John Curtin and “Greater Britain” – James Curran

Dr James Curran is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Curtin’s Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Dr Curran is also the co-author (with Stuart Ward) of The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire and author of The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image. James Curran addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 22 March 2011.

JOHN CURTIN AND “GREATER BRITAIN”

 

JAMES CURRAN

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of John Curtin’s “Look to America” statement published in the Melbourne Herald on 27 December 1941. The message contained the Australian government’s plea for American support in the face of a rampant Japanese imperial army sweeping down through South East Asia. The strategic circumstances of the war at this time seemed to presage what Australian politicians and policy-makers had long feared – that with Britain engaged in a European war, it would be unable to defend Australia against a military invasion by an Asian power. Curtin did not mince his words, writing, “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”

The words have become an article of faith in the speeches of Labor prime ministers – witness Julia Gillard’s recent address to the US Congress where the ritual genuflection to Curtin’s judgment yet again provided the historical anchor of Labor’s alliance management credentials. Moreover the statement for many years acted as the canonical proof for those who have painted the portrait of Curtin as a leader fired by the spirit of nationalism – as much in historical scholarship as in the broader public culture.

Yet it has been a long time since anyone claiming specialist expertise in this field has asserted that Curtin’s statement remains the precise moment when Australia finally grasped the nettle of nationhood and cut its ties to Britain.

Contrary to the generally accepted view, Curtin’s “Look to America” was not an epiphany of Australian independence and a rejection of the nation’s Britishness but an expedient call for help at a time when Australia feared the prospect of a Japanese invasion.

Indeed, Prime Ministers Deakin, Lyons and Menzies had all previously appealed to the Americans to come to the defence of Australia. Curtin’s message, although pronounced in far more dramatic circumstances, was entirely consistent with the orthodox Australian foreign policy doctrine of searching for security in the Pacific.

The Labor Prime Minister was adamant that the Pacific should not be treated as a “subordinate part of the general conflict” and declared that the “Australian government therefore regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the democracies’ fighting plan”. More recently, even David Day – the historian who more than any other of recent times has given voice to a radical nationalist interpretation of Anglo-Australian conflict during World War Two – conceded that by war’s end the statement “seemed to have left no lasting mark on Australia”.

It is often forgotten that Curtin himself moved very quickly to assuage any fears that his comments were to be taken as marking a fundamental break with Britain. Under a barrage of visceral verbal assault from his political opponents – one criticised the statement for its “execrable choice of words” – he convened a special press conference in Canberra only two days later, where he said:

There is no part of the Empire more steadfast in loyalty to the British way of living and British institutions than Australia. Our loyalty to His Majesty the King goes to the very core of our national life. It is part of our being….I do not consider Australia a segment of the British Empire.  It is an organic part of the whole structure.  But I do not put Australia in the position of a colony.  Australia is a Dominion.

Curtin’s concern to stress Australia’s position as a “Dominion” in an organic whole was predicated on the view that all British peoples were equal and that all should contribute to the creation of a policy that would provide equal and absolute security for all the peoples of “Greater Britain”. While it might be tempting to see these comments as a pragmatic way of dampening down a domestic scuffle, Curtin went to great lengths as PM to give an institutional expression to his understanding of Empire.

My new book, Curtin’s Empire, takes as its starting point the statement of 1941 to show that it has, to some extent, frozen the Labor leader in time, labelling him forever as the leader who locked horns with Churchill, refused to be bullied by the British and forged the alliance with the United States. But that has meant his ideas about Australia and the empire have been given less billing, as if they don’t fit the nationalist mould in which he seems to have been permanently cast.

Indeed it is almost as if Curtin’s celebrated nationalism is seen as being fundamentally at odds with his periodic lapses into imperial patriotism (such as his appointment of the Duke of Gloucester as Governor-General, or his defence of “God Save the King” as Australia’s official national anthem). Because there remains such a need to hold Curtin up as the great hero of Australian “independence” – in effect, to enoble him as Australia’s George Washington – his commitment to Britain is often depicted as a strange anomaly.

