DEIRDRE O’CONNELL Harlem Nights: The Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age. Reviewed by Braham Dabscheck
Deidre O’Connell recounts how an American jazz band caused panic in White Australia.
In the latter part of the 1920s, the JC Williamson Company was on the lookout for American talent to attract patrons to vaudeville shows at their Tivoli Theatres. One of the acts they brought to Australia was Sonny Clay’s Colored Idea, a ten-piece jazz band. Also on the bill were songsters the Four Harmony Emperors, dancers the Four Covans, and singer Ivy Anderson. The band landed in Sydney on 19 January 1928 for what was to be a nine-week tour, with shows scheduled for Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. All the performers were African American.
However, at the end of March 1928 the tour was cancelled and the performers forced to return to America following the arrest of five young White Australian women for consorting with band members in Melbourne. All five were found not guilty. They had not committed any crime on the statute book such as vagrancy or prostitution – they were all self-supporting, and the band members were not living off their immoral earnings. The women had been dancing and socialising after a night’s performance, and police and magistrates combined to run them out of Melbourne. The band had its visas cancelled and were forced to leave Australia.
The women were guilty of the crime of mixing with Black men, and thereby threatened the very existence of Australia as a White nation.
Deirdre O’Connell takes us through the events associated with the Colored Idea’s ill-fated tour, and provides a fascinating broader examination of the mores that dominated Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Harlem Nights is an outstanding book, possibly one of the best works of scholarship on Australia that I have read in a long time. O’Connell combines the skills of a researcher with those of a novelist. An example of the latter is her description of Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth century:
Los Angeles sprawled: a coastal belt of gap-toothed development and automobiles, buckled by mountains, soothed by sea and watered by public utilities.
O’Connell’s account is organised around a clash of values: racial hatred and tradition versus modernity. The arrival of Sonny Clay’s Black band threatened the White Australia Policy. From the moment the musicians and dancers landed, the Intelligence Service, with help from police in both Sydney and Melbourne, maintained surveillance of them. Police broke into the band members’ accommodation, searched their belongings (looking for drugs – the cocaine trade was alive and well) and, on one occasion, a band member woke to find a policeman in his bedroom.
The White Australia Policy rested on the supposition that Whites were superior to persons of colour. To maintain this superiority, especially in a part of the world where there were so many Asians to the north, it was considered essential to keep Australia White. Any departure from this, it was argued, would weaken the Australian stock and Australia would be overrun by so-called ‘inferior races’. While an immigration policy of discrimination protected Australia from without, domestically, the White Australian Policy was premised on the fidelity of White women and their role as ‘Mothers of the White Race’.
The presence of Sonny Clay’s Colored Idea threatened this. Young White women were attracted to these Black musicians with their ‘mumbo jumbo’ jazz. O’Connell digs up a quote from an ‘ethnomusicologist’ of the time who claimed African ritual music opened up a psychic crack in its listeners which enabled unseen forces to enter people’s bodies and control their thoughts and actions. To be touched by ‘primitive’ rhythms was to be bewitched. Exposure to jazz would result in miscegenation, and the debasing of Australia’s White racial purity.
During the 1920s, increasing numbers of young women moved to the cities to escape the drudgery of country life. Able to find white-collar jobs and to live independently (the genesis of the 1920s ‘flapper’), they had disposable incomes and enjoyed Hollywood movies. These young women didn’t see their role as ‘Mothers of the White Race’.
The flip side of White women being attracted to Black men who dressed well and talked about people they knew in Hollywood (and had developed skills to deal with Jim Crow America), was that their attractiveness threatened the sexual confidence of Australian White men.
O’Connell points to the contradictions within attitudes to sexual activity between Whites and Blacks – it depended on who was doing it with whom. Within Australia, sexual activity between a White man and an Aboriginal woman was not a cause for concern. In Australia, it fitted in with the policy of assimilation, and the idea that Aborigines were a ‘dying race’ that would be absorbed into the White population. O’Connell contrasts this with America, where, ‘The idea of absorbing the Black race into the White was simply not possible; one drop of Blackness was enough to disqualify Whiteness.’ On a number of occasions O’Connell draws attention to the sexual violence inflicted on Aboriginal girls and women by White men both in outlying areas and in domestic service in the cities, and how the Women’s League campaigned to place buffer zones between Aboriginal women and railway labourers’ camps.
It was a different matter when it came to sexual activity between Black men and White women: this would bring about the end of civilisation. O’Connell notes the recurring motif of the captive woman in stories about the Australian and American frontiers:
The idea of a beautiful White maiden lost to civilisation, held at the mercy of savages, governed the conventions of a popular literary genre that usually ended in heroic rescue missions and punitive raids. They were narrative balms to soothe colonial violence.
O’Connell provides insights into the ways in which Sydneysiders and Melburnians spent their leisure time in the 1920s, and demonstrates the connections that existed between the different institutions that sought to keep Australia in the straightjacket of the White Australia Policy: the links between the Intelligence Service, police, newspapers – especially Truth – magistrates, the Musicians’ Union, politicians, right-wing militias and vigilantism:
… officials compounded Australia’s geographic isolation by obstructing the circulation of … ideas. Censors banned words and images. Immigration officials blocked the flow of people. Protectionism privileged imperial nostalgia over commercial demand.
As Sonny Clay’s Colored Idea was preparing to leave Australia, Prime Minister William Morris Hughes referred to the band as scum, and went on to say, ‘If that had happened in some American States they would not have gone away on Saturday. They would not have lived the night!’
Eugenics was the handmaiden of the White Australia Policy. Beside the need to ‘protect’ White women from mixing with ‘inferior’ races, there were calls for the sterilisation of ‘defective’ individuals, especially the ‘feebleminded’ and moral degenerates. Thankfully, following World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, these sentiments lost their currency.
Aside from the jazz African American GIs would bring with them to Australia during World War II, it would be another 25 or so years before African American jazz players toured Australia again. The music scene in Australia was a backwater, with Australian bands and orchestras playing tunes from the good old days of nineteenth-century Britain. The arrival of jazz revolutionised Australian music and lead to the development of a vital and innovative music culture.
Harlem Nights is a significant work. O’Connell’s writing is exceptional and her command of so many nuanced issues, more than have been examined here, is breathtaking. This is a book that goes to the essence of Australia in the early twentieth century, delineating the shameful forces that sought to control and limit the lives and opportunities of so many people, and in so doing held back the country’s development as a nation in a complex and dynamic world.
Deirdre O’Connell Harlem Nights: The Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age Melbourne University Press 2021 PB 424pp $34.99.
Braham Dabscheck is a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School at Melbourne University who writes on industrial relations, sport and other matters. He is tone deaf.
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