The Aussie and the Yank

by DIXON WECTER

1

BEFORE the invasion of Australia by nearly a million GI’s, the average American seldom thought of that land save as a large blank continent with a zoological sense of humor. Concerning us, the Australian had a knowledge of sorts. Thanks to his press — which maintains a battery of New York and Hollywood columnists, with an eye to the more lurid and lunatic aspects of life in America — and to our movies, magazines, and canned music, the Australian reacts constantly to the vibrations of American life.

While our ignorance of our cousins down under is often tinged with smugness, theirs of us is accompanied by keen interest and some anxiety. No officious Congressman need remind them — these few English-speaking settlers of a big continent lying upon the perimeter of a restless Asia — that in their darkest hour the armed forces of America did for them what the Royal Navy was helpless to do.

The White Australia policy, which for half a century has kept out undesirables by the quaint device of a reading test in any language (such as Gaelic) set by the examiner, would not long have barred the Japanese in 1942 — without the battles of the Coral Sea and Guadalcanal.

During the century and a half of Australia’s relations with Britain, America has remained somewhere in the background as a tertium quid. American enterprise built the first telegraph lines and cable cars, broke records with clipper ships, and set up a famous stagecoach service from Melbourne to the gold diggings. Later, when the Australian states came to federate, they turned frankly to the United States for their political and judicial model.

Australian-American relations fell to their lowest ebb in the days of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which, joined to the onset of depression, toppled Australia’s American imports from thirty-five million pounds sterling in 1928-1929 to seven in 1931-1932. She has always bought our manufactures more eagerly than we have bought her wool; even though we use twice the wool we raise, a vast deal of this custom goes to Argentina and other producers nearer home. In consequence, in the last year before the war, while Australia’s trade with Britain showed by far the most favorable balance with any nation, — namely, a credit of about thirteen million pounds, — her trade with us showed the least favorable, a debit of nearly twelve million.

In the twenties and early thirties, before the threat of fascism closed ranks everywhere, Australia did not wholly escape a wave of anti-Americanism then passing around the globe. Australian labor suspected us as the great capitalist power, committed to exploitation and “payment by results,” and there was talk about Yankee intentions to “flood” Australia with goods.

Nevertheless, a solid friendliness has always existed between Australians and Americans. The repute of superciliousness which always, and often most unfairly, dogs the steps of the visiting Englishman, in America and Australia alike, does not operate on either side in Australian-American relations, nor does the American share a widespread British dislike of “Australian bumptiousness.” The homespun Aussie in turn has an old word for the pomegranate-cheeked emigrant from Britain — the pejorative “Pommy.” Back in 1941, in making a survey of opinion about the war, the anthropologist A. P. Elkin quoted some workingmen who asked, “Why should we fight the Pommies’ wars? I think it would be all right if America took us over, don’t you? More like us, the Americans are; we ain’t much like the Pommies.”

Yet Australia wears the yoke of the British Commonwealth more willingly than most Americans realize. Britain has learned, at least among colonists of her own blood, that it is a far shrewder policy to offer too much freedom than too little. Australia has shown nothing but apathy toward the Statute of Westminster, which in 1931 proffered them almost total independence — a measure, as they like to say jokingly down under, designed “to give Britain dominion status.” Australians, I found, were keenly interested in American history (as the largest American oil company in the Antipodes also discovered when it distributed free to its customers thousands of copies of Nevins and Commager’s pocket history of the United States). Our War of Independence they readily recognize as the pivotal event in British colonial relations. Former Prime Minister Menzies told me that in his boyhood most schoolbooks were pretty strongly pro-American. Australia has never deprecated our Independence. Neither has she shown much disposition to follow suit. Her contentment has its positive side, in old habits of sentiment and commerce, and its negative, an indifference to the non-English-speaking world.

Australia was settled by homesick men, the majority being younger sons, remittance men, the poor, the uprooted. Separated from their point of origin by the greatest distance possible on this globe, they clung to the continent’s rim as if sight of the open sea were a tie with the land they had left. They brought along not only the apple and hawthorn, the sheep and the cow, but also weeds like broom and gorse, and less useful fauna like the rabbit and fox and English hedgehog, to surround themselves with a loved milieu. While putting up with “near enough” standards of comfort and education and culture, — which leave their traces even now upon Australia, — they hoped some day to make their pile and return to Kent or Yorkshire.

