The fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942, and the arrival in Australia of General Douglas MacArthur and his American legions later the same year, confronted Australia with the collapse of the imperial order that had hitherto underwritten its security. The Prime Minister, John Curtin, made clear the new reality in his New Year message for 1942, when, as the British dithered in Singapore, he declared ‘that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom’. Although Curtin himself did not intend his words as a declaration of independence from Britain, events produced their own logic. Australia became a military base from which the United States launched its campaign to drive back the Japanese. The troops who came to fill the base brought with them colour discrimination and Coke, but also jazz, modern poetry and courtesy to women. Max Harris, who had established the journal Angry Penguins in Adelaide in 1941, and Clem Christesen, who in 1940 in Brisbane had founded Meanjin Papers to keep civilized values alive amid wartime restrictions, were among those who appreciated the new spirit. To youngsters who had grown up under the repression of Prime Ministers Lyons and Menzies and Attorney-General Hughes these newcomers brought the sense of a world open to conquest by the mind and the senses. Meanjin welcomed contributions from American writers like Harry Roskolenko and Karl Shapiro whom the tide of war had washed to Australia.