The lonely boy with the sad eyes finally got to come back to Australia

The tale of the lonely boy left at a Sydney orphanage broke the hearts of a nation. Described as a war child of mixed race with “sad eyes”, Geoffrey Joiner was the result of a wartime romance between an Australian woman and an African-American man who met at a Sydney nightclub.

Joiner was born in Sydney on the day after his father, Trennon, a US Navy sailor, was shipped home in 1944.

Three years later the boy was surrendered to Dalwood Children’s Home at Seaforth on Sydney’s northern beaches by his mother, Jean Aughey.

Joiner had no other home and was stateless. He was not the only one.

“There are potentially thousands of children [like Joiner] born of war who have been neglected by the United States and Australia,” said historian Dr Victoria Grieves Williams, who developed an Australian Research Council project looking into such cases. “We have almost 40 of the children and their families in the project, and every story is different.”

Most were love stories.

“People fell in love and wanted to marry,” Grieves Williams said. “Many were bitterly disappointed by the two racially segregating regimes [Australia and the US] not allowing them to marry and form families for their children.”

Like Joiner, many were never issued a passport or any papers.

The story of five-year-old Geoffrey Joiner’s abandonment, his loneliness and the generosity of the public and a prominent philanthropist and trustee of Taronga Park Zoo, Sir E. J. Hallstrom, who funded Joiner’s reunion with his father Trennon in the US, made gripping news.

Like a real-life soap opera, it prompted daily coverage by newspapers to quench readers’ interest in the boy’s fate.

By March, the five-year-old was reunited with the father he had never met. Joiner never made it back to Australia before he died, aged 79, in Ohio in 2023, and did not ever see his mother or his older sister Betty again.

This year, though, his son, Geoffrey Joiner jnr, of Virginia Beach, US, brought his late father’s ashes back to Australia.

Before his father died Joiner jnr asked: “Would you like for me to take you back to Australia and dump your ashes somewhere? And he was like … ‘That’ll be the best thing that could ever happen. That way I’ll be back to where I started from’.”

Joiner’s remains were spread at Dalwood, no longer a children’s home, and at Aughey’s grave.

His family sprinkled more ashes at Taronga Zoo, where Hallstrom’s archives are held. A long-serving director and trustee of the zoo, Hallstrom made his fortune selling Silent Knight refrigerators. He wrote a blank cheque to cover the costs of sending Joiner to live with his father in the United States.

Hallstrom’s philanthropy also included bringing three boatloads of animals from Africa, South America and Papua New Guinea after the war to Australia, which he had bought and donated to the zoo.

In correspondence, Hallstrom marvelled that Joiner had grown to more than two metres tall.

The boy may have remained at Dalwood for his entire childhood if it wasn’t for a report by The Daily Telegraph on the eve of his fifth birthday in 1949, and headlines describing him as “the loneliest boy in the world”.

“Geoffrey never has a visitor, and nobody contributes to his support … he gets all dressed up and sits waiting for someone to come see him, but no one ever calls,” the report said.

It included a plea from Trennon Joiner, writing from Ohio. “Won’t you please send my son to me? Why should he suffer for what was wrong?”

The next day the boy with no visitors had crowds of them, and a mountain of toys. Soon after, Hallstrom gave him the blank cheque to get him home.

Later in life Geoffrey Joiner wanted to return to Australia, but he had been scared that if he left the US he would not be able to come back.

And when the boy arrived in the United States he was detained until the paperwork for his entry was complete. He was not issued with a passport.

Joiner jnr said his father never recovered from his experience in Australia.

A fear of abandonment had haunted Joiner snr’s life, making him insecure in relationships and unsure of his citizenship.

In an undated letter, he writes to his half-sister Betty in Australia, apologising for not being in touch: “I had no way of corresponding with mother and you.”

He writes that he doesn’t know how they were separated, and adds, “please don’t let it happen again”.

“He didn’t really know if he had proper citizenship in the United States, and he had been living under the radar his entire life,” Joiner jnr said.

“The biggest question we all have is why Jean didn’t come. Sometimes I ask myself if it was the military, or if she had a change of heart. Maybe my Aunt Betty wasn’t allowed to come and she didn’t want to leave her behind. Or perhaps some paperwork was required for her because from that point on it’s where [Hallstrom] steps in.”

Letters between Joiner’s parents, who had met at Booker T. Washington Club in Darlinghurst during the war, show they wanted to stay together.

Aughey was unfairly criticised by people, Grieves Williams said. “Women like Jean who were left holding the baby were commonly not thought well of. Placing your child in an orphanage when you had no family support to allow you to work was a common option for single mothers at this time.”

Some reports said Aughey would often stand at a distance to glimpse her son, and Joiner thought he occasionally saw her. She was reported as saying he would be better off with his father.

If Trennon Joiner had applied for permission to marry Aughey, it was probably never approved. Grieves Williams said military command generally did not action requests by African Americans to marry Australian women. Only two cases she knows were approved, including an under-age and pregnant woman whose family insisted on a marriage to avoid a scandal.

Prospective war brides were encouraged to write to their fiance’s family, and Aughey had been writing to Trennon Joiner’s mother.

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