam himself, voted heavily in favour. The young navigator was appalled by the eventual result: ‘The campaign had an immediate and lasting effect on my attitudes and career.’ The Labor defeat in the referendum meant that ‘reform would be protracted and piecemeal’, and Menzies’ opposition to the constitutional change seemed to Whitlam like vulgar opportunism.
Far away in the New South Wales country town of Albury, before the Union Jack, the Liberal Party of Australia was inaugurated in December 1944 by the leader of the UAP opposition, Robert Menzies, a new definition of the conservative political impulse in Australia. Though it did not seem so then, and despite the fumbling of the early war years, Menzies was on his way back.
From its base in Gove the 13th Squadron carried out anti-submarine patrols and bombing raids on Japanese targets in Timor and the Netherlands East Indies. With Goudie at the controls, Whitlam’s aircraft flew seventy-six missions in September 1944, eighty-seven in October, and eighty-six in November. They were, by comparison with the European theatre, short-range missions, but each one involved a potentially dangerous take-off and landing, and an encounter with the enemy in between. Whitlam got airsick on the smell of fuel as it mixed with that of oil and smoke from flares when they flew below 2000 feet (600 metres). ‘He could have got out of it anytime he thought things were getting too risky,’ said Goudie, ‘but he never did.’
On 15 January 1945, Whitlam’s Ventura made a low-level attack on shipping in Bima Harbour in Sumbawa, an Indonesian island. A bullet passed through the starboard engine, filling the plane with smoke and disabling the engine. It was feathered and everything was jettisoned to lighten the load, and the gunners went to the nose of the aircraft. They were still 420 nautical miles (780 metres) from base. The plane lost height at six metres a minute and was down to 210 metres when for no reason it rebounded to six hundred. A Catalina seaplane flew alongside them, ready to collect survivors. But they got back to Yirrkala–Gove.
Whitlam’s crew did not continue with 13th Squadron when it left Gove in 1945. It was not, however, because Whitlam had become aware of hearing damage during his final tour. Whitlam and his pilot, Goudie, were the flyers of the only RAAF aircraft flying for MacArthur’s headquarters at Leyte and then Manila. His crew flew generals from the Australian, British, Indian, Canadian and New Zealand forces from Australia to the Philippine headquarters and back again. In June, Whitlam attended the opening of the Philippine Congress, getting a seat amongst the press. Both houses of the Congress had been elected before the Japanese invasion but had never managed to convene until now. Whitlam would later claim that from his experience of the Philippines he got a sense of Dutch, Spanish, German, Japanese and American imperialism, and thus of Australia’s pretensions to imperialism in New Guinea and elsewhere. ‘I was convinced the European, as well as the Japanese, empires in the Pacific and Indian Oceans had no future.’ On the death of John Curtin while he was home on leave, Whitlam applied to join the Australian Labor Party.
CHAPTER 8
Peace and its discontents
The people want; the people fear
NUCLEAR ENDING
In June 1944, a detachment of some hundreds of American and Australian prisoners of war were brought to Japan in a cargo of sugar and pumpkins on the Tamahoku Maru. Off the coast of the island of Kyushu it was torpedoed. Two Tasmanians, Peter McGrath-Kerr and Allan Chick, were amongst the minority of seventy-two Australian survivors. Of the nearly eight hundred prisoners, 213 in all were rescued. Picked up in their drenched rags, they were trucked to an enclosure in Nagasaki that had once been a cotton factory, and worked in the foundry next door to the camp on propellers and cylinder blocks for marine diesel engines.
Chick wielded a mallet, and McGrath-Kerr cleaned out the sandy cores in preparation for a new casting. If there was a weakness in the casting, prisoners often took the opportunity to widen it. They were surprised to find, amongst the scrap metal prisoners had to deliver to the furnace, a number of pieces marked NSWGR (New South Wales Government Railways), part of the notorious and controversial pig-iron shipment to Japan before the war.
Sometimes they worked with elderly Japanese and women, and volunteer schoolboys and schoolgirls, so reduced was the labour force. The prisoners would also often see American bombers overhead, B29s and A36s, their bomb bays opening and spewing incendiaries. Prisoners were no more immune from the detonations and fires than anyone else, and from sharing shelters with Japanese workers, they got a strong sense that if Japan were invaded, people would fight, however haplessly, with petrol bombs and sharpened poles. The prisoners wondered if they would survive the imminent confrontation.
Pneumonia was a great killer of POWs. In the prison dormitories, men slept on the floor on tatami mats with a hard blanket, an unbleached calico sheet and a small canvas pillow filled with sawdust. A typical meal was a bowl of rice, a little barley, coarse corn, a cup of miso soup and some pickles. A dead horse brought to the foundry on one occasion was treated as a bounty from the gods.
