Australia’s Strategic Origins In The South Pacific And Its Future In East Asia

The Hon Justice Michael Pembroke SC is a judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. He is also a writer and author, most recently, of Arthur Phillip – Sailor, Mercenary, Governor, Spy and currently writing a book on the origins of the two Koreas and China’s entry into the Korean War. The Georgian society that produced Arthur Phillip – first governor of the colony that became New South Wales – belonged to an age of entitlement, exploration and acquisition. More than two centuries later, Australia’s geographical space is increasingly dominating Australian perceptions. Where once it was the fear of invasion from our northern neighbours, today Australians seek more understanding of the Eastern hemisphere, its cultures and its leaders. On Tuesday 9 August 2016, Michael Pembroke addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss his two areas of research and to offer fresh perspectives on Australia and Asia as neighbours.

AUSTRALIA’S STRATEGIC ORIGINS IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC AND ITS FUTURE IN EAST ASIA

MICHAEL PEMBROKE

I would like to speak to you first about the geopolitics of the eighteenth century, which was the context in which the first settlement in Australia was established. Then I would like to move to the geopolitics of northeast Asia, which is the subject of my current project. As Gerard has just said, it is three years since my biography of Arthur Phillip was published, and four years since I wrote it, so you will understand why I am grateful for the opportunity to say a few words about another subject.

The eighteenth century

Let me give you a few dates and we’ll work our way through those formative years relevant to the establishment of the first colony in NSW. In 1770, James Cook claimed the east coast of Australia for Great Britain. He was imprecise about how far west his claim extended. It was basically to the Great Dividing Range, as far as the eye could see from the Endeavour. There was no longitudinal specification of the western boundary. Two years later, in 1772, the first French government expedition in search of the great south land landed in Western Australia. It was commanded by a man called Kerguelen, after whom some islands are named in the southern Indian Ocean. His deputy was a man called Saint Aloüarn. They landed on the west coast near Dirk Hartog Island.

Let me read something to you from my book because it may sound familiar:

The annexation ceremony took place on the cliffs above Turtle Bay on Dirk Hartog Island. Just as Cook had done, the French wandered inland and did not recognise any evidence of organised human occupation. They then raised the flag, read a formal proclamation claiming possession in the name of Louis XV, shouted “Vive Le Roi” three times and fired three volleys of musket shot. Before leaving they buried one of their seaman in the sand and left several bottles, a few French coins and a white ensign.

Thus, within the space of two years, there were competing claims to the east coast and the west coast of Australia. The international law of nations at the time provided that in order to take control of an uninhabited country, you had to do more than make a claim. You had to consummate the claim by settling, civilising and cultivating the land. It was necessary to establish a settlement. Over the next 20 years there was a degree of urgency in France and in Britain about ensuring that their respective inchoate claims were completed.

Let us move forward to 1778. In 1778, Arthur Phillip was in Rio de Janeiro, in the last few months of his four years of service as a captain in the Portuguese navy. This was a period of his life where he excelled himself. In fact, there were several such periods. But this period gave him a great step up. Phillip served with distinction and was highly regarded by the Portuguese Governor Lavradio. News of Lavradio’s testimonials about Phillip’s character and expertise were well received in London.

Portugal and Britain were old allies. Phillip was in the Portuguese navy to assist in a war then taking place against Spain in South America. Portugal owned Brazil. Spain owned most of the rest of South America. They were at war over territory around the River Plate estuary, where Montevideo is on the northern side and Buenos Aires is on the southern side. The war indirectly and eventually gave rise to the country we now know as Uruguay.

When a peace treaty was reached it was called the Treaty of San Ildefonso. The peace treaty recognised that the ancient line of separation, the Papal line through the Atlantic Ocean which divided the old world between Spain and Portugal, remained in existence. Not only did it continue to exist, but the treaty recognised that it continued into the eastern hemisphere of the globe. At this point, no one in Whitehall knew as much about the political dynamics of the ancient line of separation between Portugal and Spain as Phillip did.

This became significant to the territory over which Phillip was given control when he was commissioned by His Majesty’s Government in 1786. Phillip sat down with officials in Whitehall for months on end in the autumn of 1786 and the following winter – through to May 1887 when the First Fleet weighed anchor. The terms of his commission were matters on which he was vitally interested and in respect of which he had a lot of input. Phillip proposed that the western boundary of New South Wales should be the 135^th meridian of longitude. By adopting that boundary the British government was seeking to respect the ancient line of separation and avoid offending the Dutch. I say the Dutch because Holland was effectively the legatee of Portugal in the Indian Ocean.

