Peter Carey's novel Amnesia (2014) can be read as a meditation on the political, economic, and military relationship between the United States and Australia from World War II to the early twenty-first century. The narrative opens in 2010 on “a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne,” as a hacker's worm infiltrates the “computerized control systems of countless Australian prisons.” Because “Australian prison security” is “mostly designed and sold by American corporations,” the Angel Worm also infects “117 US federal correctional facilities, 1700 prisons, and over 3000 county jails”; American military presence worldwide ensures that the worm spreads to Afghanistan, Kurdistan, and the United States’ “secret centres of rendition” in Australia itself.Footnote ¹ When Australian citizen Gaby Baillieux is identified as the hacker behind the handle “Angel” and threatened with extradition to the US, her supporters hire veteran left-wing journalist Felix Moore to pen a biography that will “Australianise her” (38). Felix has his own agenda: he believes that the Angel Worm must be understood within the modern history of American–Australian relations, especially “the events of 1975” (5), when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) allegedly undermined Gough Whitlam's Labor government. Felix wryly acknowledges, “I took the same view as our American allies, that this [the Angel Worm] was an attack on the United States”: for Felix, the hack is a form of “retaliation” (5) against CIA subversion thirty-five years earlier.Footnote ²

In this essay, though, I want to focus on Amnesia’s excavation of US power's earlier, more overt presence in Australia during World War II, and especially Felix's research into and rendition of the officially censored “Battle of Brisbane.” In doing so, I want to compare Carey's take with And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963), an important but nowadays neglected novel by the African American author John Oliver Killens. Whereas Carey dramatizes a historical showdown between Australian and American troops that occurred on Thanksgiving Day (26 November) 1942, Killens fictionalizes a nine-day conflict between white and black American soldiers that took place eight months earlier. I hope to show how each novel utilizes its respective “Battle” to both interrogate American–Australian relations and imagine alternative ways of being in a “globalized” world beyond the war itself.

In Amnesia, the US military's wartime role in Australia comes to the fore when Felix's research for the biography goes back in time beyond Gaby's birth during the downfall of the Whitlam government (167) and deeper into her matrilineal family history. Felix is an old friend of Gaby's mother, Celine, and has known since their student days at Monash University in the early 1960s that Celine is the illegitimate daughter of an American soldier. Felix has since established that Celine's father was Hank Willenski, the “Brownout Strangler” (97) who raped, mutilated, and murdered six women in Brisbane during the war. Celine's painful, secret link to the Strangler is tied in turn to the suppressed history of the (second) Battle of Brisbane, first referenced in a flashback scene at Monash c.1961. Apart from Felix and Celine, none of the other students present “had heard of the Battle of Brisbane” because it was “censored,” so Celine explains, “It was about sex … The stupid Australians were jealous of the Yanks. The only people in the world who want to help us, and so they shoot them because they like Australian girls” (32–34). Celine herself is aware of the battle because her mother, Doris, once claimed that her father was one of two American soldiers who died during it (44). Felix subsequently verifies that Willenski raped Doris during the night of the battle, and was “murdered by the Aussies” while in jail awaiting trial (99).

Felix dramatizes Doris's fateful encounter with the Strangler against a backdrop of simmering tension about Australian women interacting with American soldiers. A city of only 330,000 residents c.1941, Brisbane hosted a million US servicemen over the next four years, becoming, as historians Raymond Evans and Jacqui Donegan observe, “arguably the most rapidly and thoroughly Americanised place on earth.” This process severely destabilized local social mores as “Australian men were confronted by a new and threateningly competitive pattern of aggressive masculinity” exhibited by American troops.Footnote ³ Though initially the “the women of Australia were instructed to welcome the ‘Yanks’ into their homes” as saviors,

Felix stresses that this sexualized fearmongering about foreign men was also racialized: Doris's mother refused to let African American soldiers into her home, and white locals generally were leery of “Brissy's ‘black zones’ … where black Americans were allowed to look for entertainment” (74–75). It is within this context of Australian antipathy toward American soldiers boiling over into violence that Willenski whisks Doris away from a mob to apparent safety, only to assault her outside her home in the working-class suburb of Woolloongabba. The rape is witnessed by a passing African American soldier, and Willenski flees; Doris's mother, seeing her disheveled daughter with the black American, is mostly worried that Doris will give birth to “a little piccaninny” (98).Footnote ⁴

Whereas this anonymous African American soldier is merely a supporting character in Carey's novel, Killens's Thunder focusses squarely on Solly Saunders and his comrades in the segregated 913th Amphibious company as they move from training in Georgia and California through combat in the Philippines to stationing in Australia. The final part of the novel is set in Bainbridge, a thinly veiled version of Brisbane, and climaxes with “the Battle of Bainbridge.” Killens himself spent “forty-one months” – from July 1942 to December 1945 – “in the service of my country during World War II,” including “twenty-seven of them island-hopping, ducking bullets in the South Pacific” with the 813th Amphibian Truck Company; in 1944, he was stationed in Brisbane.Footnote ⁵ Killens later declared, “The climax of my new novel … is based on this actual BATTLE,” and that Thunder’s “entire structure … was dictated by this final confrontation which I knew would take place in Australia.”Footnote ⁶ But whereas Felix in Amnesia dramatizes the Thanksgiving showdown between Australians and Americans, Thunder details how the reconstruction in Australia of US racial segregation and discrimination became the catalyst for a climactic “battle” between black and white American soldiers. Though Australian soldiers are involved, and Australia's own racial politics are not ignored, Killens's “Battle of Bainbridge” correlates more with the historical events of March 1942.

