Continental Drift

Australia's Search for a Regional Identity

Rawdon Dalrymple

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351753623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2003. Original, insightful and well-organized, Rawdon Dalrymple studies Australia's sense of vulnerability and attachment to distant protectors which has coexisted with tendencies of both assertiveness and complacency. Penetrating and authoritative the book examines the cautious development of Australian relations with East Asia during the 1980s and 1990s, with detailed coverage of the background to the Australian effort and critical analysis of where Australian forays into the politics of the region leave its standing in East Asia and the world today.

Chapter 1

Living With Vulnerability – From the Beginning to 1983

The Sense of Vulnerability

For much of Australia's modern history, that is to say since 1788, a sense of vulnerability was a prominent feature of its attitudes to the outside world. Indeed it can be argued that it remains in changed forms, and still exerts an important influence on Australian attitudes and foreign policy.

The nature of the apprehension of vulnerability evolved and became more complex as the colony itself evolved, spread, reproduced itself in other parts of the continent and developed its own characteristics. The surrounding circumstances changed too. The original fear of being overwhelmed by a foreign enemy came back in acute form 154 years after the beginning of the settlement but since then it has receded and become hardly visible, although no doubt it still lies dormant in the Australian mind - or in many Australian minds. Certainly it plays almost no part in current public discussion of foreign policy and has been heavily discounted in official discussion of foreign and defence policy. But the wariness about Indonesia which shows up in opinion polling¹ suggests that the fear of actual attack could recur and influence political consideration. Beyond that fear of being overwhelmed by force, other grounds for feeling vulnerable developed. But these too have receded, although remaining strong enough still to be exploitable in domestic politics. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Australia seems to have more confidence in its capacity to survive and prosper largely on its own terms than at any time in the past, and the old concerns about vulnerability to threats from outside seem to trouble Australians far less than used to be the case. But some of the grounds for feeling vulnerable which influenced policy and discussion in the past have not gone away. The issues which produced them have not been resolved and indeed the various problems which have come to be included under the rubric of ‘border security’ have attracted more attention than for many years. That is especially the case with what the Government describes as attempted illegal entry mainly by people from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Their movements are typically arranged by ‘people smugglers’ and terminate in dangerous and sometimes fatal journeys in small boats from Indonesia. The treatment of these people under the increasingly stringent Australian immigration regime has become politically contentious both domestically and internationally.

It seems moreover inherently unlikely that the sense of vulnerability which was for so long an important influence on Australian attitudes and Australian policy has not retained some hold even though the old grounds for feeling vulnerable have all diminished. Indeed the diminution has almost become a reversal in some senses. Whereas the smallness of the population used to be a major factor in the sense of vulnerability, it is now seriously argued in some quarters in Australia that the population is too large for ecological sustainability, even though it is only 19 million in an island continent nearly as large as the United States of America. Australia's sense of remoteness has greatly diminished with the ease and rapidity of travel and the instant capacity to communicate with all of the rest of the world including especially Australia's cultural homelands of Europe and North America. That capacity will expand even more rapidly in the early decades of the twenty-first century. But already an Australian who is conversing by e-mail with people across the world, browsing web sites everywhere, and aware that the great cities of Asia are only between eight and twelve hours away, while in twenty four hours she or he can be in London or New York, is unlikely to have a sense of remoteness such as young Australians had in my youth when it took five weeks to reach London and most of what lay between Australia and Europe was ignored. Moreover the fear of being overwhelmed by foreign force, while it can perhaps still be summoned up by questions about Indonesia for example, is not at all acute or urgent in the absence of any identifiable potential enemy with the present intention and power to dominate Australia. And the sense of racial isolation which fed into vulnerability in various ways has greatly diminished. But all of these factors still have some presence in the Australian consciousness, even though much changed and reduced, and another kind of isolation and vulnerability may be emerging. A Prime Minister of noted political sensitivity, on a visit to Washington in mid-2002, still spoke in terms which Menzies could have used of the strength of Australia's commitment to the United States. Though uttered to the Congress of the United States such ringing statements are addressed indirectly to an Australian audience. Mr Howard knows that the alliance continues to give comfort to Australians. The influence on Australian thinking and action of the sense of vulnerability is therefore worth further exploration.

In 1979 Alan Renouf wrote a book entitled The Frightened Country reflecting his critique of the dominance of Australian policy by the perceived ‘threat of international communism’, especially during the Vietnam war period. Recently David Walker has written Anxious Nation with a wide historical and cultural sweep based on extensive research which illustrates Australian anxieties about Asia. He shows how, despite the anxiety, there was a growing Australian interest in Asia and over many years the development of links of many kinds. He calls for a sympathetic understanding of the sense of vulnerability which ‘the four million insecurely established and predominantly Anglo-Celtic settlers of 1900’ felt towards Asia: ‘The idea that Australia was a continent under threat seemed all too rational for those who saw the world as a place in which the strong preyed upon and eliminated the weak. Australia's distance from Europe, tiny population, high levels of urbanization and declining birth-rate seemed unmistakable signs of a community at risk either of takeover or of an accelerating exposure to Asian influences’².