However puzzling colonialism may be to the American mind, however strong the suspicion that Australia has given Britain — in resources, war manpower, and export of her best brains — more than Britain has given Australia, the fact remains for one’s admiration that a mother country and race can inspire such tenacious loyalty. No nation save England has ever been able to gain it.

2

AUSTRALIA’S long-rooted program of social planning is still a major concern, of keener real interest than matters of foreign policy. It is not doctrinaire socialism in the Marxist sense. It stems from another basic difference between our history and theirs. Australia, with an area as big as continental United States, even in her pioneering days had no real frontier. The landless and discontented, in the wake of the gold rush and pre-emption of the limited good land, eddied back to the few big coastal cities and sublimated their disappointment by starting a great trade-union movement which antedated the rise of big business, and by political action has kept its advantage.

A “fair average wage” means more to the unhurried Australian than sporadic big money. His unions have a “go slow” policy that requires a “wharfie” to load only so many bales of wool per hour, a mason to lay just so many bricks. This ceiling upon effort has raised production costs out of line with world parity prices. It is one reason why Australia will never become a highly industrialized nation, but must continue to count upon the world’s buying her raw wool and unprocessed steel.

As compensation, Australia’s mid-Victorian liberalism — the greatest good for the greatest number — has saved her our worst slum developments and areas of abject rural poverty, the shock of our heaviest depressions, and our record of industrial violence. Only one man has been killed in labor disputes in this century. Such domestic affairs, — a living wage, social security, industrial arbitration, protection of home industry, and the White Australia policy, — these ways by which she has long sought to insulate her demi-paradise against poverty, competition, and external pressure, are still the concerns nearest her heart.

Australia wants to live and let live. Before the Washington Conference of 1922, she worked against Canada and the United States in trying to persuade Britain to keep her old treaties with Japan, but was overruled from Home. Ten years later she looked upon the Stimson policies in Manchuria as too provocative; the hornet’s nest was well left alone. In 1940, with her best soldiers embarking for the European theater, she agreed to, and indeed may have forced, the closing of the Burma Road. Up to Pearl Harbor, all her loyalties and warlike attitudes were oriented toward Europe. Australia in fact used to think that “the sure shield” of the British Navy saved her from having any foreign policy of her own. Too much free will or initiative she dreaded.

Now, like our own country, Australia is convinced of the fallacy of isolationism, but gives a lingering backward look toward the good old days — the wish, as someone has said, that things should be again as they never quite were. Whenever immediate security is in danger, she has the reflexes of independent action. But at bottom, Australian foreign policy is none too sure of itself, looking anxiously to both the United States and Britain.

It is no fault of Dr. H. V. Evatt that the spirit of his government is not more bullish. In October, 1943, he announced that the joint power of Australia and New Zealand “is very great.” He had a main hand in the Australia-New Zealand Agreement of January, 1944, which grandly demanded Australasian consent in all changes of sovereignty or control “in any of the islands in the Pacific.” He complained bitterly that his country had no voice at Potsdam, in decisions to retain the Mikado or in plans to set up the Far Eastern Commission under veto power by the Big Four.

Dr. Evatt, however, is probably the most unpopular man in Australia. During seven months of living in his home town and lecturing at his alma mater, Sydney University, I never heard a single hearty endorsement of him. His past, his present, and his future are all subject to the most scathing rumor, conjecture, and disparagement. What one Australian described as “Evatt’s demand that he be consulted on everything that’s happening anywhere” goes down less successfully than did the homely nationalism of “Billy” Hughes at Versailles in 1919.

Certainly the type of politician most favored by the Australian people is the plodding, homely man with neither arrogance nor eloquence, like the late John Curtin, who left school at twelve to become a printer’s devil, or his successor, Joseph Chifley, the former locomotive engineer. On the stump, the electorate prefers a politician whose grasp of the obvious amounts to a stranglehold. For the average Aussie, given to belittlement and sardonic humor, is a born debunker, blunt in speech, allergic to high-brows as well as quacks, sentimentalists, and loud-speakers. Of poets and romancers and heroes his race has produced a negligible quantity, but of realistic novelists, satiric painters, and caricaturists a notable crop. In a man like Evatt he suspects insincerity and delusions of grandeur. Evatt has also impinged upon the mores of Empire loyalty by demanding a foreign policy quite independent of Whitehall.