My approach is not biographical in the traditional sense – namely I do not seek to offer a picture of the life. Neither is it concerned with following the meandering tributaries of the “history war” controversies over whether or not there was a “battle for Australia”, whether the Japanese were intending to invade the country, or whether the British failure to hold Singapore constituted a “great betrayal”. Such arguments have produced a vibrant and necessary historical debate but when they explode into the public sphere they so often fall victim to the short-term imperatives of domestic politics or the hysteria of populist national mythology.

Rather, the book aims to show how John Curtin came to see himself as the architect of a new form of Empire – he called it an “Empire Council” or “Imperial Secretariat”

–  and why he thought that this new phase of imperial cooperation would be an “inevitable development” in the post-war world.

In the book, I trace out the deeply laid and culturally rich sources of Curtin’s proposal for a more closely integrated concept of empire in the post-war era – as one way of illustrating the centrality of Britishness in Australian ideas of selfhood at this time.  As a Labor man of Irish Catholic descent, who had been an anti-conscriptionist leader in World War One, Curtin is an excellent anti-intuitive subject for this purpose. Moreover I attempt to show that his attitude to Britishness and Empire were not the eccentric initiative of a maverick but a response to the world drawn from widely held beliefs about national identity.

Over the previous two decades, Curtin and Labor had been living with the aftershocks arising from the bitter conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917, when the party had split and its credibility on questions relating to international affairs, especially its attitude to empire, had been brought into question. During that period, many in Labor ranks nurtured deep suspicions of being entrapped in another “imperial” war in which the Australian people would have no say. As a result their conservative opponents ruthlessly exploited Labor’s internal divisions and tagged the party as “disloyal” to Empire, a label that undermined the party’s claims to be defender and protector of the national interest.

Despite these frictions and fissures, however, Labor’s political troubles on these international questions never developed into a full-blown platform of anti-Britishness, and separation from the “mother-country” via the inauguration of an Australian republic was never placed on the party platform. It is testament to the deep currents of British race patriotism in Australia’s political culture at this time that no leader or senior figure in the federal parliamentary Labor party could hope to be elected in adopting such a stance.

The book shows that the empire was a subject of vibrant debate in Australian political culture at this time, a debate which was not about the empire’s inherent validity – this was a given – but about how it could be reinvigorated to so as to provide security for all parts of the Empire. In short, it seeks to examine the Labor brand of Britishness. What Curtin had shown, both as a young firebrand writing editorials for the Westralian Worker, as a parliamentarian, and as leader of the Labor party, was a resentment of those who saw the monarchy as the head of a class based society and who craved the privileges of an imperial aristocracy.

Labor did not reject British race patriotism, but the conservative militarist patriotism that often went with it. In the late 1920s, Curtin confessed that he resented the “turgid oratory for which Empire day often gives the excuse”, on other occasions he railed against those he believed were afflicted with the disease of “imperialitis”, and despaired of  being “manacled to the blatant screamers of loyalty”. Even more was the complaint that Australians too often succumbed to the flattery of British politicians and London financiers – only to then realise they were being treated as inferior colonials.  But he could also point to a “natural and justifiable” friendship with England, and proclaim that the defence of Australia was equally the defence of “seven million British subjects…three million square miles of British territory, and one thousand millions of British investments”.

There can be little doubt that the 1940s were tempestuous times in Anglo-Australian relations, and of course the Fall of Singapore and the ensuing “cable battles” with Churchill are often seen as marking  a fundamental rupture with Britain. But, equally, it might be argued that the war only intensified Australia’s sense of geopolitical fragility and therefore motivated Australian leaders to bolster the imperial connection and reinvigorate the concept of imperial defence.

The great aim of post-war reconstruction was to attain the levels of economic growth and full employment necessary to fulfill its strategic and economic efficiency.

In April 1942, Curtin broadcast to the people of Britain that Australians were “practical Empire patriots, and practical democrats”. By laying the stress on the “practical” he was giving voice to a language of Britishness that Labor could make its own, one which underlined the benefits to Australia and avoided the flowery imperial oratory for which he had no patience. He even lauded the fact that Australia had been the “first empire people to send their men away from their shores to fight for the Empire”, words unthinkable for a Labor leader to have uttered in the 1930s.

