This book crosses many borders. Working with Aboriginal Australians as fellow historians, I have become increasingly aware of the diversity and tensions within the artificial borders erected between ‘White’ and ‘Black’ Australians. Many of the Aboriginal people I know had backgrounds which included South Asian seamen and African, African-American, and Chinese gold-miners. The non-Aboriginal Australians who unthinkingly declared themselves to be ‘White’ also often had diverse backgrounds, sometimes including Aboriginal – or Indian or Indonesian or Chinese – ancestry. The relationships that generated this complex racial geography were not in the distant past, but often within the time of my parents or grandparents – proof, if any more were needed, that the ‘White Australia’ policy was not only draconian but also based on illusions of a fictionalised racial purity, which turned its back on the rich cultural offerings that could have been the experience of all Australians.

If this inquiry had just been about Australia I would already have had many people to thank, but this book posed even more of a challenge. Not only is it set during the tumultuous decade from 1939 to 1949, but it is also based on the premise that Australia was not isolated but instead embedded within a region: the eastern Indian Ocean, extending from India into Southeast Asia, China, and on into the South Pacific. The principal countries considered here are India, Indonesia, China, and Australia. Many groups of people have made their living by moving between at least three or four of these countries, even before they were connected to the more distant arenas of imperial politics and economic power in Europe. The decade of the 1940s was shaken not only by World War II – as was Europe – but also by the challenges to colonialism that made war and its aftermath a very different matter in this Eastern Indian Ocean region than it was in Europe.

Mobile people – seamen, traders, soldiers, and later correspondents and activists – were the channels through which the many cultures of Asia were linked, interacting with each other and with the locally resident populations in each of their ports or battlegrounds.