Among conservatives, isolationism in Australia often assumes the shape of passing the buck to Britain; with Labor, of threatening to sit out “all foreign wars” in favor of home defense. The average man oscillates between these ideas, but is likely to be repelled by the extreme statement of either position. The Labor Party, with a better political sense than its opponents, has been flexible enough to bend under the pressure of circumstances, reversing itself in respect to the Second World War when theory yielded to fact. For, in December, 1938, Mr. Curtin had told the world “we have no resources left which would warrant us undertaking commitments in the defense of other countries far away.” Three years later found him strongly pro-American; six years later, increasingly pro-British.

Despite moments of irritation with “the Pommies,” the average Australian longs neither for independence nor for annexation as the Forty-Ninth State — as slyly proposed from time to time by the Chicago Tribune, in payment for this or that British debt. In the desperate days after Pearl Harbor, the search for powerful allies stirred the South Pacific from its old dependence upon Britain. Prime Minister Curtin in his famous speech of December 27, 1941, invoked not only the United States but also Russia; Dr. Evatt asserted that Russia “cannot and will not tolerate any attempt by Japan to destroy the southern democracies.” It was a shade ironic that the Labor Government in this crisis found its only effectual friend in the capitalist power that it had sometimes eyed distrustfully.

For, as Mr. Curtin’s words were spoken, the first American troops — diverted from the Philippines by news of the Japanese attack — were landing at Brisbane and the ports of tropical Australia, hastily setting up ack-ack batteries and laying out airstrips. In early 1942, with the Japanese offensive rolling irresistibly south and Australia’s British hope gone with Singapore, more American divisions landed at Melbourne and Adelaide; Perth became a great submarine base; and March 17 witnessed the dramatic arrival of General MacArthur, by Australia’s special request.

3

THE “American invasion” of Australia was matter for awe, curiosity, and delight — with combined aspects of the crusades, the circus, and the gold rush. It also meant salvation to a brave but wholly unprepared people. “Your soldiers were the answer to prayer,” the roving American is still told. After the Battle of the Coral Sea, the landings in the Solomons, and the offensive over the Kokoda Trail — spearheaded by Aussies recalled from the Middle East — the Commonwealth breathed more easily. Today a visiting American is loaded with thanks, personally undeserved, “for what your country did to save Australia.”

It is probably better for no one to bask contentedly in the sun of this good will. If we saved Australia, it was done primarily in saving ourselves. In Australia we found the only base able to provision a growing army and mount an offensive into the jungles of New Guinea and ultimately the Philippines. The need and the help alike were mutual.

Isolation and hospitality frequently go together; in Australia the only limit set to hospitality is the visitor’s stamina. In a wartime Australia, at home to the servicemen, this hospitality flowered.

The American Center in Sydney always had more dinner invitations and week-end plans than there were GI’s to fill them. In Adelaide the ThirtySecond Division, recruited mainly from Michigan and Wisconsin, arrived still smarting from the Southern brush-off they had received during the Louisiana maneuvers, — when reportedly not a single “Yankee” was asked out to Thanksgiving dinner, — and the wining and dining of South Australia was balm to their souls. Most Americans in turn wasted no grumbling as winter came on over the lack of central heating, but shivered cheerfully about the flickering hearth; food was usually plain but abundant, since Australia is a basic producer.

In general, relations between the GI’s and Australian civilians ranged from good to excellent. In time the honeymoon waned a little, as suggested by later coinage of the word “Yank-happy”; irritable civilians blamed the Americans for every rape in the park as well as the dearth of taxis and apartments, while equally peevish GI’s tended to magnify the discomforts of life in a new land. Eager to spend their folding green, they invited the overcharge of waiters, landlords, florists, and cab drivers, who called their profits “Yankee cream.”

High pay and free spending of our men yielded no more than the usual toll of inflation in civilian circles, envy in local military ones. GI’s with a grudge against overcharging, in the Pacific or European theater, will readily endorse these sentiments of an expeditionary force member long “They fleece us pitilessly; the price of everything is exorbitant; in all dealings that we have with them they treat us more like enemies than friends.” These words were written in 1782 by Count Fersen, staff officer to Lafayette, after a winter among the Yankees. Curiously enough, the GI’s reputation in Australia — that of a stalwart and efficient soldier, with too much money and a devastating way with the girls, is almost exactly that gained in 1915-1919 by the Anzacs in England.

