Some Women's War
Robert Drewe
Anthony J. Baker and Lisa Jackson
IN THE SIXTIES my mother's friends still gossiped about Mrs Maguire, the woman up the hill who had allegedly 'gone with the Americans' during the war. In her hat and suit, Mrs Maguire was a tall, elegant, rather lonely figure as she strode past our front curtains to the bus stop. But not as lonely-looking as the silent, vaguely-ravaged Mr Maguire, trudging his usual five or six paces behind.
If, as my mother's cronies suggested, Mrs Maguire's war had passed in a miasma of champagne, gifts and fornication with the American servicemen (a level of licentiousness matched only by women who 'went with' Dalkeith bookmakers, the other big spenders of those innocent Perth days) it was, as Fleeting Attraction makes clear, not too dissimilar to the war experienced by thousands of Perth women of all classes and ages, single and married. Married, it is hardly necessary to point out, to young Australian husbands away fighting for their lives.
In their differing ways, histories such as John Hammond's Over-Sexed Over-Paid and Over Here, and Yanks Down Under 1941-45, by E. Daniel Potts and Annette Potts, as well as novels as varied as Xavier Herbert's Soldiers' Women, Henrietta Drake-Brockman's The Fatal Days, Robin Sheiner's Smile, The War is Over and Lois Battle's War Brides have dobbed in many of the mothers and grandmothers of the two generations born since the war.
But while the earlier literature, and the contemporary press, describes how the Americans were, at least initially, warmly welcomed throughout Australia as heroes and saviours, much of it concludes that most eastern Australians were not too sorry to see them go, the relationship having been soured by the constant brawling between Allied soldiers and the string of Melbourne murders committed by Private Edward Leonski. As usual, things were different in the west.
Anthony Barker and Lisa Jackson point out in Fleeting Attraction just how different, how much more intense, welcome and lasting, the American impact was there. Of course Perth women went ape over the Yanks, whose Catalina flying-boat base at Crawley Bay on the Swan River was perfectly situated for patrolling the Indian Ocean and, equally strategically, the famous middle-class, mixed-drinking watering-hole, the Nedlands Park Hotel (Steve's), next door. So did the girls of Fremantle (port to the US navy and home of the biggest US submarine base), Albany (a submarine base) and Geraldton (another Catalina base), greeting them ecstatically as a new super-species.
Former Pennsylvanian foundry hands, Arkansan farm boys and Depression jetsam still struggling with their Navy primers on how to read and write suddenly found themselves regarded as urbane, romantic and wealthy Hollywood heroes. Not surprisingly they wondered what had hit them, especially when the majority of local males they met -- the fathers and young brothers of their ardent girlfriends, war-excluded farmers and even servicemen -- were also amiable, trusting and hospitable.
Perth's adoring relationship with the Americans had a responsible basis: genuine gratitude. They offered protection from invasion to a vulnerable, uniquely isolated and increasingly anxious state whose northern towns of Broome, Exmouth, Onslow, Port Headland and Wyndham had already been bombed by the advancing Japanese.
But Barker and Jackson stress that any coherent picture of the interaction of Americans and Western Australians must consider the state's uniqueness, 'always self-evident to its inhabitants, even though their fervent conviction may be a matter of indifference or amusement to the rest of the country.'
Combining feelings of intense parochialism, confused identity and ambiguous loyalties, Western Australians, Fleeting Attraction tells us, are still both more pro-American than any other Australians. And, with higher levels of United Kingdom immigration, also demonstrably more British, to the extent that proposals for a secessionist, pro- monarchical state (should fellow-Australians opt for a republic) are canvassed without fear of general ridicule.
It is impossible to ignore the isolation of Western Australia and the special feelings that go with it -- a need more urgent even than that felt by other Australians to seek the reassurance of outside attention, the validation conferred by outside approval and, in some cases, even the means of escape into that outside world.
Ouch!...