It seems to have happened overnight, Val thought. How extraordinary. We’ve become a khaki town.

It’s March 1942. Singapore has fallen. Darwin has been bombed. Australia is on the brink of being invaded by the Imperial Japanese Forces. And Val Callahan, publican of The Brown’s Hotel in Townsville, could not be happier as she contemplates the fortune she’s making from lonely, thirsty
soldiers.

Overnight the small Queensland city is transformed into the transport hub for 70,000 American and Australian soldiers. Barbed wire and gun emplacements cover the beaches but the dance halls are in full swing with jazz, jitterbug and jive.

The Australian troops begrudge the confident, well-fed ‘Yanks’ who have taken over their town. There’s growing conflict, too, within the American ranks, because black GIs are enjoying the absence of segregation. And the white GIs don’t like it.

As racial violence explodes through the ranks of the military, a young United States Congressman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, is sent to Townsville by his president to investigate. ‘Keep a goddamned lid on it, Lyndon,’ he is told, ‘lest it explode in our faces…