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Preoccupied Policemen

  • Yorick Smaal
Chapter
Part of the Genders and Sexualities in History book series (GSX)

Abstract

In February 1944, the Australian journalist and war correspondent Osmar White was visiting friends in New Farm. A once quiet Brisbane suburb was now transformed by wartime conditions. Groups of Allied servicemen could be heard marauding on the streets outside; drunken voices and shattering liquor bottles echoed in the night air. Our journalist discovered that he had missed the last tram when he decided to leave his hosts around midnight to make his way back to his city hotel. He decided to try his luck by the nearby wharf in an unfamiliar neighbourhood; perhaps he could catch a lift from there. He set out across the local park to find out.

Keywords

Military Police Military Authority Civilian Police Brisbane City Council Forward Basis 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

  1. 3.
    For further discussion see Yorick Smaal, ‘Revisiting Queensland’s War-time Sex Panics: Moral Alarm, Male Homosexuality and Policing Public Space’, in Crime over Time: Temporal Perspectives on Crime and Punishment in Australia, eds Robyn Lincoln and Shirleene Robinson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 111–141.Google Scholar
  2. 15.
    W. Ross Johnston, The Long Blue Line: A History of Queensland Police (Bowen Hills: Boolarong, 1992), 237.Google Scholar
  3. 18.
    For these patterns in the US and Britain see for example George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 198;Google Scholar
  4. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26–28.Google Scholar
  5. 20.
    Cited in Garry Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Subculture (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1991), 69.Google Scholar
  6. 28.
    Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 108.Google Scholar
  7. 45.
    Kay Saunders, ‘In a Cloud of Lust: Black GIs and Sex in World War II’, in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, eds Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 181–84;Google Scholar
  8. Kay Saunders, War on the Homefront: State Intervention in Queensland 1938–1948 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1993), 59–80; AWM60, 185/1/229 [Undecipherable] DG 7 LHC Provost Co. to Provost Staff Officer HQ NQ L. of C. Sub-area (15 March 1943).Google Scholar
  9. 57.
    Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 197.Google Scholar
  10. 60.
    Lisa Featherstone, Let’s Talk about Sex: Histories of Sexuality in Australia from Federation to the Pill (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 204–22.Google Scholar
  11. 62.
    Featherstone, Let’s Talk about Sex, 217. For narratives on VD also see for example Saunders, War on the Homefront, 81–105; Michael Sturma, ‘Public Health and Sexual Morality: Venereal Disease in World War II Australia’, Signs, 13, 4 (1988), 725–40;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. Monica Dux, ‘“Discharging the Truth”: Venereal Disease, The Amateur and the Print Media, 1942–1945’, Lilith: A Feminist Historical Journal, 10 (2001), 75–91.Google Scholar
  13. 63.
    Health Act of 1937 (1 Geo. VI. No. 31), Section 56. On the Contagious Diseases Acts see Kay Saunders, ‘Controlling (Hetero) Sexuality: The Implementation and Operation of Contagious Diseases Legislation in Australia, 1868–1945’, in Sex, Power and Justice: Historical Perspectives of Law in Australia, ed. Diane Kirkby (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. 14–18;Google Scholar
  14. Raymond Evans, ‘Soiled Doves: Prostitution in Colonial Queensland’, in So Much Hard Work: Women and Prostitution in Australian History, ed. Kay Daniels (Sydney: Fontana, 1984), 141–50.Google Scholar
  15. 66.
    Katie McConnel, ‘Something More: The Voluntary and Paid Work of Queensland Women During World War II’, in Queensland Women in War, ‘You Had to Laugh’: An Exhibition of Personal War Stories, ed. Barbara Henson (Brisbane: Queensland Emergency Services, 1995), 4.Google Scholar
  16. Also see Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1979), 416.Google Scholar
  17. 67.
    Estelle Freedman, ‘“Uncontrolled Desires”: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath’, Journal of American History, 74, 1 (1987), 96. Also Sturma, ‘Public Health and Sexual Morality’, 726–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. 73.
    F. G. MacDonald, ‘The Problem of the Homosexual with Venereal Disease’, British Journal of Venereal Diseases, 25 (1949), 14.Google Scholar
  19. 75.
    Josephine Hinrichsen, ‘The Importance of a Knowledge of Sexual Habits in the Diagnosis and Control of Venereal Disease with Special Reference to Homosexual Behaviour’, The Urological and Cutaneous Review, 48 (1944), 483.Google Scholar
  20. 80.
    Ibid.; Philip S. Broughton, Prostitution and the War: The Missing Man in the Front Line, Public Affairs Pamphlet, no. 65 (New York: Public Affairs Committee, 1942).Google Scholar
  21. 101.
    Although this is contingent on context and circumstance, as Mary Louise Roberts points out. She argues that sexual relations between American GIs and French women took on larger political meanings with men expecting sexual servitude and submission from local females there; Mary Louise Roberts, What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War II France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. 104.
    Graham Willett, ‘The Darkest Decade: Homophobia in 1950s Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 28, 109 (October 1997), 128.Google Scholar
  23. 105.
    For further discussion see Yorick Smaal, ‘The “Leniency Problem”: A Queensland Case Study on Sentencing Male Same-sex Offences, 1939–1948’, Women’s History Review, 21, 5 (2012), 793–811.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. 114.
    Humphrey McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004), 186.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Yorick Smaal 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Yorick Smaal
    • 1
  1. 1.Griffith UniversityAustralia

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