Australian Historical Studies ISSN: 1031-461X (Print) 1940-5049 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rahs20 Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II Yorick Smaal To cite this article: Yorick Smaal (2017) Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II, Australian Historical Studies, 48:3, 455-456, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2017.1337491 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2017.1337491 Published online: 31 Jul 2017. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rahs20 Download by: [Griffith University] Date: 01 August 2017, At: 19:01 Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 19:01 01 August 2017 Reviews: Books artists who have ensured the continuity of traditions such as shell necklace-making, and whose work supplies a subtle yet forceful rebuke to myths about the supposed erasure of Tasmanian Indigenous culture. Though the layperson seeking a general introduction to or overview of the art of Indigenous Australians might not find what they’re looking for in Rattling Spears, the art historian or curator will find in McLean’s highly readable and absorbing book a fine example of a postcolonial analysis at work, and a compelling rereading of the power, impact and enduring appeal of a vast, fascinating and complex realm of Australian visual and cultural expression. JOANNA GILMOUR National Portrait Gallery, Canberra © 2017, Joanna Gilmour Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II. Edited by Judith A. Bennett and Angela Wanhalla. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. Pp. 379+xxiv. USD$65.00 cloth. We tell many war stories, the political more so than the private. Narratives of love and loss sit uneasily with traditional accounts of nations, units and combatants; they can be painful to acknowledge and difficult to recover. Nonetheless, affection and intimacy have been fertile ground for histories challenging dominant tales of war and conflict that all too often emphasise the bloodiest battles and the men who fought them. Judith A. Bennett and Angela Wanhalla’s edited collection, Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific, is an exemplar of how to shift that focus, providing hitherto untold stories by indigenous women, their children and their families, that explore a very different side to the American experience in the South Pacific during World War II. In a field so often the preserve of male experiences in war rooms or on battlefields, Bennett and Wanhalla take as their concern an estimated 4,000 children left in the wake of the American war machine. That machine had 455 brought millions of US soldiers, sailors and airmen into contact with indigenous women. As part of a wider project that links ‘war babies’ with their American fathers, this book emphasises the realities, perceptions and legacies of these human relationships forged in the exigencies of global conflict: between lovers and between kin, across communities and across generations. The editors do an excellent job of framing the collection, which often reads like a monograph rather than an edited volume – probably given Bennett’s hand is on more than half of the chapters as well as the introduction and the epilogue. The eleven chapters roughly follow the trajectory of the American occupation in the South Pacific Command Area, focusing on sex, love and romance in its varying forms. These include the intensity of passion sparked in war, the heartbreak of often inevitable separation, and the experiences of the children conceived in these circumstances. The stories reveal an uneven experience. Diverse cultural views on marriage, the role of Christianity, and attitudes to sex and gender across island nations, along with personal circumstances and US policy, all structured intimate lives in different ways. Not all fathers, white or black, abandoned their children, but few soldiers prevailed against the entrenched racism that forbade marriage between the Americans and islanders with less than 51 per cent of so-called ‘white blood’. Even with the best of intentions, many fathers were unable to return despite their assurances to do so. The memories of those promises and the secrets that have surrounded them make for very powerful reading. The volume considers other visitors and inhabitants too. The history of the South Pacific is peppered with whalers and traders, shipwrecked sailors and mutineers, travellers, missionaries and European colonists. The inclusion of other individuals like the so-called ‘Pacific chameleon’, Tom Harris (chapter four), and Father Bertrand Soucy (chapter five), for instance, adds nuanced texture to the stories involving Americans. The most striking chapters for me were those anchored around a central actor. The story of Isabella Louise Pezron, a mother and bride who travelled to the US from New Caledonia, is a case in point (chapter three). Her Downloaded by [Griffith University] at 19:01 01 August 2017 456 Australian Historical Studies, 48, 2017 experiences and those of her children stayed with me throughout the book. I wonder if some of the other chapters perhaps tried too hard to recover every story rather than relying on rich vignettes to make the case, although to be fair this can be difficult in the face of thin evidence. Elsewhere, I was struck by the sustained attention to military detail. The balance between the particulars of war and its human dimensions shows with compelling power how these lives and loves unfolded. Beneath the logistics of war lie deeply personal accounts of belonging and absence, and of denial and acceptance, all recovered sensitively through rich oral histories on which this book is based, together with an array of archival sources. Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific is a unique and special account of relationships that have their origins in war. These affiliations involved power and possibility, encounter and exchange, as well as exploitation. Their legacy has persisted long after the soldiers departed. Bennett and Wanhalla’s collection shows just how strongly they continue to resonate generations later. YORICK SMAAL Griffith University © 2017, Yorick Smaal The Last Battle: Soldier Settlement in Australia 1916–1939. By Bruce Scates and Melanie Oppenheimer. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. 298. A$59.95 cloth. Soldier settlement is one of the more melancholy chapters in the history of white colonisation of Australia: good intentions betrayed by ill-conceived and poorly executed policy. Soldier settlement, as Richard Waterhouse, Kate Murphy and others have shown, is part of a longer story of flawed rural settlement schemes, grounded in colonial fantasies about the desirability of settling a sturdy yeomanry on the land and the bountiful capacity of that land to support families on small farms. As so often, this fantasy of ‘rurality’ was despoiled by reality – that of flood, fire, tempest, drought, impoverished soils, poor equipment, inadequate transport, fluctuating markets, the physical and mental toll on farmer and family and the inevitable setbacks any efforts to master a harsh environment can exact. The soldier settlement part of this larger story is told with great sympathy and insight. This involved the schemes of the war and interwar years to create a ‘land fit for heroes’, that by the 1930s were seen by many to have failed, with around half of all the families settled on the land having left their allotments saddled with debts and the despair of disappointed dreams. Scates and Oppenheimer have built on the pioneering work of earlier scholars and added a rich vein of illuminating archival evidence – some 7,000 repatriation files – to build a more comprehensive portrait of soldier settlement in Australia than ever before. While it perhaps lacks the vital iconoclasm of Lake’s path-breaking Limits of Hope (1987), the transnational perspective of Fedorowich’s comparative history of land settlement across the Empire (1995) or J.M. Powell’s acute focus on the demographic, geographic and environmental conditions and impacts on soldier settlement, The Last Battle builds on all three, and many other studies. It particularly makes use of local and regional studies to create an invaluable and original synthesis. The political and cultural context of the scheme is familiar but enlivened here by attention to detail: the belief that ‘unsettled’ and damaged men would benefit from working the land, the desire to repay the national debt for the ‘blood sacrifice’ of ‘our diggers’ and the concern to extend white settlement of the land much further to cement the colonial claim to occupation. However, the heart of the book is the social histories of individual settlers, the men, women and children who battled the land and the bureaucracy to survive. There is an ethnographic richness here that brings to intimate life the story of soldier settlement. The Last Battle, however, does more than add archival colour. There is an important analytical theme, drawing on the work of E.P. Thompson and Alan Atkinson (closer to home), running throughout the narrative. Scates and Oppenheimer see the ‘moral economy’ of soldier settlement as integral to how the scheme was conceived, debated and, in the end, contested. Implicit in the mind of policy-