The Yank’s instincts were often those of the predatory male. The lobby of Sydney’s best hotel — haunt of American officers and their peroxided, “perm-waved” companions who seemed to blossom miraculously on demand — came to be known as the Pit of Passion. On a Sydney streetcar last winter I observed a temperance poster, “The World’s Greatest Home-Wrecker — Drink,” whose last word had been altered in pencil to “Yanks.” Certain civilians tended to believe the worst about GI morals. Sounds of laughter and singing in any house or hotel taken over by the Army in provincial communities always led to the assumption that orgies were in progress.

In Townsville — a semi-tropical town swamped by military traffic until tempers grew raw on both sides — a characteristic rumor whispered that a whole railway coach full of pregnant WAAF’s had been shipped south, the carriage bearing the chalked label, “Return When Empty.” The Deputy Mayor of that town went so far as to state in public that “soldiers were now pushing the girls whom they had impregnated under Army trucks to save themselves the expense of an illegal operation.”

In 1943 these myths were scrupulously sifted by the Prime Minister’s Committee on National Morale, which found, in the former instance, only one pregnant WAAF in this area during the six months in question, and in the latter a sole accident involving a U. S. Army truck in Townsville, where a local citizen was injured when the truck against which he was leaning started up without giving him notice. Concerning the home-wrecking repute of the GI, this report noted: “The woman is, for the most part, absolved nevertheless, blame being attributed to either the subtlety or the crudity of the Americans, according to the observer’s inclination,”

The total number of Australian war brides runs to about 15,000. A few have been admittedly unfortunate — most publicized being the case of a Negro soldier’s Australian wife, who, without much notion of the regional feelings involved, went alone to his home in the South and has now returned embittered to Australia. The tensions of war have already begun to produce their crop of divorces, although the temperamental affinity between Australians and Americans ought to keep the percentage lower than in most international matings of this war. According to a news dispatch in January, 1946, about three hundred American soldiers with Australian wives plan to settle in the Commonwealth, an underpopulated land that challenges a sense of enterprise.

Australia’s Ninth Division, long absent in North Africa, came back in the middle of the war believing German propaganda leaflets that said the Yanks had stolen their wives and sweethearts. When they touched at Fremantle, the Diggers were breathing fire and brimstone. American soldiers in Sydney were instructed to keep to their quarters when the Aussies arrived, and the windows of the American Center were boarded up.

Not a single incident followed their arrival. Beyond the tidemark of a joke — “Say, Dig, we’ve stolen your girls.” “Not at all, buddy; you only sorted them out for us” — the rumor quickly ebbed. Within a few days soldiers from the two camps were visiting each other and inventing a service-team sport called “Austus” football, with a miscellany of Australian and United States rules. Despite occasional street brawls in Brisbane and the northern ports — often no more sanguine than a street fight in Cairns which was broken up by an old lady with her umbrella — relations were good. Friendliness always varied inversely with the distance from the front.

One clear impression left by the GI served as a good corrective to the pulp magazines, boogie-woogie, and cheap Western movies which have long filtered into Australia and led some old-fashioned alarmists to deprecate “American vulgarity.” This corrective came from the alertness, personality, and good education of the average GI — whether he was asking his way at the street corner or sharing Sunday dinner with an Australian family. Robert G. Menzies told me that since the American influx, he has been able to state publicly, “without being offered violence,” that the average American is better educated than the average Australian.

4

AFTER most of the GI’s had gone forward, late in 1944, the Royal Navy moved into Sydney and Melbourne. Political considerations probably had as much to do with this disposition of Britain’s proudest service arm as did docking facilities — in making up to Australia for her understandable neglect before the invasion of Europe. Comparison with the Americans was interesting. By general opinion, the British ratings were much inferior in physique and education, the officers perhaps on a parity. The sailors had little money, which did not endear them to the shopkeepers, but awoke sympathy in other circles, with published warnings to the local girls not to snub servicemen unable to produce taxis and orchids.

On the whole, however, if skirts were the weakness of the GI, the bottle was that of the British sailor. Last October I saw an altercation in Sydney’s Kings Cross between two tipsy ratings and a shabby, middle-aged civilian who reproved them for throwing banana peel upon the pavement; after they had treated him to billingsgate and a few physical threats, and reminded him how far they had come to save him from the Japs, they lurched off, while he told a gathering audience, “The Yanks never abused us like that — and it was them, not the limeys, that saved Australia.” In justice to the British Navy it should be remembered that its sailors arrived at a time less dramatic, when civilian morale was already growing a little jaded.

