CHAPTER SEVEN
FROM HYDE PARK TO HOLLYWOOD
I discovered a pub so wild that taxis refused to take me to the front door. It was on the waterfront and reminded me that this was once a convict island. Women fought on the floor, tearing each other’s hair out, while men emptied pints of beer over the writhing bodies. And an old man danced crazily to a jukebox, his hair matted with blood that had stiffened over the days.
Waltzing Materialism
Anonymous English writer.
Australian civilians, in common with the government of the day, were inexperienced in the realities of war. During these dark times, everyone had seen news photos of the devastation caused by Hitler’s blitzkrieg bombers in Europe; but fear of the Japanese was much more deep-rooted and intense. Rumours were circulating around the country about the horrific treatment of 16,000 Australian soldiers and nurses captured in Singapore and now incarcerated in the infamous Changi prison camp. There were stories of Australian nurses being gang raped then killed, of slivers of bamboo being forced under fingernails, and of public and summary eviscerations with swords. All confirmed an impression that the Japanese were a devilish, cruel and monstrous enemy.
During the three weeks following the indecisive Coral Sea battle and aerial engagement on 8 May, it finally dawned on Australia that an invasion could be at hand.
When Japan entered the war, the Australian Government issued identity cards to all civilians over 16 years of age; air raid wardens were given steel helmets and National Emergency servicemen and women were trained in fire-fighting, first-aid, and aircraft spotting. In case of possible gas attacks, respirators were stored in readily accessible places.
In Sydney, the underground railway tunnel was hastily converted to an air raid shelter, with numerous entrances situated throughout the city, while civilians in the suburbs dug slit trenches in their backyards for use as bomb shelters. Sandbags were stacked against city buildings to protect them from bomb blasts and street names, hotel names and signposts were ripped down to confuse the Japanese invaders. A now weird and ghostly Bondi Beach was fortified with barbed wire and tank traps, while cliffs and headlands around Sydney were honeycombed with concrete pill-boxes, gun turrets, and searchlight and anti-aircraft batteries.
At the Sydney General Post Office the tower was dismantled and its stones numbered then put into safe storage until after the war. Frequent air raid drills were carried out in office buildings, schools, and factories. A top secret “denial squad” was formed and trained to fire and demolish important factories and other industrial plants to deny the Japanese their use… an idea, which came from the Russian “scorched earth” policy against invading Nazis. This unpopular squad even partially cut through steel beams, which supported the roofs of some of Sydney’s biggest factories to help facilitate their rapid destruction; while explosives and inflammable materials were stored within their confines to help expedite the destruction.
From the end of 1941 onwards a “brown-out”, or modified blackout, was imposed, whereby lights couldn’t be seen from the air but could be seen from the street. Car headlights were masked at night and dark curtains placed across exposed windows. In Kings Cross, however, lights from clubs and bars were kept blazing, as if oblivious to the outside world, and prostitutes continued to ply their trade with cries of “Hello Sailor”.
Dread of a Japanese invasion expressed itself in a brittle gaiety, which seemed to overtake everyone. The advent of the American GIs raised Australians’ hopes of defeating the Japanese and had the effect of lifting morale generally. Sydney office and hotel buildings were taken over by a wave of khaki to accommodate administration staffs and servicemen on leave or passing through Sydney in transit to other areas.
It should be remembered that Sydney was a front line city under benign occupation by American troops. There were more than 80,000 US servicemen in Australia at this time. But their wartime “invasion” of Sydney had its compensations. It cosmopolitanised what had been an isolated and provincial town, dreamily locked up in its own rather puritanical past. The social and sexual ramifications of the American invasion were immense, and have been made public in a number of classic books. John Hammond Moore wrote in his book, Over-Sexed, Over-Paid and Over Here:
The GI was a novelty, something new and different, and most welcome. Compared with the Australian soldier, he was beautifully dressed, well paid and often possessed an aura of mystery and romance. This was a dream come true for a generation of Australian females nurtured on Hollywood legends… and most important, with the cream of Australian manhood overseas, the GI was here in the flesh, both available and willing.
A more personalised version appears in Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’ wartime classic, Come in Spinner. This, the most famous novel of wartime Sydney, was first published in 1951 and has seldom been out of print since. One of the novel’s heroines, Guinea, reminisces:
Ah yes, the great days of ’42… when the American forces first spread over the country in a wave of superbly tailored beige-pinks, olive drabs and light khakis; a wave that bore on its crest orchids, nylons, exquisite courtesy, Hollywood lovemaking and a standard of luxury that had never before been experienced outside the ranks of the privileged socialites…
The affluent Yanks were paid twice the amount of their Australian counterparts and soon acquired a reputation as big spenders. They handled money recklessly, offering a handful of assorted Australian notes in payment for prized cartons of Camel and Lucky Strike cigarettes,
local orchids, black market liquor, perfume and nylon stockings – commodities, which were now becoming a status symbol and a way of life. The smooth-talking Yanks got preferential treatment from shopkeepers, barmaids and taxi drivers, and Australian girls who accepted their orchids at night would often sell them back to the florist the next day at half price.