Nor has the perception that undercurrents of fear and uncertainty have strongly influenced Australia's view of the world been limited to Australian writers. For example, in the 1940s and 1950s the American historian Werner Levi conducted studies of Australian foreign policy and wrote of an Australian fear of ‘the Asian peoples swooping down over Australia and appropriating the empty lands for their impoverished masses…The assumed hostility of these “masses” was usually made more frightening by pointed emphasis to the “loneliness” of Australia, a psychological factor dating back to colonial times, a haunting obsession which [in the Second World War] seemed to turn into reality’³.

The manifestation of the sense of vulnerability in attitudes and policies from the beginnings of modern Australia is surveyed briefly in this chapter as a necessary preliminary to the examination of the main themes of this book. It raises questions which will be addressed in what follows.

The Last of Lands

When Captain Arthur Phillip arrived at Botany Bay on 18 January 1788 after eight months and one day at sea he had a total complement of 1030 people to found the new settlement. Three quarters of them were convicts. Finding Botany Bay unsuitable, Phillip moved the fleet a few miles north, through the entrance to Port Jackson, and raised the British flag on the site of what is now Sydney. The tiny remote settlement survived with difficulty and on the edge of starvation until the second fleet arrived in July 1790. Even then its isolation and smallness meant that it remained vulnerable to Britain's imperial rivals or enemies and especially the French. A French expedition under Baudin in 1801-03 caused alarm and prompted expansion of the colony to the south with settlements in Tasmania and on Port Phillip, in what was later Victoria. Those and subsequent outlying settlements remained conscious of their extreme remoteness from the metropolitan country and their very small population. In an age of European expansion and rivalry, the colonists looked apprehensively at the presence in regional waters of French and then Russian naval units. Anxious reactions to a subsequent French expedition prompted the establishment of further settlements including in Western Australia where a colony was established in June 1829. It was concern about the Russians in the 1850s which led to the construction of Fort Denison, the little stone fort which still stands in Sydney Harbour. The extension of the colonizing phase to include the United States and then Japan added to the sense of potential turbulence. In 1863 the Admiral in command of the Russian Pacific fleet visited Melbourne and Sydney and it was claimed that he carried plans for Russian attacks on the Australian colonies in the event of an outbreak of war between Russia and Great Britain⁴.

In the beginning the infant colony with its complement of a thousand people, its remoteness from home, and its very precarious supply of food and other necessities of life was vulnerable to attack by an enemy force. Intelligence about the presence of French or other potentially hostile visitors was lacking or late and there was an obvious basis for anxiety about survival. That direct sort of anxiety about the possibility of being overwhelmed by sea-borne invasion has never entirely disappeared from Australia. From time to time it was stimulated by the presence of actual or perceived threats and was at its most acute in 1942 under Japanese attack. As a ground for perceived vulnerability the possibility of invasion persisted for most of the first two centuries, but other grounds emerged alongside it. The most influential of these were closely related. One was the perceived need to retain the whole of the continent and its approaches in British (Australian) hands and the other was the determination to ensure that the population remained British. Both of these objectives were seen as threatened by non-British of one kind or another and the settler British at times feared, and greatly resented, that they did not have whole-hearted support from the homeland on the other side of the world.

The territorial integrity argument was based on the belief that security would be compromised if the island continent were to be shared with an alien and possibly rival power. The argument that vulnerability would be reduced, and future opportunity increased, by holding the whole continent developed strong roots in the colony. When later it was extended to demands that British or Australian control be asserted over New Guinea and other South Pacific islands, because they were seen as essential to the integrity of Australia's security, there were rather sharp disagreements with the imperial government in London.

Governor Phillip's commission had not covered the whole of the continent, excluding most of the parts already discovered by the Dutch. Phillip's commission extended from longitude 135 degrees east, that is a line through the continent a little to the east of present day Alice Springs. The primary and indeed decisive reason for establishing the colony of New South Wales was to create a place far away from England to replace the lost American colonies as a repository for convicted criminals and for that purpose half a continent would no doubt have seemed sufficient. With time and the emergence of a sense of identity and long term interest among the settler population, there emerged a determination to make Australia a new country, to be populated by British but with its own character. With the debate over federation of the separate colonies came the call for ‘a continent for a nation and a nation for a continent’. Already in 1826 the decision had been taken to claim the western side of the continent and in 1829 Captain James Stirling took settlers there to establish Australia's first non-convict colony.

