ABSTRACT
Marcia Hines is an African American who arrived in Australia to take a role in the musical Hair in Sydney in 1970. Renee Geyer was born in 1953, as was Hines. Geyer was brought up in a very Jewish environment, with a constant awareness of the Holocaust and an inheritance of the trauma experienced by both her parents. As Jews were racialized in Australia in the period leading up to the Second World War, they were thought of ambiguously as both 'white' and 'non-white'. The connection between Jews and Negroes was much more clearly enunciated in the United States, where African Americans and Jews had both been considered a threat to the white race. In 1909, Tucker started singing without blackface while continuing to work in African-American musical forms. Her comedy was no longer founded on imitating African Americans, though singing in African-American genres continued to whiten her and, at the same time, remained liberating for her as a woman.
