‘White only to the depths of his outer skin’: newspapers, whiteness, and Indigenous Australian enlistment in the First World War

This article uses contemporary newspaper reports on Indigenous enlistment in the AIF during the First World War to highlight how media narratives of war service were racialised during the conflict. Newspapers used and sensationalised examples of Indigenous Australian enlistment to temporarily bestow a degree of whiteness on non-white individuals, while threatening the removal of whiteness from un-enlisted Anglo-Australian men. In doing so, these reports reinforced the idealised racial boundaries of the AIF and the Australian nation, even as they reported on cases that crossed them.