By the middle of 1943, however, as the country prepared for a federal election, it was clear that the tide of the war had turned for the better, to the point where Curtin was being forced to rebut accusations that he had been overstating the dimension of the crisis facing the nation. He now had the chance to be take on the role of statesman and give serious attention to the role that Australia would play in the post-war world.  In so doing he became part of a broader debate occurring in London and other empire capitals about how Britain was going to maintain its post-war power and influence alongside that of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Richard Toye has shown that Churchill viewed the concept of the “English-speaking peoples” as “one way to preserve British influence in a world in which growing American power was a reality”.

Imperial unity of the kind that followed the outbreak of war in 1939, and the material and psychological support that the dominions afforded to Britain in the 12 months following June 1940, was thus thought by some to constitute the lynchpin of Britain’s claims to be one of the “Big Three”. Or, in the words of British conservative politician Duff Cooper, the British Commonwealth was the epitome of interdependence, the very model of “binding together a vast community of peoples”. Other empire enthusiasts in London were giving speeches emphasising that a more united, more closely integrated empire was a prerequisite for Britain maintaining a powerful voice in world affairs. As John Darwin has concluded, the “renewed talk amongst British leaders of imperial unity and a common foreign policy’ around this time ‘may have owed something to Curtin”.

For the Labor Prime Minister, the idea of an Empire Council – a body that would provide for full and continuous consultation between London and the Dominions, and which would circulate around the Empire – seemed to be the only and obvious answer to the problems thrown up by the war. He could not believe but that the Empire should be able to accomplish the protection of all parts of the British world if only the right policies and processes were adopted.

For Curtin, a central part of this process was convincing some in his own party that the days of isolationism were over. He had already proceeded some distance in changing the party’s mindset on these questions. Against much vociferous internal opposition, Curtin was successful in introducing conscription for overseas service in the South Western Pacific theatre in January 1943.

Speaking to the NSW Labor Party Conference later that year, Curtin told his colleagues that “The world can never be the same in the years to come…in problems of defence and security – as it was in the year before this war started….for all the years to come, so long as this land remains free, it can be free only by Australians being willing to be a policeman in the Pacific.  We must be a Pacific power for our own security.” But, as Curtin would later add, it was also about being a Pacific power for the purposes of safeguarding Australia as a trustee for British civilisation in that part of the world. Australia had to “have available the advantage of concerted Empire policy if she is to be a power to stand for Democracy in the South Pacific”.

When Curtin provided a confidential briefing to Australian journalists on his plans for an Empire Council, he placed it firmly within the context of rebuilding British honour and credibility in Australia’s part of the world:

British prestige suffered a bad knock in the Far East. I not only regret that but I want to retrieve it…..The British Commonwealth of Nations has got to have economic strength as well as the unity which the throne symbolises. We have got to keep in mind all the time the sovereign symbol with autonomous rights.  What I have in mind is the development of common ideas so that these sovereignties will understandingly promote joint welfare without sacrificing their own interests and position.  I want to develop a practical fraternity among constituted members of the Empire for dealing with the world at large and with themselves.  Perhaps that sounds a loose sort of show, but the fact is that the ties which unite the British Commonwealth are of that nature and are no less weak because that is the case.

By “practical fraternity”, Curtin attempted to marry the two worlds of sentiment and self-interest that had characterised the history of Anglo-Australian relations from the late nineteenth century. By “practical fraternity”, Curtin attempted to marry the two worlds of sentiment and self-interest that had characterised the history of Anglo-Australian relations from the late nineteenth century. It was also another more precise indication of what he meant by defining himself and his people as “practical Empire patriots”: its essence was his desire to make the empire work better for Australia and to show that this could be done in a way would not make the country subordinate to Britain. But the comments also suggested an emerging difficulty for Curtin in making the case for greater cooperation.

This tension between the respect for the sovereign rights of individual nations and a desire for the cultivation of “common ideas” for the Empire would prove difficult to resolve. And like those before him Curtin seemed to think that the creation of new machinery was a fait accompli. His contention that “Machinery to give effect to what I am sure will be recognised as an inevitable post-war development, would appear to be easy to devise” showed that he had not looked at past experience and as a result did not foresee the difficulties that would arise from his proposals. Many other Commonwealth leaders and commentators would view it as neither “inevitable” nor “easy”. For them Curtin’s plan defied the pattern of developments in the British Commonwealth during the 1920s and 1930s which stressed the right of all Dominions to have their own foreign policy.

