"I WILL BE GRATEFUL ALL OF MY LIFE' MOTHERS OF CHILDREN BORN OF WAR IN AUSTRALIA DURING THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC 1941 - 1945 IN AUSTRALIA

Between 1942-1944 a young woman in North Queensland, Australia, wrote at least seven letters to two Australian Prime Ministers requesting that the White Australia immigration policy be suspended to allow the father of her two small children to return to Australia at the end of the war. An extraordinary person, Rachel Patterson stepped outside of the social boundaries of the time, exercising greater agency than expected of a woman. Rachel was not alone in that other white and coloured women in Australia chose to have relationships with African American men that often led to pregnancy but very rarely to marriage. Permission to marry was not granted as a matter of course in the case of African American military personnel. The letters of Jean Augher who developed a married life with an African American sailor Trennor Joiner in Sydney, survive in their son’s personal archive. Geoffrey Joiner became something of a media sensation when he was returned to his US-based father from a Sydney orphanage where his mother had left him when he was two-and-a-half years old. The contrast of her letters to her prospective mother-in-law and family with media representations of a “heartless woman” is stark. This paper critically analyses the nature of these women and others, from their letters, from media and other representations of them, including the views of their children.