In September 1941, a critical report authored by William Hastie, civilian aide to US Secretary of War Henry Stimson, observed, “The traditional mores of the South have been widely accepted by the Army as the basis of policy and practice affecting the Negro soldier.”Footnote ⁷ The Pacific theater would be no exception: historian Kay Saunders observes that “formal internal segregative policies and practices employed in the US were transferred to and refined in Australia.”Footnote ⁸ In Thunder, Solly and his fellow black soldiers discover that US military policy in Bainbridge is continuous with the Jim Crow racism they have already experienced while training in rural Georgia. Joseph “Bookworm” Taylor reports that the first wave of black soldiers in Brisbane were treated well by Australians, but that the situation changed with the arrival of “them Southern peckerwood divisions”: since then, the US military has “been putting places off limits to colored soldiers all over everywhere. The MPs worse than they are in Georgia.”Footnote ⁹ Thus Killens adumbrates the conditions that generated the “battle” between black and white US soldiers from 11 to 20 March 1942, after which US General Patrick J. Hurley was moved to declare, “I have never seen the racial problem brought home so forcibly as it is here in Queensland.”Footnote ¹⁰

Whereas in Amnesia Felix connects the Thanksgiving battle to Australian male anxieties about white women interacting with “oversexed” (black) Americans, the US Army report on the events of March 1942 emphasized white American soldiers’ hostility to “negro troops entering dance halls and skating rinks patronized solely by white people,” and especially black soldiers’ “association with white girls on the streets of Brisbane and in houses of prostitution, the latter without definite segregation.” But the report also registered that this seemingly welcoming attitude on the part of locals contradicted Australia's official policy of white supremacy. Shortly after arriving in the country, General Douglas MacArthur observed, “Their policy of ‘white Australia’ is universal here.”Footnote ¹¹ This policy had been in place since 1901, and the threat of Japanese invasion only amplified the official discourse of Australia as a white nation. US troops began to arrive in Brisbane in December 1941, shortly after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, but on 14 March 1942 – one month after the first Japanese air raid over Darwin, and right in the middle of that ten-day period during which black and white US troops were clashing on the streets of Brisbane – Australian Prime Minister John Curtin made his famous appeal for further American military protection: “Australia is the last bastion between the West Coast of America and the Japanese.” As Paul Giles observes in Antipodean America, “Curtin played the race card, contrasting the ‘yellow aggressor’ with the idea of a shared Anglo-Saxon heritage” between (white) Australians and Americans: “We are all the same race – the English speaking race.”Footnote ¹² In this heavily racialized wartime context, the entrenched White Australia policy facilitated “a double process of segregation – one operating internally in the US armed forces and another maintained by Australian civilian authorities.”Footnote ¹³

Killens portrays social (including sexual) interaction between black Americans and white Australians, and the legal–political system of white Australian supremacy. Solly becomes romantically involved with Celia Blake, a nurse and war widow from Bainbridge, while he and other black soldiers drink with working-class white Australian soldiers at the Southern Cross pub. In contrast to the sexual and racial prejudices of Doris's mother and other white Brisbanites in Amnesia, none of the Australian soldiers with whom Solly socializes object to his relationship with Celia. Instead, the local troops indict American racism and imperialism: one of them, Steve, tells the white US Captain Samuels,

At one level, this exchange dramatizes Harilaos Stecopoulos's point that “[w]hite racism and white racist violence were by no means limited to the South or to a ‘dixiefied’ U.S. military”: they were also reproduced abroad via an “incipient ‘empire of bases’” that included the war's Pacific theater.Footnote ¹⁴ (The legacy of such military expansion includes the American “signals facility” at Alice Springs that Gaby's Angel Worm infiltrates in Amnesia.) On another level, however, Steve's claim to speak for the “American Negro” against “white supremacy” conveniently elides institutionalized racism in Australia itself. By this point, Solly and his fellow black soldiers know all too well that “dixiefied” US military policy has been extended to Australia: Solly complains to Celia, “The bloody MPs threw me out of two places today right here … Not in Mississippi or Georgia – right here in dear old darling Queensland” (410). But the African American troops are also acutely aware of their host nation's “White Australia” policy, which was especially evident in Queensland, “the state with the most rigid internal segregation of Aboriginal people in the Commonwealth.”Footnote ¹⁵ Yet when Samuels turns the charge of systematic racism back on the white Australian soldiers – “What about your White Paper? What about your own colored people?” – Dobbs responds disingenuously: “That wasn't a race problem at all … That was a labor problem” (388). Solly resists getting sucked into an argument about racism between white Americans and Australians, declaring instead, “I'm putting my money on that large minority known as colored people, three quarters of the world's population.” But this merely prompts Steve to turn his fire on Solly: “You're not a Socialist. You're nationalistic and you're anti-white and you're reactionary” (392). The exchange suggests how Killens's experience of a dual form of white supremacy during World War II – racial segregation in the US Army and the “White Australia” policy – alerted him to the limits of an international socialist worldview, articulated by white men, that subordinated race to class, and the potential of a transnational antiracist, anticolonial front among “colored people.”