The former Canadian High Commissioner to Australia, Major General Victor Odlum, wrote Curtin a personal note, heaping praise on him for “giving the lead” to and “setting the pace” on the question of a “British Empire Council”. But these were the sweeteners before the medicine. He then stressed that Curtin needed to “answer one critical question” for his proposals to make headway, namely “what is to be the authority of the Council over the Dominions?” And for good measure he underlined the point that although Canada was determined to remain within the Empire, “she has no intention of being told by others, even though they may be members of the same family, what she is to do unless she has previously agreed that she will accept the direction”. This was why the Canadian Government had backed the demands for autonomy and backed away from the idea of a common imperial policy. And of course Curtin had avoided this difficult question.

Curtin could only reply by stating that the body he envisaged would possess no such authority, being “merely consultative”.  But he again made the connection between his present arguments and the reaction which greeted his 1941 appeal to the United States:

I may say to you that had there been such a Council in existence, my appeals to the United States would not have been subjected to the misunderstanding in Australia and in Great Britain which marked them because the facts would have been better within the knowledge of Canada and of the United Kingdom for instance than appeared to have been the case.

What Curtin meant was that if this ideal system had been in position at the time, by its nature each side would have understood what the other was doing and would have reacted sympathetically. And there would have been a realisation that that such an approach to a foreign power was not a danger to the unity of the Empire. The significance of this source cannot be understated. Previously, Australian scholars have only had Curtin’s public statements refuting the misreading of his “Look to America”. Here, in private, he was saying that it had all been a complete “misunderstanding”.

But it was Curtin’s address to the Federal Conference of the Australian Labor Party in December 1943 that represented the highpoint in his campaign to win popular and party support for his plan. In the speech he held up the British Commonwealth as the model for any future “world society of nations”. It had, he said, “exemplified to the world how autonomous nations can collaborate on matters of mutual interest’. For Curtin, the pre-war fascination with “national experiments” – Communist Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the New Deal in the United States – had meant that the “significance and interest of the British race’s great experiment in a British Commonwealth based on a free association of nations” had been overlooked.

Curtin then laid out his interpretation of the history of the British Empire as it had evolved to the early 1940s, claiming that the British peoples were in the midst of transition to a new stage of Empire. The first British Empire, he said, “related to the early days of colonisation and came to an end with the revolt of the American colonies”. The “Second Empire” lasted until the Great War; and the “Third Empire” was defined by the Imperial Conference of 1926.  But in Curtin’s history the British peoples were on the cusp of a “Fourth Empire”, in which the “trend” was “to augment an association of independent sovereign peoples by a common policy in matters that concern the Empire as a whole”. Curtin wanted to position himself as the architect of the “Fourth Empire” which would finally resolve the question of how the disparate British people could face the world as one and agree on a unified foreign policy for the whole race.

The essence of Curtin’s new proposals lay in their insistence that Australia’s views should be taken into account right from the outset in the making of imperial policy. Although existing arrangements to that time provided for regular consultation between the Dominion High Commissioners and the Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, there was no formal body that had as its purpose the task of ensuring dominion views were considered before decisions were made. “It was this gap”, Nicholas Mansergh notes, “that the Imperial Council was intended to fill”. Curtin wanted a “permanent secretariat” staffed by “men as expert in the problems of peace as those who are expert in war”.

It would “normally be located in London, but it would be an ambulatory body… responsible for seeing to the preparation and presentation of information on subjects to be considered by the [Imperial] conference from time to time”. It would also “provide the conference with an agency for continuity in its detailed work, which is important, in view of changes which occur in governments and Prime Ministers”. Implicit in this arrangement was the hope that this intense process of consultation would ensure a common position for the Empire in world affairs.

Curtin’s proposal received the overwhelming endorsement of his party, with barely a ripple of disagreement in the conference ranks. For a party that had torn itself apart over conscription in the First World War, and which had adopted an “isolationist” policy in the 1930s and taken to the 1937 election a policy of continental defence, this was significant. Indeed for Labor it might be seen as something of a transmogrification. And while Curtin was in a stronger political position following his win at the 1943 election, nevertheless he had been giving voice to his British empire argument prior to that poll and without serious dissent from his party. 

