Study team launches hunt for Allied servicemen’s offspring
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RESEARCHERS are searching for Territory families who may have links to allied troops stationed in the Northern Territory during the War in the Pacific from 1941 to 1944.
Researcher Karen Hughes is on the hunt for descendants of Allied troops that had relationships with local women. She said many may not know who their fathers or grandfathers are due to the race-based legislation preventing mixedraced couples immigrating to other countries.
The team of researchers is working with about 30 of the 50 families they’ve identified in Australia so far but strongly believe there are more in the Northern Territory with US troops stationed in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and Darwin.
“There are some from the NT we don’t know about,” Ms Hughes said.
“In Alice Springs there was a lot of socialising and dancing, particularly the women who were mixed raced who attended dances with US troops and socialised with African-Ameri- can troops. Alice may be a place we hear more about that history from.”
The project aims to highlight the impact of the racebased legislation at the time that prevented couples staying together to raise children.
“Many people were very in love and it was devastating,” Ms Hughes said.
Ms Hughes is working with Tessa Cubillo whose father John is the son of a currently unidentified African-American US sailor and David Simmons in Yirrkala who found out his biological father was a US serviceman when he was in his late teens.
For more information or to contact Ms Hughes, email karenhughes@swin.edu.au.
LOOKING at a photo of an African American sailor, David Simmons couldn’t see any similarity to himself, even though his mother swore he was the spitting image of the man in the picture, his father.
But the man in the picture was not the man he knew as his father growing up.
David was 17 or 18 when he learned his father was Malcolm Butler, an African-American sailor who was stationed in Perth during the end of WWII.
“I clued on that something was going on when I was going in a taxi one day with my uncle and his son and the bloke said ‘are you Americans?’ and my uncle said ‘no, but this bloke is’ and he pointed at me,” he said.
“When I got back home I said to Mum ‘Uncle Les reckons I’m American, I always thought I was just Aboriginal’. Mum said, ‘yeah your dad came from the US’ and she went and dived in this case and came out with the letters and photo and said ‘you were going to be called Malcolm, after him’.”
Now 72, David grew up as an Aboriginal man in Perth with six siblings before moving to Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land about 20 years ago.
He was one of potentially thousands of Australian children fathered by Allied servicemen during their postings down under in WWII.
David’s mother, Eliza Barron, was a Noongar woman from Perth who met Malcolm Butler when he was on the USS Corpus Christi, which arrived in Australia in July, 1944.
David was born in June, 1945 and Malcolm’s ship departed when he was just two months old, on August 27, 1945.
“He sent her some money to fly to Pearl Harbor to meet him there after the war, but mum didn’t go,” David said.
“She was going into a totally foreign world, and she had other children.”
David never got to know his father, even after he found out who he was.
The letters and photos Malcolm had sent his mother were burned by his stepfather, making tracking him down incredibly difficult, as there was such little information known about him.
“I really regret not keeping those letters because he had his naval ID,” David said.
“I tried (to track him down) when I was 35, I rang up people and finally got through to the navy — they gave me a mailing address back then. I never followed it through.
“I would have really loved to ... they had a thing on TV for a while about locating lost family. I would have loved to get over there and meet the family before the old man carked it.
“That would have been good for my kids, my littlest one is 12 and she wants to know about Dad’s side.
“It’s something we should have kept up to speed with in the old days, but without the whiz bang communications of today it was pretty bloody hard, everything had to be kept physically.”
Upwards of 800,000 Allied troops were stationed throughout Australia during WWII, from Townsville to Perth, and a need for infrastructure through the Red Centre meant many troops were stationed in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and Darwin.
Karen Hughes is one of three researchers working with almost 30 families throughout Australia studying the impact of children born of war, and the race legislation at the time in Australia and other nations that devastated and ripped mixed-race families apart.
She said there was similar research into the impact of children born due to conflict internationally, but very little in Australia.
While 12,000 Australian women left as war brides it was far more complicated for mixed-raced relationships. Both Australia and America had extremely prejudicial race policies.
“The race-based legislation at the time in each of those countries was trying to uphold this mythical white nation,” Karen said.
“Australia had the White Australia policy and Immigration Restriction Act, and in the US their immigration was similarly restricted — the only people of so-called ‘colour’ allowed into the US were of Chinese or African descent. Even if Aboriginal women were able to marry AfricanAmerican serviceman and have a child together, in that time in Australia it was made clear they were not able to emigrate to the US.”
Karen said the research highlighted the heartbreaking human impact of the discrimination, which is left out of the history books.
“It’s to bring out that history of injustice,” she said. “There’s lots (of research) on the war bride ships that went overseas, but there were also Aboriginal war brides and nothing’s been written about them, and also the white women who married AfricanAmerican men, nothing’s been written about them.
“We’re bringing out the stories of those who couldn’t marry because of the racebased legislation.”
In Australia, American officials visited the homes of those hoping to emigrate to the US with their partners, to make sure they had more than 50 per cent white heritage, and it wasn’t an option for AfricanAmerican US personnel at all.
“These are the people who fell through the cracks of those official policies at that time,” Karen said.
“We’re not exclusively researching about Aboriginal women or AfricanAmerican men, but our main focus is along lines of racial injustices that happened.”
For Tessa Cubillo, finding information about her African-American grandfather is about helping her understand her identity.
Her father John was adopted into the Cubillo family in Darwin when he was about four, after his birth mother, Audrey Pearson, travelled up from Perth when he was a youngster.
“There’s a lot of speculation as to how he came to be adopted,” Tessa said. “Some say she looked over the fence and seen my grandparents and said ‘hey you want a child?’ Others say they were on a bus and my grandparents looked at my dad and said ‘oh isn’t he cute’ and she said ‘here, have him’.
“Nobody really knows the circumstances as to how they came together, but that’s how life was and I don’t know what Audrey would have gone through prior to that.”
Tessa said finding out who her grandfather was and learning more about his family would enhance her understanding of her identity for both herself and her children.
“Since coming into the project it’s more about who are we? Where do we belong? Everybody wants to know where they belong and where they fit in. I’m not saying I don’t, but it’s about knowing the other part of our identity and gaining more knowledge of who I am so that my kids know,” she said.
“I want to be able to say to my kids ‘here is your background — this is your history’.”
The research is challenging because much oral information has been lost as generations pass and, if families even know the name of the relative, accessing information without proof of relation is difficult. Plus one building in the US containing detailed military archives is known as the ‘burnt archives’ after a raging fire in the 1970s damaged much of the paperwork.
While Karen is diligently researching family links around the world for David and Tessa, she is also looking for other Territorians who believe they may be related to foreign troops stationed here during the war. For more information email karen hughes@swin.edu.au