Americans, Australians, and the “South Seas” during the Pacific War

For Allied service personnel serving in the Pacific Theater between 1941 and 1945, the “South Seas” was as much a set of mythical assumptions as it was a geographic reality. Having suggested elsewhere that Hollywood played a key role in sustaining and popularizing long-standing misconceptions about the “South Seas,” the authors will use this paper to consider the different ways in which Americans and Australians understood, described, and reacted to, the realities they encountered in the South Pacific during World War Two. Australians’ wartime encounters with the South Pacific thus promise to cast light on Hollywood’s influence on pre-war Australia, and reveal something about the relationship between popular culture and the lived experiences of Australians and Americans caught up in the chaos and horrors of the Pacific War. This analysis will thereby enhance our understandings of the cultural and social impact of the United States on Australia, and provide an opportunity to interrogate Australians’ traditional paradigm of “Americanization,” which is commonly dated from Prime Minister John Curtin’s 1941 declaration that Australia “looked to America” rather than to its traditional alliance with Great Britain.