The prospect of offending Spain did not seem to matter. It was an inveterate British enemy. The Dutch republic was in a different position and Britain’s attitude to it was delicate. That this was the true reason for selecting the western border emerges from a draft preface which Sir Joseph Banks wrote for Matthew Flinders’ book A Voyage to Terra Australis. Sir Joseph Banks explained “that the selection of the 135^th meridian was intended to observe the ancient line of separation with which it was nearly corresponding”. However, the issue was apparently so sensitive that Sir Robert Peel, the Undersecretary for Colonies, requested Banks to “omit any notice of the reasons that are supposed to have informed His Majesty’s government in placing the western boundary of New South Wales”. Banks got in a huff about this and withdrew his preface, which was never published. But it still exists and historians know about it. That is how New South Wales came to extend to the 135^th meridian, which is near to, but not the same as, the current border of Western Australia.

We then move forward to 1784 when Phillip was sent to France. He had returned from his time in the American Revolutionary Wars, which culminated, in his particular case in a major naval expedition to the Bay of Bengal and back – over much of the same water that he would later cover with the First Fleet. He was much favoured in Whitehall, especially by Nepean who was the Undersecretary of the Home Office.

The Home Office was responsible for colonies and espionage. Phillip was sent as an espionage agent to France because there was a great concern about re-building the French navy. Ever since the Seven Years War from 1856 to 1863, when France suffered terrible losses, it had been on a mission to rebuild its navy. This was a concern to the British. Phillip was sent to Toulon and the other ports of France. We have two of his reports that he sent from France but we know that there were five because they were numbered in a series and the two reports are part of a series of five reports. While Phillip was in the ports of France he must have come across Lapérouse. The great expedition of Lapérouse was being fitted out in Brest Harbour in 1785.

This brings me forward to 1786. This is the year that the decision was made to establish the colony of New South Wales. It was a decision made during a time of great urgency and a great anxiety. It was made on a Saturday morning, which was unusual for cabinet meetings. There were two motivating factors in the geopolitical sense. There was, of course, concern about the overflowing prison hulks but the decision may not have been taken without the influence of the geopolitical issues.

The first issue was the concern about possible French colonisation of New South Wales and New Zealand. Louis XVI was now the king. He was the grandson of Louis XV. The monarchy skipped a generation. His father died of tuberculosis. Louis XVI was young and very much a figure of the Enlightenment. Most people think of Lapérouse’s expedition as scientific and geographic, but Louis’ instructions required Lapérouse to consider and report upon the ‘possibilities of commerce’ and the “suitability for settlement” of the lands visited by him. And he was specifically requested to ascertain whether the English had formed a settlement on the islands of New Zealand.

The French curiosity about whether the English had actual settled any of the newly discovered lands in the South Pacific was matched by an equivalent British concern that the French might do so themselves before they did. That explains why the British ambassador in Paris, Dorset, expressed great anxiety in May 1785, passing on intelligence that he had heard that “Lapérouse had orders to visit New Zealand and that the French have a design of establishing some kind of settlement there”.

The following month both Dorset and Dalrymple, another diplomat and also a cousin of Dorset, passed on intelligence that ultimately proved to be wrong, but which they believed at the time. They said that there was “little room to doubt that the French had a desire to make a settlement in New Zealand by landing convicts there”. In particular, the intelligence included the alarming information that “60 criminals from the prison at Bicêtre”, which is in the south east of Paris, had been “conveyed under strong guard and with great secrecy to Brest where they were to be embarked on board Monsieur de Lapérouse’s ships. It is imagined that they would be left to take possession of that lately discovered country”.

That was one anxiety. The other became manifest the next year. In 1786, Pitt and Sydney, who were the core of the cabinet, and Nepean, a most influential civil servant, made the decision to establish the colony of New South Wales. In the lead up to the decision, in February 1886, the British ambassador at The Hague, a man called Harris, warned that “the intentions of France in forming a connection with the Dutch republic were too evident to admit of doubt”. The Dutch and the French both had possessions in India. Then the French engaged in transparently provocative actions in the Bay of Bengal around the entrance of the Ganges River – a bit like ships manoeuvring in the South China Sea. These were the first drumbeats of war.