Despite a US Army ban on socializing in Bainbridge, Solly and the other black soldiers return to the Southern Cross because, in Bookworm's words, “Goddamit, this ain't Mississippi” (425). Dobbs and other Australian soldiers support the black troops in terms of resistance to what they see (anticipating Felix in Amnesia) as the United States’ neocolonial “occupying” of Australia: “This is still our country, I hope” (426). In a confrontation with US military police, black soldier Jimmy Larker is arrested, and the situation degenerates into an armed battle between a “White Army” and a “Black Army” (466) supported by Samuels and select Australians. Bookworm, Larker, and two other black soldiers die during this “Battle of Bainbridge.” On the penultimate page of Thunder, in the immediate aftermath of the battle, Solly imagines a postwar “new world” that does away with racial, regional, and national designations altogether: “neither East nor West nor North nor South, but something new, superior to anything that ever was” (484–85). Yet Solly also reaffirms his newfound faith in “colored people”: “Perhaps the New World would come raging out of Africa and Asia, with a new and different dialogue.” Finally, five African American soldiers approach and Solly invites them to “Sit down, mates, and make yourself at home. This is the place where the New World is” (485).

If we read post-battle Bainbridge itself as the “New World,” it appears bitterly ironic: this world seems less new than the dystopian endpoint of those racial practices that followed Solly and his fellow black soldiers from the US South to the South Pacific theater, where Jim Crow meets White Australia. However, if this brave New World refers to a group of battle-scarred African Americans reimagining themselves in relation to a global revolution “raging out of Africa and Asia,” then it mediates in more optimistic fashion the embrace of postcolonial and black internationalist struggle by African American activists during the period in which the novel was published. If we consider too that the black soldiers are accompanied in battle by white Australian troops and a New York Jewish captain (Samuels) who saves Solly's life, it suggests that “Killens's 1960s spin on liberation” might yet include a “multiracial and socialist” dimension.Footnote ¹⁶

Ranging from wartime Brisbane via 1960s student radicalism and from “the events of 1975” into the age of “globalization,” Amnesia too offers a kind of double take on (resistance to) American power. When Celine learns that Felix's manuscript dramatizes the Brownout Strangler's sexual assault of Doris, she is outraged: “Anyone who knows you can see what you're doing. America rapes Australia. It's pathetic … You want this psycho to represent them all” (93). Celine's charge that Felix is using the rape of her mother to allegorize the ongoing penetration of submissive Australia by US hard power is not unfounded: early on Felix remarks, “Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked and Australia would behave like the client state it always was” (50). Yet by the end of Amnesia, Felix recognizes that this reading of American–Australian relations cannot simply be superimposed on the next generation. Felix's “obsession” with the United States’ role in Australia from World War II through the Cold War is complicated by his investigation into Gaby's adolescent initiation into environmental activism during the early 1990s. Felix's research reveals that Gaby and her fellow hacktivists were less interested in retaliating against the United States than in taking on a wide array of state and non-state actors. Felix ruefully acknowledges,

By articulating this epochal (rather than merely generational) shift, Amnesia also intervenes in ongoing debates about the relationship between Americanization and globalization. Paul Giles states that “since about 1981, the multidimensional effects of globalization have reconfigured the premises of U.S. national identity” in a “transnational era” that is “centered around the necessarily reciprocal position of the U.S. within global networks of exchange.” Yet if capitalist globalization is often associated with “the weakening of the nation-state,” Fredric Jameson insists that it still amounts to “the subordination of the other nation-states to American power.”Footnote ¹⁷ It is this kind of subordinate status that Felix believes characterizes Australia from World War II through and beyond the events of 1975, and the Angel Worm confirms the links between US state and corporate power throughout an increasingly globalized, for-profit “prison–industrial complex.” Nevertheless, Gaby's hacktivism offers an alternative worldview, premised on a radically different sense of space and (deep) time: the “enemy” is transnational and hydra-headed rather than a single superpower, and resistance occurs in the Anthropocene rather than the Holocene.Footnote ¹⁸

In Amnesia, then, the Battle of Brisbane reveals white Australian xenophobia and racism, but also figures as part of a longer historical narrative in which Felix's 1960s leftist perception of Australia as a submissive “client state” of the US does not neatly dovetail with the younger generation's struggle against more diffuse, transnational forms of power in the Anthropocene age. Published almost fifty years earlier, Thunder emphasizes the US military's reproduction of Jim Crow in a nation itself defined by institutionalized racism, but also imagines a “New World” of postcolonial and cross-racial solidarity. Each in their own way, Killens and Carey imagine alternatives – albeit double-edged and ambiguous – to dominant narratives of “globalization” defined by US hard power and corporate capitalism.