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NLA News - home May 2002 Volume XII Number 8
Americans in the Library
Yankee Digger [1858?] by Edward C. Moore

Edward Charles Moore
Yankee Digger [1858?]
watercolour; 18.5 x 27 cm
Rex Nan Kivell Collection NK4270/18;
Pictorial Collection T1764

Barry York provides a historical perspective of American immigration to Australia through his exploration of the Collection

The National Library holds a great deal of information about the diverse national and ethnic groupings that comprise the Australian people. The Americans in Australia are a case in point: a national group itself made up of manydifferent cultures and religions.

Biographical files are held on some of the better-known Americans in Australia’s past and present: politicians such as King O’Malley, Norm Sanders and Bob Charles MHR, entertainers Bob Dyer, Don Lane, Marcia Hines, Tommy Hanlon jr, Big Chief Little Wolf, Jack Little and Evie Hayes, and public figures Bettina Gorton and Gerald Stone. Biographies have been published about O’Malley, Hines, Hanlon and Hayes.

The United States of America’s strong economic and cultural influence in Australia has understandably diverted attention away from the 50 000 American people who have settled here. American immigration into Australia began at the turn of the nineteenth century with the arrival of United States trading ships, sealers and whalers, but significantly increased during the 1850s gold rushes. By 1861, there were more than 4000 American-born settlers in Australia. Their number included entrepreneurs such as Freeman Cobb and James Rutherford who made pioneering contributions to inter-colonial transportation systems and the iron industry.

The romance and adventure of the Cobb & Co. coaches attracted many writers and artists and the Library holds several books, pamphlets and kits—and nineteenth-century works of art—about them. A surprising find in the Library’s Manuscript Collection is the text for a broadcast on radio station 3AR in the late 1920s by Frank Smiley, who had started work for Cobb & Co. as a driver in 1877. Further reminiscences are found in the Oral History Collection, in the form of an interview recorded by John Meredith with Joan Rutherford, an historian of the company. Cobb & Co. also inspired Australia’s legendary country musician, Smokey Dawson, and the Library’s Sheet Music Collection holds the score of his song The Lights of Cobb & Co, published c.1957.

Portrait of Marcia Hines at the Australia Day Concert by Don McMurdo

Don McMurdo (1930–2001)
[Portrait of Marcia Hines at the Australia Day Concert (ie. Australia Day Live), Sydney Entertainment Centre, January 1984]
Col. transparency; 35 mm
From Don McMurdo performing arts collection
Pictorial Collection PIC/4822/I/34

Two excellent overview histories of the American contribution to Australia are Ray Aitchison’s Thanks to the Yanks? (1972) and The Americans in Australia (1986). In 1986, Aitchison recorded an interview for the Oral History Collection with Jay Pendarvis, an American who migrated to the Northern Territory in 1967. Pendarvis became a figure of national controversy in 1985 when his company sued the Australasian Meat Industry Employees’ Union during a dispute at his Mudginberri abattoir.

The American culture and value system do not always coexist comfortably with British Australia. The formation of the Californian Rangers’ Revolver Brigade at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, in 1854, prompted colonial authorities to investigate the subversive nature of the United States citizenry in Victoria. As the first people in the modern era to successfully overthrow monarchical rule, ‘Yankee republicanism’ was feared by those in power. The Library holds the Victorian Colonial Secretary’s Copies of correspondence respecting American citizens who were supposed to have participated in the late riots at Ballarat (1855). The American influence during the gold rush period is discussed in E. Daniel and Annette Potts’ Young America and Australian Gold (1974). Also of interest is Raymond A. Bradfield’s pamphlet, Some ‘Yankies’ on the Central Victorian Goldfields (1988).

An important figure during this period was entrepreneur and merchant George F. Train, a republican who disembarked at Melbourne in 1853 and helped establish the Melbourne Stock Exchange. The Library holds a first edition of his book Young America Abroad in Europe, Asia and Australia, which was published in 1857. His Australian letters for the period 1853–1855 were compiled, with introductory notes, by E. Daniel and Annette Potts as A Yankee Merchant in Goldrush Australia (1970). Clive Turnbull’s brief biography, Bonanza (1946), is also held.

A typical Brisbane Hotel in World War II (with American soldiers in the streets)

A typical Brisbane Hotel in World War II (with American soldiers in the streets)
AIS photograph
Pictorial Collection

Another important historical figure is John Greeley Jenkins, who was Premier of South Australia from 1901 to 1905. A brief outline of his life, From Pennsylvania Farmhand to Premier of South Australia, is held by the Library. It was compiled by Gerald Fischer in 1984.

