Unit 4: World War 2 (1939 – 1945)
AIATSIS Education
At least 4,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people served in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Women’s Services during the Second World War. It is hard to know exactly how many because the Defence Act was still discriminatory, stating that people had to be ‘substantially of European origin’ to enlist. Consequently, many people hid their identity in order to be accepted into the services. This unit tells the stories of individual Indigenous men and women in their own words and demonstrates the complexity of choosing to fight for the people that took their Country.