This was followed by a series of alarming news items in quick succession. On 1 August, Harris wrote that there “would soon be a major development and that France intended to send troops to the Dutch bases in India”. On 8 August, a week later, he reported that “the crisis is drawing nearer and nearer every hour”. And on 16 August, Sydney, who was the Home Secretary, sent an account to King George III of the French naval capacity in the East – meaning India. Within hours, George III acknowledged what Pitt and Sydney and their colleagues had been warning him. Three days later on a Saturday morning, Pitt’s cabinet decided to establish a settlement in New South Wales.

The eleven ships of the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay between 18 and 20 January 1788. Four days later, on 24 January, two large French ships – La Boussole and L’Astrolabe – arrived off the entrance to Botany Bay. They were Lapérouse’s ships. Phillip did not want to meet Lapérouse. The Melbourne historian Alan Frost suggests that he was concerned that Lapérouse might recognise him from his days undercover in France. Just as probably, Phillip did not want Lapérouse to see the advantages of Port Jackson, which had not been charted and which the French had not seen.

It was no accident that Lapérouse arrived in Botany Bay on that date. He had been sent a despatch from France. When the French learned about Phillip’s expedition, the French Minister of Marine decided urgently to get a message to Lapérouse. It was calculated that at a certain time, Lapérouse would be in Kamchatka, north of Japan and Korea, in the far northeast near Sakhalin. But how did you get a message to someone so far from France in those days? They had to send despatch riders in relays of horses from Paris to St Petersburg, then Moscow, all the way across the tundra, to Petrapavlosk and then Kamchatka. The message arrived just before Lapérouse was due to depart. The message told him to go immediately to Botany Bay and to ascertain what the English were doing at Botany Bay. Lapérouse arrived four days after the last ship of the First Fleet.

Northeast Asia

Now I want to move to another part of the world, at least a part of the world that affects Australia. Understanding the historical origins of the current instability in North East Asia is something we all owe to ourselves. Only when you know the history can you understand the context. Only then, can you put yourself in a position to make an informed decision. For their part, the Chinese have a great feel for their history. You may not know that there were three supply ships in the first fleet – six transport ships, three supply ships and two naval ships. After they had unloaded and completed their responsibilities, the three supply ships headed to China, making the journey around Cape York, through the Sunda Strait up into the South China Sea. They were chartered from East India Company and they were going to collect tea to take to London.

Let me read an extract from my manuscript. What the editors do to it I cannot promise:

The fateful proposal that the Korean nation should be partitioned at the 38^th parallel was an American initiative, made by a little known war time policy committee known as the State War Navy Coordinating Committee. It was called ‘Swink’ after its acronym SWNCC. The proposed dividing line was selected on 10 August 1945 around midnight in room number 866 in the Pentagon by two young colonels in the State Department. They were working from the March 1944 issue of the National Geographic magazine which contained a map of the Korean Peninsula. One of the colonels was Dean Rusk who later became Secretary of State.

You might ask, why did they do this? Well it was 10 August, Hiroshima occurred on 6 August; Nagasaki on 9 August. This was a significant factor in Japan’s surrender. But another factor was Russia’s intervention in the Pacific War. Stalin had agreed at Yalta in February 1945, to enter the war against Japan within three months of the end of the war in Europe. The German surrender took place on 8 May and precisely three months later on the evening of 8 August, two days after Hiroshima, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov informed the Japanese Foreign Minister of his governments’ hostile intentions.

At one minute past midnight on 9 August, the Soviet Army moved into Manchuria, the area north of the Korean border. The operation took place on a grand scale. The front consisted of three army groups, half a million men and over five thousand tanks. It extended more than 4600 kilometres from the Pacific Coast to eastern inner Mongolia. The ability of the Soviet Army to occupy the whole of the Korean peninsula, before American forces could arrive, was manifest. This was a source of consternation in the Pentagon. By 10 August, the first elements of the Russian 25^th army had entered north east Korea. A fortnight later they had completed occupation as far south as Pyongyang. By 1 September they had affected occupation to the 38^th parallel. So impressed was one American military historian that he named the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula ‘Operation August Storm’.