Vague rumours of a bomb used on the city of Hiroshima, an explosive of a new order, reached the POW camp in Nagasaki. Australian POWs Les Prendergast, Bert Miller and Murray Jobling therefore started to run hard for the camp dugouts when on 9 August 1945 they heard a plane drone over and recognised it as American. McGrath-Kerr took his time, putting down his book on his mat and standing. In the next instant he was buried in the ruins of the former cotton factory. Chick, working on the roof of a storehouse with an Indonesian POW, was aware of the huge flash of light before he passed out. When he came back to consciousness, he lay on the ground and the storehouse was gone. Dust from the bomb was blocking out the sky. Another prisoner, Jack Johnson of the RAAF, was sure he had seen three white parachutes—the ones from which the bomb was suspended—moments before the dazzling light. Johnson now pulled the injured McGrath-Kerr out of the wreckage. After the sinking of the Tamahoku Maru, Johnson had pulled McGrath-Kerr onto an upturned lifeboat, so there was a pattern.
In the aftermath and in a blasted and vacant landscape, bemused Japanese guards cried, ‘Go, go, go!’ The Australians headed towards the Inasa Bridge, on which some of them had been working, and on towards Inasa Mountain to the west. Astoundingly, Chick found on the far side of the bridge a horse and cart, and loaded it up with Red Cross parcels lying about as thick drops of black water began to rain down from the heavens. The road up into the hills was blocked by fallen trees, and new guards turned up and joined them to a larger group of POWs making their way up the slopes. Below them lay the flattened city.
The prisoners sat in a bamboo grove that night watching fires burning in the city. Army trucks turned up from the less damaged southern part of the city, took away the wounded and rounded up the prisoners to take them back down to their camp. The scope of destruction astonished them. Their position was much altered but different—no longer prisoners, no longer free. They themselves set up their makeshift camp in the ashes of the onset of the nuclear age, in the world where they had been slaves, w
hich had been transformed by physics.
On 14 August, the POWs were moved to a dormitory south of the city that they shared with Mitsubishi workers and mobilised students. They saw that some of the Dutch prisoners who had been working out of doors on the day of the bomb and whose chests were terribly burned were now mortally sick. By 29 August, a number of the Dutch had died.
The remaining prisoners were now put on parade and told that from this time on, Japan was joined with the rest of the world in the pursuit of peace. The war was over and they could all go home. There were no cheers. American planes began to drop relief supplies. US reporter George Weller arrived at the camp with a Red Cross representative and suggested that the men get to Kanoya in the south where there was a great airbase now being used by the Americans. He said that planes were coming in every day with equipment and supplies and leaving empty.
The Australians, including McGrath-Kerr and Chick, found their way to Nagasaki station and caught the train to Kanoya. They carried in their satchels and on their laps containers with the ashes of their comrades, retrieved from the foreigners’ section of the Sakamoto cemetery. They were airlifted to Okinawa and Manila, and after treatment in hospital, were put aboard the aircraft carrier Formidable with other Australians, and began their journey home. McGrath-Kerr would return to Japan with the Australian contingent of the occupation force. He served at Kure, the Australian occupation zone not far from Hiroshima. There he married a Japanese wife, Haruko, and took her back to live in St Helens in Tasmania. For Haruko, it must have been like a journey to Mars, its reference points hard to grasp. But her husband had lived through the same bewilderment.
BLACK SAVIOURS?
Australian Diggers’ attitudes towards the Americans were in part influenced by the fact that the GIs were so well paid compared to the citizen forces or militia that they were stripping the shops of merchandise as well as driving up the price of clothing, jewellery and small luxuries. Often enough, these goods became gifts for Australian girls.
But in White Australia, there were other GIs far from the emporiums of the city, and they were suspect for race reasons. It is fair to say that the same prejudices operated in many white GIs, sometimes even more ferociously than in any Digger. On a May evening in 1942, soldiers of the 11th Australian Battalion took up defensive positions along a road outside Townsville. Locals had reported the sounds of Thompson submachine guns being fired near the new Kelso airfield. They didn’t know what was happening or who was doing the firing, but there were black US troops stationed out there. Captain Harry Duddington had issued ammunition to his Bren gunners, and ordered powerful anti-aircraft searchlights mounted on nearby trucks to be switched on to light up the bush road. Seven kilometres away, members of the 26th Battalion were being rushed up by truck towards a roadblock near the Ross River. They were in full battle kit and had live ammunition.
What the Australian soldiers could hear was a riot by black American troops of the 96th US Engineers (Colored) in their Upper Ross River bivouac. Details of the riot that night are sketchy—the chief press censor would ensure that. But from the start there had been, throughout White Australia, considerable suspicion of black American servicemen. For Curtin’s government it was easier to deal with the problem because American units weren’t racially integrated. Segregation prevailed in the army, as it did in the southern United States. That made it easy to deal with the ‘coloured’ units.
The first contingent of black American troops, fortunately for their own sakes rerouted from the Philippines, had arrived in Melbourne in 1942. Customs officials had actually wanted to refuse them entry, but the War Cabinet was forced to countermand that decision. There were no racially segregated units in the AIF, and the early ban that had tried to keep Aborigines out of the armed forces was diluted under the Japanese threat. By September 1945, about three thousand Aborigines had served in the AIF.