Curtin’s ideas, the very same that Labor had rejected when Hughes had earlier expounded them, were now seen as a credible means of emphasising the equality of all Britonsand their capacity to act as one people in the world.

The suggestion that Curtin crafted this speech to win popularity has no substance.  All the evidence points to the conclusion that he had totally embraced the view of a “fourth Empire”. Indeed he was advocating the sorts of plans that would normally have been associated with Labor’s domestic political enemies. Labor’s ‘Empire Spirit’, as political correspondent Ross Gollan noted in his conference review, needed to be taken seriously. “As an addition to conventional Labour doctrine of 1917-1939” the resolution had to be “considered a new and shining revelation – a winning post in the road away from isolationism”. And he added that “enough shades of Labour thought were represented among delegates to make it clear that any other representative Labour conference would have carried an identical motion”. Only “one-tiny working class wing” had trouble in “swallowing the fact that in peace as in war Australia’s destiny is that of a member of the British Commonwealth”.

Elsewhere the mainstream press came mostly to praise Curtin. The Sydney Morning Herald argued that the prime minister was on the right side of history, judging that whilst the “evolution of the Commonwealth has been away from constitutional rigidity…it may be that this process has gone as far as it can safely go, and that, under the impulse of the war and faced with the problems of a new world, we are about to witness a reaction towards a more closely knit and cooperative British Commonwealth”.

 

Still, as it watched Curtin’s proposals develop, the Australian press routinely noted that he was “deadly earnest” in pursuit of them, and that his advocacy proved that his “thinking on external relationships has advanced rapidly during the critical years of his national leadership”. Curtin’s arguments for closer imperial cooperation were being greeted as a welcome and timely product of his leadership of the nation in war.

In this view, the conflict and the pressures of office had made him see with dramatic clarity that Australia, in the words of a Herald editorial, “can hope to survive as a small white nation on the fringes of Asia only by close cooperation with the other members of the British Empire”. That most newspapers expressed “surprise” at Curtin’s “conversion” itself says much about the way in which, despite his repeated assertions to the contrary, he had remained to some extent suspect on the question of imperial loyalty and his commitment to Empire. Given the ALP’s position on defence matters since 1918, there was perhaps good reason for these ongoing doubts.

The Opposition leader, Robert Menzies, was not so much sceptical as incredulous. He could not treat Curtin other than as an impostor in the world of high imperial politics – a veritable “Johnny-come-lately” to the world of high empire politics. Thus he dismissed the conference speech as “nothing new” and a “complete disappointment”.  He could not view the proposals as anything but a cynical attempt by Curtin to re-cast himself as an Empire statesman. In Menzies’ eyes, all Curtin had done was “re-state at great length the principles upon which empire relations had been maintained for many years”.  But Menzies no more understood how loyalty to Britain was the culture of Labor than that his own side’s sometimes assertive and uncritical embrace of British leadership was itself a partisan expression of Britishness.

Thus even though he welcomed the secretariat proposal, Menzies concluded that Curtin was merely “theorizing” about these matters – thus depicting them as lacking proper respect for and belief in the Mother Country. For him the habits of consultation and collaboration were well established: “our relations with Empire countries had for many years been based upon the view that there should be a full exchange of information, and that wherever possible knowledge should be obtained in time to express opinions before decisions were taken”.  Menzies seemed to assume that this had been the case, when clearly it was not.

Curtin was not deterred by the mounting opposition to his plans from his dominion colleagues – especially the Canadian McKenzie King.

British officials, who had seen the proposals so many times before from Australian prime ministers, expressed embarrassment at having to shelve them once again. Nor was he put off course by the fact that Churchill and Smuts were absent from the session at the 1944 Prime Minister’s Conference in London at which he presented his ideas. At the meeting, Curtin however reminded his British hosts of the crisis that his country had faced in meeting the Japanese threat. In his opening statement, he made no apology for asking for American assistance when Australia had been “seriously threatened” by Japan. The result was that a “Continent which was an integral part of the British Empire, and was occupied and defended by British people, had been held through a period of grave peril”.  And, he added, the acceptance of this assistance from the United States had “in no way affected the Australians’ deep sense of oneness with the United Kingdom”.