Practical interest in the north of the continent was much slower to develop and was desultory until South Australia claimed administrative control in 1863. The economic advantages which had been expected failed to materialize and ‘By the late nineteenth century, accusations of inertia, ineptitude or downright incompetence were routinely levelled at [South Australian] politicians and bureaucrats responsible for the Territory’⁵. David Walker has recently shown how ‘deeper anxieties’ developed in Australia about the ‘Empty North’ and the failure of the South Australian administration to develop and populate it. ‘Australia could not afford to run the risk of appearing indifferent to the mounting pressures and restless energies of emerging Asian nations in its immediate neighbourhood’⁶. Authorities including President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States were invoked; there were grave warnings by prominent Australians, and novels were written which depicted the traumatic consequences of imagined Asian invasions. Not much less imaginative were some of the contributions in the debate which preceded passage of the Northern Territory Acceptance Bill in December 1910, ending South Australia's administration and transferring responsibility to the Commonwealth. Some proponents spoke in extravagant terms of the development potential of the territory, others of its alleged attractions to countries to the north, especially Japan. But in fact when the South Australians had made representations to the Japanese government in the late 1870s to undertake government sponsored immigration into the territory the proposal was rejected. The debate on the Northern Territory Acceptance Bill precipitated increased attention to the perceived threat to the British character of Australia of burgeoning Asian populations and rising Asian nations thought to be looking on Australia's ‘Empty North’ with covetous eyes.

Already in the 1880s the issue of Chinese immigration had generated a sharp disagreement with the Imperial government and begun to figure in the movement for a federation of the Australian colonies. Sir Henry Parkes, Premier of New South Wales, made a series of speeches in 1888 explaining what he saw as the Chinese threat and justifying action taken to prevent Chinese immigration. In the Legislative Assembly in Sydney on 3 April 1888⁷, he recalled that in November of the previous year he had sent a circular letter to ‘all the Australian governments’, in which he had invited them to join in a general measure ‘for the virtual prohibition of Chinese immigration’. He then explained that in February 1888 he had written separately to the premier of South Australia (because it had been exploring the possibility of bringing Asian immigrants into the Northern Territory) ‘that it appeared a very likely fact that the Chinese government were privy to what was taking place in the Northern Territory, and that very probably it might be the design of a considerable number of Chinese to form a settlement in some remote part…where they might become strong enough to form, in the course of time, a kind of Chinese colony’. Sir Henry concluded that if the British government did not take the action he was demanding ‘it will be the duty of this government, without the loss of a single day, to ask Parliament to take the necessary steps to protect this colony once and for ever from the influx of Chinese’. A few days later, on 9 April in a speech⁸ at Wagga Wagga, the Premier sought again to drive home the message about the threat from China. He spoke at length about the transformation of China in a relatively few years from ‘a mysterious and sealed country’ to ‘one of the most formidable Powers in the world’ with ‘considerably more than one quarter of the whole population of the globe’ (contrasting China's 403 million with a total of 3, 500, 000 for ‘all the Australian colonies including New Zealand and Fiji') and massive armies, large fleets with modern ships and a growing national armaments industry. He went on to extol the qualities of the Chinese people and especially ‘their endurance and their patient labour’ and said that ‘It is for these very qualities that I do not want them to come here’. It was ‘because I believe our first duty…[is] to preserve the British type against all other nations, that I do not want these people to settle amongst us’. Sir Henry endorsed the assertion, attributed to Napoleon, ‘that if the Chinese nation once learnt the art of shipbuilding and the use of European arms, they would be able to conquer the world’, another reason for not wanting to ‘see the imprint of a Chinese settlement on the fair face of these Australian colonies’.

The British government was disconcerted to find itself the recipient of representations by the Chinese Minister in London on instructions from his government protesting the discrimination by the colonial authorities in Australia against immigrants of Chinese race. In the end the Australians got their way on the issue. The British government was also concerned about Australian attitudes towards Japan, a rising power which was being cultivated for reasons of Imperial policy and trade. In Australia there were doubts and worries about these developments. While there was a recognition of commercial opportunities in trade with Japan there was also a disposition to see the Japanese through the same anxious eyes which looked with alarm on Chinese immigration. In August 1894 Great Britain and Japan ratified a Treaty of Commerce and Navigation which they had signed the previous month in London. In the New South Wales Legislative Assembly a question was asked under the title ‘Immigration of Japanese’⁹. ‘In view of the warlike events in the East, and the great success attained by the Japanese nation, will the Government c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• 1 Living With Vulnerability – From the Beginning to 1983
• 2 Approaching an Independent Australian Foreign and Defence Policy
• 3 The Persistence and Decline of Dependence
• 4 Promoting Australia's Asian Future
• 5 Commitments and Hesitations
• 6 Development, Values, Solidarity and Fault Lines
• 7 Australian Efforts to Qualify
• 8 Dealing with Indonesia
• 9 East Timor and the Watershed in Policy
• 10 Opportunities and Constraints
• Bibliography
• Index