‘Australian Is an Alien’: The Position of Australian Women Married to ‘Aliens’, 1920–49

Phyllis Eve Pick was born in Australia and she married a Hungarian man, Alexander Pick, on 5 May 1942. In March 1945, Perth’s Daily News used her story to highlight the absurd nature of marital denaturalisation – a law whereby women who married ‘aliens’ lost their original nationality and were deemed to acquire that of their husbands. As Phyllis’s husband was an ‘enemy alien’, she was legally regarded the same way: she was required to register as an alien, she had to obtain a travel permit to visit her family who lived in a different suburb and she was prohibited from owning a camera. Prior to marrying, she had served as a voluntary driver in the Red Cross and had been a member of a field unit. She lost her position a week before she married. She recalled that when she went to register as an alien: ‘The only photograph I had to take with me ... was in [my] Army uniform, and the official I had to give it to laughed.’