War in a ‘white man’s country’: Australian perceptions of blackness on the South African battlefield, 1899–1902

Abstract

Australians volunteered to fight in the South African War at a time when transnational constructions of whiteness determined policy within the British Empire and its colonies towards non-whites. However, the commencement of war in 1899 necessitated a shift in the definition of ‘other’ to justify combat against the white Boer enemy. This article analyses late nineteenth-century settler colonialism in Australia alongside the letters and diaries of Australian South African War soldiers to demonstrate the effect of both affinities with the Boers as inhabitants of a ‘white man’s country’ and conventional perceptions of blackness on their reactions to the South African ‘other’.