‘They’re different from us, aren’t they,’ Aunty Edie had succinctly remarked to Val a week or so ago when they’d stood together at the railway station watching the black troops pour out of the carriages. They’d heard there was another troop train of Yanks arriving and they’d gone to the station to get a good look. ‘Nothin’ at all like my mob,’ Aunty Edie had said, studying them closely. ‘Whole lot bigger for starters. Good lookin’ bastards,’ she’d added with begrudging admiration, ‘but I wouldn’t want our blokes to get in a fight with ’em.’

Aunty Edie was Djabugay, from around the Cairns region further to the north, but having spent well over a decade of her forty-something years on nearby Palm Island, she referred to herself as a Bwgcolman woman. Pronounced ‘Bwookamun’, it was the name adopted by all Palm Islander Aboriginals, meaning ‘many tribes – one people’.

Val had laughed at the comment – Aunty Edie was famous for cutting through the bullshit. ‘Well, I’ve met a few of them, and I can tell you the fellas who’ve come to my place are gents, Edie,’ she’d said. ‘Our Aussie boys could pick up a few manners from those Yankee blackfellas, that’s for sure.’

Val had no intention of encouraging only whites to frequent her pub, and in particular the ever-popular main bar known simply as The Brown’s. Admittedly, American segregationist practices instilled as they were, white and black soldiers had, for the most part, adopted their own favoured R and R haunts, but as far as Val was concerned, anyone who behaved themselves was welcome at The Brown’s.

Indeed, it seemed the Australian Government’s fears about the acceptance of Negro troops were proving relatively unfounded, at least so far. The local populace did not seem as offended by the presence of vast numbers of black men as had been originally predicted. Australian officialdom agreed, however, that it was fortunate the American Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Theatre, General MacArthur, had been sympathetic to the situation at hand. MacArthur had categorically stated that all coloured troops would be withdrawn ‘at the end of the Australian emergency’, and that as he ‘respected’ Australia’s racial views, Negroes would be assigned to bases ‘far from urban centres’.

Townsville was, of course, just such a base, as was the inland mining township of Mount Isa, nearly 500 miles to the west. Both were ideal locations for the building of airstrips and military bases, and both were certainly ‘far from urban centres’; in Mount Isa’s case, probably as far as it was humanly possible to get, most would agree. Both towns were therefore flooded with the arrival of black Americans, who in these early days of arrival – their jobs being to build the actual bases – preceded and outnumbered their white counterparts.