CHAPTER 18 | 1939–1945 – The Second World War
. . . During the war, there were instances of Aboriginal people working on farms and vineyards, mostly as labourers, and when the need arose, many of the men joined the armed services. But the plight of the Aboriginal community throughout Australia at the time was little noticed by city dwellers. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, there were groups that sought full citizen rights for Aboriginal Australians, such as the Aborigines Progress Association, but the strong arm of the law – enabled by the 1911 Aborigines Act and others – restricted the movements of First Nations people. Most lived in missions and reserves, where administrators believed that it would be best to assimilate them into Western culture. South Australia’s Aborigines Amendment Act 1939 began an era of exemption certificates, in which Aboriginal people could live and work in the general community but at the expense of foregoing their indigenous identity and culture. Those without exemptions were prohibited from mixing with white people. This was enforced by the Police Act of 1869–1870, which remained in effect until it was amended in 1958. But newspaper reports throughout the 1940s and 1950s would show a country eschewing reconciliatory reform. All too often, the Aboriginal people were treated harshly through the court system. In the 1780s, convicts from England were shipped to New South Wales for transgressions as minor as having stolen a loaf of bread. During the 1930s and 1940s, Aboriginals, dispossessed of their lands, were regularly fined or jailed for misdemeanours, including the use of indecent language, drunkenness, theft of cigarettes and liquor, and assault. In an article in Perth’s South Western Advertiser on the 1st of March 1940, titled ‘The Australian Aborigine’, it was reported that ‘the democratic aspect of our country would suffer considerably by the existence in it of a lower caste of men and women to whom only certain avenues of employment were open’. Federal and state governments were grappling with the ‘present rate of increase of half-castes’ in Australia, and their policies of the 1940s promoted further dispossession and the destruction of Aboriginal bloodlines and culture. Meanwhile, as was often the case during wartime, the inconsistency of racist policy saw amendments to various Aborigine Acts allowed over four thousand Aboriginal and Torres Islander peoples to serve with the Australian Defence Force during World War II; however, they received only one-third of the pay given to other Australian soldiers. Many vineyards in South Australia supplemented their labour with the Australian Women’s Land Army (AWLA). At Kay’s Amery, in McLaren Vale, diary records show the arrival of three Italian prisoners of war who worked at the farm and winery. The isolated Coonawarra district was also a beneficiary of POW labour. Around 1943, 1,070 Italian prisoners of war were put to work in country areas, especially in South Australia’s southeast and Adelaide Hills. Reportedly,
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