DEFENCE REFORMS AND OPPORTUNITIES: 1946-64

The Corporal came around and he said, 'Prepare to move out. Things are getting a bit hot here.' And I said, 'I'm ready.' Never heard the word to get out, so we were left behind and I was wounded and me mate was killed.

– Len Ogilvie, Korean War veteran

The aboriginal people gained further credit for themselves last week when one of their number parachuted from a plane near Newcastle. He was L/Corporal Stan Houston, full-blooded aborigine of Rockhampton, and he had just graduated as a paratrooper at the Williamtown RAAF station.

– Dawn, April 1952

Dawn and its successor New Dawn were monthly magazines published by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board between 1952 and 1975. The magazines reported widely on the board's activities, but they also reported news supposedly of general interest to Aboriginal Australians. One of the main objectives of Dawn and New Dawn was to promote assimilation within Aboriginal communities. Why Dawn and New Dawnare significant here is because the Australian military featured frequently throughout the magazines' publication run. Some issues featured stories about Aboriginal people serving in the armed forces, while others reported general Australian military news. The Korean conflict, for example, was a frequent subject, mentioned in 17 separate issues between 1952 and 1959. The cover image of the March 1955 issue was even a photograph of Aboriginal serviceman Cecil Donovan. The caption reads that he 'is proud to be doing his training with the C.M.F. [Citizen Military Forces] and his fellow trainees are proud to have him as a team mate'.

The strong military presence in Dawn reflected evolving military policies in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander enlistment, as well as the ways in which a new discourse was conflating military service and assimilation during the 1950s and 1960s. Assimilation had different meanings, both among non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians. One feature is common to the different interpretations of assimilation: agreement that equality required an end to discrimination. This was as true for the military as it was for civilian Australia. This chapter traces the evolution of military policies and the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander service personnel from the end of the Second World War until just before the Vietnam War. This period witnessed important shifts from the exclusion of persons not substantially of European origin and descent during the military occupation of Japan, through to repealing such restrictions and, while not necessarily welcoming Indigenous service personnel, at least opening the door to their participation in Korea and Malaya. Meanwhile, as the military was gradually becoming more colourblind in its recruitment practices, discourse in civilian Australia promoted military service as a means to assimilate Indigenous Australians.

The traditional historical interpretation of assimilation as summarised by scholar Anna Haebich is that it represented the promise of equal citizenship rights for Aboriginal people, but in exchange 'they were required to abandon their distinctive cultural values, lifestyles, customs, languages and beliefs and conform to the national way of life'. As Russell McGregor and Rani Kerin argue, there were tensions in the 1950s between policymakers, who saw assimilation as the rise of individualism and gradual decline of Aboriginal traditions (a monocultural vision of assimilation), and anthropologists and Aboriginal supporters, who advocated pluralist models of assimilation where certain features of Aboriginality would be permitted and sometimes even encouraged to endure. In the 1960s the pluralist vision was superseded by the concept of integration, whereby Aboriginal people could participate in the nation-state with equal rights while preserving their distinct cultural identities. Citizenship became the bridge linking military service with assimilation because military service has traditionally been viewed as an exercise of the duties and obligations of citizenship. Even Aboriginal activists of the 1930s to 1940s invoked participation in the first and second world wars as grounds to claim citizenship rights. Those activists considered citizenship rights to constitute political and economic equality; for policymakers in the 1950s, though, citizenship rights, military service and equality became tied up with the notion of assimilation.

The British Commonwealth Occupation Force and debating exclusion

Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers on 15 August 1945, thus concluding the Second World War. The formal Instrument of Surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. Between those two dates the occupation of Japan by United States military personnel under the command of General Douglas MacArthur commenced. These troops remained in Japan until the San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on 8 September 1951, came into force. Under the aegis of MacArthur, the Americans in Japan helped to implement significant changes to the Japanese political system, including establishing a democratic form of government. Not all of the occupying service personnel were Americans, though. Also present was the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF), a force drawn from the United Kingdom, India, Australia and New Zealand. The motives for the Commonwealth presence in defeated Japan had much to do with continuing to assert a British influence in East Asia. As far as the Australians were concerned, the impetus for participation came from a sense that their role in the Pacific War had been overlooked. The Australian component left for Japan in February 1946 to take up its occupation responsibilities in Hiroshima prefecture. With the departure of the British segment of BCOF to Malaya, and the withdrawal of Indian forces subsequent to that country's independence in August 1947, BCOF came to be dominated by Australians. About 16,000 Australians served as part of BCOF between 1946 and 1952, and it was Australia's major military commitment until the outbreak of the Korean conflict in 1950.

The Labor government did its best to keep the Indigenous presence in BCOF to a minimum, with military selection boards again enforcing the rules about European origin and descent. As Frank Forde, the minister for the army in the Ben Chifley federal government, explained: 'In recruiting forces, particularly for the islands and Japan, a high standard of physical fitness and good educational qualifications are required. Aboriginal members of the Australian Military Forces gave splendid service during the war, but most of them cannot conform to the standard laid down for the Japan force.' As with the Second World War,...