A satirical poem, wittily directed at the Americans at the time, was published in Australia’s Yesterdays by Cyril Pearl. Entitled “The Passionate (US) General to His Love”, it went:
Come live with me and be my bride,
And you’ll have orchids five feet wide,
Unrationed robes from Saks to swathe in
And Chanel No 5 to bathe in.
With sheer stockings by the mile on
You’ll be my serpent of the Nylon…
We’ll take a flat at Darlinghurst
Big enough for Randolph Hearst;
At breakfast, as we sip our bourbon,
I’ll tell you how I met Miss Durbin;
And when I’m back in U.S.A.,
I’ll send you a cable on Mother’s Day!
Apart from these erotic reveries, and on a wider level, Canadian, Archibald Shaw, indicated the Australian/American situation to US Military Intelligence officers on his return to North America in May 1942, after five years in Sydney. In his report, reprinted in Over-Sexed, Over-Paid and Over Here, he noted how favourably received the American soldiers were. They seemed better behaved and better educated than their Australian confreres. He made the comment that in Australia he has never seen an American soldier drunk. He then added rather perceptively:
The great system [amongst the Australians] is beer, beer and more beer. I think it is an organised thing from the higher-ups. It is directed toward keeping the working class down – by getting them to spend their money recklessly and not allowing them to be educated outside of their work. There are lots of dog races every night, horse racing every week, lotteries every week and plenty of beer…
Unions are very strong. They are controlled by the government, I know that. Another great system in Australia is not to create, but to get by. That is the heritage of the people – to copy someone else. There is a lack of originality, and besides it is much easier to copy someone else.
The Australians are not worried about the war. It is hard to get them down to brass tacks. The captain of our ship told me that there were about 65 ships in the harbour at Melbourne, but there was a day’s holiday just the same and no one was working. No one is interested in working – it is just a question of using up time.
A devastating indictment of Australian workers’ attitudes to the war at this time can be seen in an excerpt from a confidential report by an American war correspondent to US Army Intelligence.
Although these attitudes astonished the Americans, they will come as less of a surprise to an Australian reader. The American journalist commented that Australians refused to work in the rain and took time out for their tea. The heavy looting, which occurred at all docks, he regarded as a national disgrace. He added the “longshoremen” weren’t searched as they left the docks and consequently got away with “a lot of stuff ”. He wrote incredulously: “A laborer can be caught, convicted and sentenced, serve his time, at the expiration of which his union will accept him for work at the same job where he was caught looting.”
Perhaps one of the more sinister aspects of the American “invasion” was the racial conflict between white Americans and black GIs. Blacks were relegated to their own clubs by white Americans who requested that Australian newspapers not publish photographs or stories of black Americans being entertained by white hostesses. On one occasion, white Americans wrecked a Sydney dance hall when the Australian manager refused to exclude black Americans, but the story was not allowed to be published at the request of the American High Command.
The influx of the Americans also allowed black markets to flourish at a time when the government was attempting to shorten drinking hours at hotels and reduce the production of beer. Sly grog shops flourished but, despite vigilant policing, there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of alcohol in Sydney nightclubs and restaurants. The price of a bottle of “black” beer was five shillings, whereas its legal price was only one shilling and seven pence. Australian whisky sold for three pounds and scotch for five pounds. One American admitted to buying 84 pounds of alcohol in one week.
Sir Paul Hasluck reflected on this problem in his official history of Australia during World War II, when he rather sniffily wrote: “Wartime experience makes it clear that beer and betting meant more than anything else in life to a considerable number of Australians.”
It was not unusual to see an Australian drinker stagger outside a pub, put his fingers down his throat, throw-up and then go back inside for another pint. This compulsive obsession with drinking overflowed into cricket, football and horse races, and women came a poor third to such “male” activities. With the arrival of the GI, women suddenly found themselves the centre of attention and Australian men complained that, in addition to the Americans killing Phar Lap, they also stole their women. Hyde Park and the Domain, Sydney’s panoramic harbourside parklands, became popular havens for the explosion of young lovers.
The headland of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair was crowded with couples spooning and necking in the moonlight. This famous lovers’ retreat was made more exotic by the scent of magnolias wafting up from the Botanical Gardens. At this idyllic place of fraternisation under the Moreton Bay figs, which was for many an oasis, the only reminder that a war was being waged was the imposing silhouettes of Allied warships congesting the harbour.