Christopher Waters

A failure of imagination: R.G. Casey and Australian plans for counter‐subversion in Asia, 1954‐1956

This article is a study of some aspects of the non-military response of the Menzies government to the decolonisation of the European empires and the cold war in Asia. In the mid-1950s R.G. Casey, the Minister for External Affairs, was given responsibility by the cabinet to develop a programme of Colombo Plan - educational, cultural, propaganda, intelligence and political initiatives - which the Menzies government hoped would influence the outcome of the cold war in Asia. This article suggests that an examination of these government initiatives reveals some important insights into the nature of the Menzies government’s understanding of and response to the revolutionary changes which swept through Asia in the decade after the Second World War.

After decolonization: Australia and the emergence of the non-aligned movement in Asia, 1954-55

This article is a study of the response of the Australian government under Robert Menzies to the emergence of the Afro‐Asian movement in the mid‐1950s, especially the element of the non‐aligned nations, which culminated in the Bandung meeting of April 1955. Non‐alignment and anti‐colonialism posed direct threats to the Menzies governments plans for the defence of Southeast Asia and its foreign policy for the region. The study of the Australian response to the Bandung meeting reveals the different legacies which European imperialism left behind in Australia compared with its neighbours in south and east Asia.

‘Against the Tide’: Australian Government Attitudes to Decolonisation in the South Pacific, 1962–1972

This paper is an exploration of the attitudes and policies of key Australian ministers and officials towards decolonisation in the South Pacific through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Until the late 1960s, Australian governments generally favoured a very slow pace of decolonisation for the region, feared that many territories would never make viable nation-states and actively considered the bringing together of some of the colonial territories into larger entities. Consequently, for much of the 1960s Australian governments were engaged in the ultimately fruitless task of holding back the tide of decolonisation as it swept into the South Pacific.

The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams for the Southwest Pacific: Paul Hasluck, the Department of Territories and a Greater Melanesia in 1960

ABSTRACT This paper is a study of the vision held at the beginning of the 1960s by Paul Hasluck, the minister for external territories, and his department of the path to decolonisation for Melanesia. Faced by the ongoing West New Guinea crisis, Hasluck and his officials proposed to keep the western part of New Guinea out of Indonesian hands by expanding Australia’s empire, step by step, to include most of Melanesia. This greater Melanesian empire would eventually be guided to self-government. The proposal stood in a long line of ideas by Pacific-minded Australians going back for 100 years for an expanded Australian empire in the southwest Pacific. Consequently the Menzies cabinet’s rejection of Hasluck’s proposal was not just an important step towards changing its policy towards WNG; it marked the end to a century of Australian dreams and designs of a greater formal empire in the southwest Pacific.

Decolonisation in Melanesia

IN JULY 2010 VANUATU MARKED 30 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE WITH A WEEK OF CELEBRATIONS. The Vanuatu flag adorned caps, shirts and aelan dres, while bunting in the colours of the nation was strung along the streets of Port Vila. Interspersed with the parades, dancing, concerts and church services was a series of seven public discussions run by the Pacific Institute of Public Policy, attended by over one thousand people. At these meetings, which included independence generation leaders such as Donald Kalpokas on a visit from his post at the United Nations, ni-Vanuatu citizens debated vigorously the past, present and future of their nation. Such celebrations are not confined to Vanuatu. Around Melanesia and diasporas in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, similar celebrations acknowledge the achievement of independence in the region. The decolonisation of parts of Melanesia has had a profound effect on all Melanesians: on those who achieved independence and those who did not, on those who welcomed the new nation set within colonial boundaries and those who sought other permutations of the nation through secessionist movements. Decolonisation remains a crucial historical episode of deep meaning for these peoples. Yet of course the decolonisation of Melanesia is incomplete. The patchwork of political changes experienced by the people of Melanesia through the decades of the 1960s and 1970s denies a single overarching narrative. As Stewart Firth has written, ‘From the perspective of the turn of the century, this particular march of history begins to look like an artefact of a period and set of circumstances, and decolonisation has lost its simple teleology’. If we take the contested term ‘Melanesia’ to

Expanding the Australian empire?: the Australian Council for the World Council of Churches, the Menzies Government and the New Hebrides in the late 1950s

In the late 1950s the Australian Council for the World Council of Churches (AC-WCC) inspired primarily by the Presbyterian Church, undertook a concerted campaign to pressure the Australian government to assume a greater role in the affairs of the New Hebrides. The AC-WCC wanted the Australian government to take over the United Kingdoms role in the administration of the Anglo-French Condominium. It was motivated to undertake this campaign by the dismal social and economic conditions in the islands, the neglect of the British and French colonial authorities, and their failure to offer the indigenous people a way forward to self-government. The high point of the campaign was a meeting between Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister and a delegation from the AC-WCC in early 1958. As a result of this meeting Australian ministers and officials, for the final time, gave extended consideration to expanding Australias empire in the South Pacific to include the New Hebrides. This article examines the AC-WCCs campaign, explores the Australian governments response, and analyses the outcome of this important episode in Australias involvement in the colonial territories of the South Pacific.

Journalists making contemporary Australian history

Review of Making Australia Great: Inside Our Longest Boom , George Megalogenis, presenter, Roadshow Entertainment, ABC TV, Screened 17, 24 and 31 March 2015.

A Reply to Neville Meaney

Christopher Waters responds to Neville Meaneys piece in this issue. In his final contribution to the debate Waters does not accept Meaneys claim that he has failed to address the problem of nationalism and that they are like historians passing in the night unable to produce a ‘meaningful conversation’.

Nationalism, Britishness and Australian history: The Meaney thesis revisited

In 2001 Neville Meaney published a landmark article which questioned the place of nationalism in Australian historiography. He argued that up to the 1960s Britishness, not nationalism, was the hegemonic marker of identity for Australians, and warned that nationalist historians had fallen into the trap of writing their histories through nationalism’s own teleological imperative. This article revisits Meaney’s hegemonic claim for the role of Britishness in Australian history by arguing that he went too far. By leeching out nationalism as an ideology at play in Australian politics in the mid-twentieth century historians are in danger of taking Australian history out of its world historical context: the Age of Decolonisation. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Every Assistance & Protection: A History of the Australian Passport

Book review of Every Assistance & Protection: A History of the Australian Passport by Jane Doulman and David Lee.