At the time of Australia’s federation in 1901, there were 7488 American-born residents here. United States companies in oil, electrical appliances, agricultural machinery and rubber had begun their process of investment in our resources and market. Yet the human factor—immigration—dwindled and was not revived until several years after World War II. Over a million American service personnel passed through Australia during the War, and 12 000 married Australian women, but only about a thousand settled here. It wasn’t until the census of 1954 that the number of  settlers from the United States exceeded the American-born population at the time of Federation.

The American service personnel in Australia between 1941 and 1945 dramatically impacted upon local communities and cities and are the subject of John Hammond Moore’s Over-sexed, Over-paid and Over Here (1981) and another scholarly study by E. Daniel and A. Potts, Yanks Down Under, 1941-45 (1985). More recent contributions are Anthony Barker’s Fleeting Attraction: A Social History of American Servicemen in Western Australia During the Second World War (1996) and Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin’s The Battle of Brisbane (2000). Popular anecdotal accounts of the period are provided by Thomas R. St. George in C/o Postmaster (1943 & 1944) and by Maureen C. Meadows in I Loved Those Yanks (1948). The awful story of United States Army Private, Eddie Leonski, is told in John Harvey’s book Journey to the Gallows (1947) and in Ivan Chapman’s book Private Eddie Leonski, the Brownout Strangler (1982).

Portrait of Bettina Gorton [196-?] by Athol Shmith

Athol Shmith (1914–1990)
Portrait of Bettina Gorton [196-?]
gelatin siver photograph on fibre-based paper; 21 x 15.8 cm
Pictorial Collection P900/74/E

In 1954, there were 8289 American-born people in Australia; in 1966, 17 412; in 1971, 30 035; and in 1996, there were 49 634. Analysis of 1996 census data is available through Terence H. Hull’s contribution to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs’ Community Profiles series, United States of America Born. Samuel Baum and Christabel Young’s working paper for the Department of Demography at the Australian National University throws light on ‘the exchange of migrants between Australia and the United States’ (1989).

Despite a postwar free passage scheme for ex-servicemen, the Americans have never arrived here en masse. Unlike United Kingdom and Southern European migrants, the United States route to Australia has been largely an individual one. The Americans have tended to integrate readily into a society that is already heavily influenced by their culture. Some, however, have come to Australia to escape their own way of life.

The position of the postwar Americans in Australia was not seriously studied until the mid-1970s when Dennis Cuddy surveyed 200 American settlers in Australia. His book, The Yanks are Coming (1977), was published in California and predicted that future immigrants from the United States would include a fair share of adventurers and people disenchanted with changes in the American way of life. In 1993, Bob Catley and David Mosley surveyed 302 United States settlers and found, in America and the Americans in Australia (1998), that employment opportunities, adventure and environmental concerns were high among their reasons for coming to Australia.

Americans seem to be particularly active in the environmental movement.This has a precedent in the ‘naturalism’ of one of Australia’s best-known Americans, Walter Burley Griffin. Environmental appreciation may also help explain the American-born people’s pattern of settlement, with 22 per cent residing in locations outside the cities. Another feature distinguishing them from other Australians is their lack of religion: 25 per cent said they had ‘no religion’ in the 1996 Census.

As an individualistic migrant group, the Americans have not established their own community associations. The Australian– American Association describes its role as ‘fostering friendship and understanding between the peoples of Australia and the United States’. As a basically affluent, middle class, professional and business group of people, the Americans may simply be too busy to concern themselves with questions of community formation.

Three soldiers with a kangaroo

Americans in australia
Three soldiers with a kangaroo
AIS photograph
Pictorial Collection

The Library holds various news-letters of the Australian–American Association; the most recent being the national newsletter, Star Times, and the earliest being the Queensland branch periodical, U.S. and Us, published during World War II. The Manuscript Collection holds a collection from the Association for the years 1951–1953 relating to moves for the erection of the American war memorial in Canberra. Material about the formation of the Association is found in the papers of Sir Ernest White, a founder of the Liberal Party, along with a copy of David Kent’ s honours thesis on the history of the Association. In the Oral History Collection, there is a recording of the opening of the Association’s federal conference in 1969.

Other items worth noting in the Manuscript Collection are the Rogers family correspondence, which contains reference to Americans in Victoria around 1850; a nine-page Ballarat gold rush narrative written in 1856 by an anonymous American from New England, and memoirs and news clippings of Jennie Scott Griffiths, the feminist–socialist who settled here in 1911 and became an editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly. And, of course, there are the King O’Malley papers and the Donald Leslie Johnson collection of Walter and Marion Griffin documents.

The Pictorial Collection has a large number of documentary images on the Americans in Australia, mainly 1960s and 1970s Australian Information Service photos of American teachers, soldiers, farmers, exchange students and tourists.

BARRY YORK is a researcher and writer who contributed to the Library’s centenary volume, Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library of Australia’s First 100 Years 1901– 2001. His email address is: garocon@ pcug.org.au

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