The rebuttal in London did nothing, however, to weaken Curtin’s passionate commitment to Empire. Even in the face of great disappointment at seeing his proposals effectively shelved – Curtin showed once again that for Australian leaders, the powerful urgings of British race patriotism made it difficult for them to bring their disagreements with Britain into the open.  In his Empire Day speech, broadcast from London only days after the conference concluded, Curtin said:

…the Australian people are a replica of Britain and the way of life in Britain.  In the southern hemisphere 7,000,000 Australians carry on a British community as trustees for the British way of life in a part of the world where it is of the utmost significance to the British-speaking race that such a vast continent should have as its population a people and a form of government corresponding in outlook and in purpose to Britain.

But these affirmations of Australia’s continued prestige within a wider British world cannot hide the fact that like Deakin, Hughes and Bruce before him, Curtin too had failed in his attempt to acquire for Australia a more intimate place in the councils of imperial decision-making. Though he had his own history of the British Commonwealth’s evolution that convinced him such a development was both natural and inevitable, he too became a captive of that past and, indeed, added another chapter to it.

To return then to the original problem: why has John Curtin’s particular view of Australian Britishness been so consistently overlooked or dismissed?

The nationalist myth surrounding Curtin has served to obscure one of the defining features of the nation’s political culture in the twentieth century: its overwhelmingly “British” character. Moreover it fails to acknowledge that the imperial idea struck distinctive roots in the Australian experience, one that proved in many respects to be at odds with the prevailing views of the meaning and purpose of Empire in Britain and elsewhere.

Britishness was not only at the heart of Australian foreign policy; both sides of politics agreed that it was at the centre of their national existence. Indeed they believed that “Britishness” itself was both more pervasive and pure in Australia than in Britain itself.  Where they differed was on how that idea should be expressed and who was better placed to articulate Australia’s interests within the empire. From the end of the nineteenth century down to the 1960s, each party voiced their own distinctive variants on the rhetoric, symbolism and ritual of the imperial ideal. And the effect of that political discord was significant: it not only cast Labor as the outcasts of “loyalty”, thus putting them on the defensive for nearly two decades, it meant that neither side of politics could treat foreign policy on its own terms.

Curtin’s imperial sensibilities were home grown, but the empire was no spectre that taunted him from afar – it was an idea and a philosophy that animated him from within. He might not have grown up imbibing the stories of imperial heroism contained in WH Fitchett’s Deeds that Won the Empire, but he could quote at will from English poets, speak eloquently of the need to defend British liberty, and envisage a productive trade union movement working within the empire. That story in itself is remarkable.

Curtin cut his political teeth in the rough and tumble of the labour movement: his eyes for so long firmly fixed on the bread and butter issues of improving the lives and lot of the ordinary Australian. And yet as a national political leader he came to promote the idea of closer Empire cooperation, giving voice to a distinctive rhetoric of Australia as a bastion of the “British speaking race”. On the opening day of the Prime Ministers Conference in May 1944, the Times of London could not have put it more succinctly:

Mr Curtin’s convictions concerning the place of the British Commonwealth in the world are the deeper for having been acquired not from textbooks on British political institutions but in the hard school of political experience.

Throughout his time in representative politics, it was one thing for Curtin and Labor to disagree with the policies of successive conservative governments in Britain; quite another to suggest that Australia opt to break free from Britain entirely. Curtin and his party never seriously entertained such a prospect. Indeed standing side by side with Britain as a proud dominion in the face of totalitarian evil was a story that Labor could be proud of. And it was a form of cooperation they wanted to see continued, albeit one where Australia’s equality was formally enshrined in a new form of imperial organisation.

Curtin’s arguments for an “Empire Council” suggest that the key lesson for Australians as they emerged from the Pacific War was not one about the need for national emancipation. Rather it was that Australia was part of a wider, dangerous world, and that as a “British” people they ought to be able to find their security through a common Imperial defence and foreign policy.

The reality, however, was that both political parties for too long pursued an illusion, believing that Britain would naturally and inevitably acquiesce to Australia’s desire for a greater say in the empire’s affairs. But it was not to be.

Australians were forced to acknowledge that an enlightened concept of the empire’s affairs burned brightest at the periphery, and not in the imperial centre. It would take nothing less than the post-war collapse of British power around the globe and the rapid decline of the British empire for Australians to begin in earnest the task of resetting the coordinates of their foreign policy and the process of remaking their national image.