The Australian American "War Bride" Story: who was excluded? Desire and mobility across colourlines and the limits of race in the aftermath of the Pacific War (1941-1945).

The “warbride story” as it is popularly conceived across Australia and the US – allies in the Pacific War -- is one of dizzy romance, mobility, and transnational family formations, underscoring western women’s changing sexuality and agency in the mid-twentieth century. But who was excluded? In Australia some 15,000 women, many who had borne children from their wartime liaisons, qualified for an official warbride scheme, legislated through the War Brides Act of December 1945, emigrating to the United States when peace came. Yet beneath this seemingly white-on-white story lies a deeply disturbing, segregated history of hundreds of Aboriginal women and American servicemen of colour who were denied the right to marry and excluded from immigrating to their partner’s country in order to be able raise their children together, because of the complex web of racialised social policies and immigration laws in each of these settler colonial nations. 

Drawing on extensive new archival and oral history research, this paper considers the contrasting stories of three Australian women who forged relationships with American soldiers on the homefront, in order to illumine the changing ways race, gender and women’s bodies were at the heart of policing intimacy and citizenship across social and geographic hemispheres during wartime and its immediate aftermath.

The research is being conducted as part of an Australian Research Council Indigenous Discovery Project, IN140100036,  Children Born of War with Dr Victoria Grieves and Associate Professor Catriona Elder.