But the Australian government had initially utterly opposed the deployment of black troops at all. Lieutenant General George Brett, the commander of American troops in Australia until MacArthur arrived, reported that the presence of black troops could ‘adversely affect relationships between Australians and Americans and nullify any military value derived from their use’. The United States army was dependent on coloured troops for much of its labour, however, and MacArthur was unwilling to exclude them. Officers were told to take note of Australian ‘susceptibilities’ on the matter.
Hence the Japanese threat brought a temporary suspension of White Australia. But people wanted the chance of miscegenation in the cities, interracial love, to be avoided, and the United States army did what it could to pander to that anxiety. American general Patrick J. Hurley would write in June 1942, ‘I have never seen the racial problem brought home so forcibly as it is over here in Queensland.’
Arriving in Brisbane on 8 April 1942, the 96th US Engineers (Colored) had been kept aboard ship for hours, because there had already been trouble with ‘Negro soldiers’ in that city. Eventually they were allowed to go on hikes in the hills around Brisbane but they were not permitted the freedom of the city. The American military police (MPs) were heavy-handed and often beat black GIs in public. While on leave in Melbourne, AIF soldier Roland Griffiths-Marsh said ‘g’day’ to a black American GI looking in a shop window in Bourke Street after midnight. He had not gone more than thirty paces when he turned around to see three tall white American MPs standing over the bruised black soldier with long wooden truncheons hanging from wrist thongs around their right hands. A black American GI was shot dead outside the Argent Hotel in Mount Isa, Queensland, in late 1942, and another was shot dead in Cairns, in full view of witnesses, and apparently by military policemen.
The novelist Ruth Park claimed to have seen the murder of black soldiers by American MPs on two separate occasions in Sydney. Jack Richardson, an Australian officer, saw a white GI stab a black American soldier in the back after being knocked over in the foyer of a crowded Townsville cinema. A black GI was reported to have been shot dead near the Eternal Flame in Anzac Square, Brisbane, for crossing over to the north side, which was off-limits to blacks. And Captain Harry Duddington, deployed on the night of the riot to defend Townsville, had needed to wrest a pistol from the hand of a white American officer who had been accidentally jostled by a black American courier in a Townsville pub, and who intended to take vengeance.
Captain Hyman Samuelson, a white officer of the 96th Engineers (Colored), took a subtler view than most of the misuse of black soldiers. He declared on 17 April 1942, ‘It is a dirty shame the way white American soldiers treat our boys. The Australians are wonderfully tolerant, but the Americans, especially the southern boys, are a problem. The only solution will be to send our battalion away from any town.’ These observations were provoked by an experience on the afternoon the 96th first arrived in Townsville, when Samuelson found a hundred of his men loaded into the back of a truck and guarded like POWs by white GIs with fixed bayonets. A corporal threatened Samuelson when he attempted to unload the men. There were edgy reactions from American MPs and locals as African Americans went looking for entertainment and a drink, and from the black GIs themselves when they became aware of the limits as to what they could do or where they could go. They had come all this way to find themselves living in an antipodean version of the South. Jack Richardson had a conversation with black American soldiers in Townsville in which they expressed a sincere fear that when they had finished their work for the Allies they would be put on a ship which would then be torpedoed by the United States navy.
After a local brawl in Townsville, with locals and MPs on the one side and black GIs on the other, Samuelson noticed the black troops’ morale collapsing. They were totally banned from Townsville now and confined to their camp on the Upper Ross with a scant ration of beer and old, grainy movies for entertainment. Three days before he was shipped to Port Moresby as advance supply officer for the battalion, Samuelson wrote, ‘They want to be free, to be with a woman.’ But that w
as precisely what most worried white Australians. Rumours arose that the US army was staffing brothels with local white women to serve black Americans. White women who went to the Doctor Kava Club, a black American servicemen’s recreational centre set up in South Brisbane in 1943, were interrogated by the Vice Squad. In reality the majority of Australian women in centres such as the Doctor Kava Club were Aboriginal, the rare city-dwelling indigenes who were not confined to remote missions by the Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act of 1939. They lived in poor inner-city neighbourhoods, which were the only ones where black GIs were permitted.
Meanwhile, the segregation and discrimination suffered by the 96th Engineers particularly irked black soldiers who had been told that they were engaged in a global struggle for democracy. The famous Jackie Robinson, who would become the first black American to play Major League baseball, probably spoke for the 96th Engineers when he declared during his own military training in the US south, ‘They want to send me ten thousand miles away to fight for democracy when a hundred feet away they’ve got stools I can’t put my black butt on to drink a bottle of beer.’
The Allies, having done their best to create alienated black troops, were concerned that agents provocateurs or Communist agitators would stir up the resentments of the black soldiers in Australia. When there was a brawl between black GIs and military police in Ingham in 1943, the Queensland security service asked the Americans whether Axis sympathisers had caused it. The Americans acknowledged that there was probably ‘a Communistic element’ amongst the black soldiers. The brawl had in fact been caused by a ban on black servicemen attending dances. A black soldier had asked a cordon of military police, ‘Why shouldn’t we go to dances with white people? We are as good as, if not better than, the white race.’ So began a further free-for-all.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 49