A mild Anglophilia is again noticeable in Australian life, particularly among the prosperous. Last December, the headmaster of the Sydney Church of England Grammar School, on the annual speech day, reminded parents that English schools are the best in the world for “moral and spiritual qualities,” and that “we should do well to look to them rather than to America, as some of our educational theorists are inclined to do.” From the same cloisters — where obviously the influence of the GI had scarcely penetrated — a young sportsmaster was testifying at the same time, before a Parliamentary Committee on Broadcasting, that “Australia’s radio life is flooded with cheapskate American stuff, especially in communities which have been designed to suit the mental age of the U.S.A., which psychological experiments have shown to be six years.” (Australia’s, he added, was twelve.)

Whatever their I.Q., masses of Australians continue so to welcome certain products from the United States — Hollywood films, Tin-Pan Alley music, the slang and plays of yesterday — that agitation is in the air for a cultural protective tariff, proposing to bolster British movies by block-booking methods, to require that 75 per cent of the cast of any play shall be home talent, and to demand that a certain quota of Australian books be found in every bookseller’s stock. The majority want to take their pleasures where they find them; the most intelligent know that if a cultural vacuum is created, masses of local writers and actors will not necessarily rush in to fill it.

5

LIKE the abrupt ending of Lend-Lease, the loan to Britain is generally seen by the press down under from a rather plaintive point of view. Some Australian newspapers have been offering Britain “the wholehearted sympathy of Australia and the other Dominions,” in the presence of the Yankee moneylender. Such views are not unanimous. In late December the influential Sydney Sun rebuked “those critics who seem inclined to revive the ‘Uncle Shylock’ of the stormy and bitter controversies that followed the First World War.”

At times, faith in American bounty is a little naïve. An Australian engineer solemnly assured me that it would pay the United States to give Australia outright a hundred million dollars, and say, “For God’s sake, buy something from us with this money ” — by which means, American factories would hum and unemployment would be kept at bay. The role of Santa Claus is admittedly jollier than that of Uncle Shylock, but such innocence overlooks the fact that the distribution of commodities depends on some exchange basis of goods and services.

More reasonable is Australia’s hope that we may lower our tariffs, buy more of her basic products, and make available more dollar credits for her need of our manufactures. “If America is prosperous the whole world is likely to be prosperous,” says a recent current affairs bulletin for discussion groups in the Australian Army. The empty display rooms of British motorcar dealers in Sydney have lately begun to blossom with the hopeful legend, “ Britain Delivers the Goods”; unless further steps are taken at our initiative to supplant Empire preference with free trade, the corollary will soon follow: “Buy British — and like it!” Ultimately, and properly, Australian commerce will tend to pursue its own best interests, without slavish submission either to Britain or to the United States.

Australia knows clearly that she has more to fear from American isolation than from American intervention. Her worry is not our aggression, but our indifference, the reputation of our foreign policy for irresponsibility. Australia wonders whether she can put the same trust in us that she reposes in the steadier foreign policy of Britain.

The average Australian fears withdrawal of American interest from the Far Pacific, knowing well that in war seven million people cannot hold three million square miles; and so he has returned to thinking about the greatest navy in the world, which will always hold the key to the welfare of that region which mapmakers call Oceania. Once this navy flew the Union Jack, and had a political reason for defending him. Now it flies the Stars and Stripes, but its reasons for keeping peace in the Pacific are to his mind no less cogent. He hopes we shall lay permanent claim to the Marianas, the Marshalls, the Carolines; if we want Manus, in his own Admiralty group, almost certainly he will hand it over cheerfully.

But he expects to assume the prime responsibility for guarding those islands which lie like a shield to his immediate north and east, beginning with New Guinea, And, being a sensitive fellow, he hopes we will not throw our weight around too blatantly in the Far Pacific, or forget — as some Congressmen, war movie makers, and Hanson Baldwin seemed to do — that his soldiers, the Diggers, also fought.

“There is no jealousy anywhere in the British Commonwealth of America’s emergence as the greatest air and naval Power,” says a recent editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Far from it. The stronger her forces are, the safer we shall feel; the more active her interest in foreign affairs, the less danger there will be of a repetition of the tragedy that followed her retreat into isolation after World War I.” At all hazards, America’s leadership in the future, whether for progress or regression, peace or war, is recognized down under as decisive.