The partition was a unilateral initiative. The United Kingdom was not consulted nor was any other allied power. Korea was ignored. Stalin acquiesced intriguingly and without demur. What followed for the next three years was an occupation of the north and the south by the armies of Soviet Russia and the United States. The State Department professed to have as its objective the unification of the country under an international trusteeship. But the Pentagon had a different idea. Certainly, the American occupation army commander, General Hodge, and his Soviet counterpart, had different ideas. So both occupation armies built client states. By 1948 there was no turning back. Later that year, predictably two states emerged. South Korea called itself the “Republic of Korea” and came into existence in August after an election which was supervised by the United Nations, but which was highly controversial and unsatisfactory.

The North Korean state came into existence a couple of weeks later after an election, but one which was not supervised by the United Nations. It called itself the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”. As a British court made clear in the 1970s, whether a nation state comes into existence or not depends on the practicalities of control and jurisdiction, not whether the United Nations organisation has supervised its elections or not and not whether the Foreign Office or the State Department has chosen to recognise the country.

So we had two states. And for two years they sparred. It was never clear who would invade the other first because the President of South Korea was always saying that he wanted to unify the peninsula and the President of North Korea made similar statements. Both presidents had been brought in from outside by their respective occupation armies. Kim Il-Sung was brought in from Manchuria. He was actually originally born in North Korea but had gone off to Manchuria to fight the Japanese. The South Korean President was an extremist firebrand called Syngmann Rhee, brought in from the United States, where he had spent most of his life.

The Korean War started in June 1950. Before dawn on a Sunday morning, the North Korean army invaded. They had over 120 Soviet tanks and other materiel provided by Stalin. It should have been straightforward. Kim Il-Sung thought it would take a matter of weeks. But President Truman sent across the US occupation army in Japan. The US troops were soft and had a hard time. They had been living a good life in Japan with house boys and maids. My father used to say they were “overfed and undertrained”. The first three months were very tough. But they turned it around and after three months they had re-established the border at the 38^th parallel. The United Nations resolution which legitimised the intervention authorised a collective force to repel the invasion and restore the security of the border. The operative words were “repel and restore”.

So it was all over in three months – by the end of September 1950. At that point a decision was made that many historians have said was tragic. Washington decided to cross the border and manoeuvred intensely for allied support for a UN resolution. Having protested at the North Koreans crossing the border, UN forces now crossed the border themselves – without any sense of irony – and moved toward the Chinese border on the Yalu River.

Up to this point, China had had nothing to do with the war. It was however concerned that the American-led UN forces would threaten its border. Zhou Enlai made a memorable statement, in which he warned that “China would not stand idly by”. I said earlier that the Chinese know their history. And they know that history tends to repeat itself. I was fascinated to read a few weeks ago that a Chinese official used the same expression in the context of American threats regarding the South China Sea. He said “China will not stand idly by”.

So, in October 1950, the Chinese were waiting for the Americans. Hardened soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army crossed the Yalu River at night and went into the mountains. To adopt a phrase that Mao used, they lured the enemy in deep. As the American led forces moved further and further into the mountains, closer to the border, the Chinese waited. They brought in over 200,000 troops and avoided all air surveillance. It was “the most successful mass infiltration in modern history”. And when the Chinese chose their moment to attack, the result was an unmitigated disaster.

The following retreat by the United States 8^th Army was not only the longest in American history, it was one of the worst military disasters in history. And President Truman declared a state of emergency. The Australian official historian of the Korean War said that legitimate questions about the wisdom, morality and legality of taking an offensive action north of the 38^th parallel were ignored. In fact, they were lost beneath a wave of moral righteousness and misplaced confidence. Doubters were sidelined, sceptics labelled as appeasers and allies were labelled as either ‘with us or against us’. And in a pattern that has since become familiar, the quest for UN authority to cross the US parallel was mired in unconvincing rationalism, transparent ambiguity, and diplomatic and legal machinations reminiscent of the wrangling over the justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

That was not the end of course. After being pushed back, the US army recovered and the fighting stabilised along the 38^th parallel – where it had started. There it remained and continued for over two years. According to most estimates, the number of lives lost was 3-4 million people. And the vast majority died after the initial resolution of the United Nations had been successfully achieved. And while the fighting took place along the 38^th parallel, behind the battle line, the cities, towns and villages of North Korea were bombed and flattened.