Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (Aus., also comboman) a white man who cohabits with or marries an Aborigine woman; thus go/turn combo, to live with an Aborigine woman; thus combo-land, used both for the Northern Territory and for any area where such cohabitation is common.

1898		H. Macilwaine Dinkinbar 70: Or you’d turn combo – live nigger-fashion and hate your own colour.
1910		Bulletin (Sydney) 6 Oct. 15/1: One former Government Resident left several half-caste youngsters behind him, children now in the blacks’ camps, ‘married’ to blacks, and sold on occasion to any old Combo who has a nip of gin in his pocket.
1910		Bulletin (Sydney) 3 Nov. 15/3: It is all looked upon as an immense joke in Combo-land.
1912		Bulletin (Sydney) 18 July 15/1: Became acquainted with an Irish combo once. [...] Lived in a one-roomed slab house, with a gin and an assortment of half-caste piccaninnies.
1926		K.S. Prichard Working Bullocks 46: Combo’s what they call a man tracks round with a gin.
1934		C. Sayce Comboman 240: You’re only a Combo man: That’s what yer are. A Comboman. The ’usband of a lubra.
1938		H. Drake-Brockman Men Without Wives I i: Some fellows simply don’t seem able to help living with gins. Going combo, we call it.
1938		X. Herbert Capricornia (1939) 13: They considered the men who sought the love of lubras — such men were called Comboes — unspeakably low.
1951		E. Hill Territory 443: Combo: (African word) A white man living native.
1958		W.E. Harney Content to Lie in the Sun 50: I would like to see one of the strait-laced scoffers of ‘Combos’ planted on an island full of these ‘girls’.
1975		K. Willey Ghosts of the Big Country 32: Those who transgressed were denigrated as ‘combos’ and ‘gin jockeys’.
1983		K. Hudson Dict. of the Teenage Revolution 45: There has been a significant obstacle to the introduction of the term into Australia, since in that culture ‘combo’ already meant ‘a white man living with an aboriginal woman’.

2. a term of address to an Aborigine.

1912

Bulletin (Sydney) 11 July 13/2: Among South Coast (N.S.W.) aborigines the name ‘combo’ does not bear the same shady significance attached to it by northern Abo.-writers. It is simply a friendly appellation used in greeting a strange nigger arrived at camp.