Commonwealth Responsibility and Cold War Solidarity: Australia in Asia, 1944–74 by Dan Halvorson (review)

As someone who moved "down under" relatively late in his life, I have always found mystifying the oft-repeated claim that Australia failed to engage with Asia during the early Cold War years. How could it possibly be—as the prevailing Australian academic wisdom would have us believe—that a country so close to Asia was able to overlook this region when its national interests were so inextricably bound to it? Why did it take Canberra so long to awaken to Asia's political, economic, and strategic importance and engage meaningfully with it?

Years spent researching Australia's involvement in Asia have not, in some ways, brought me any closer to solving this apparent puzzle. When weighed against hundreds of declassified Australian government files and other available historical records, one thing seems clear: that by the end of the 1960s, Australian efforts to engage with the region—and especially with Southeast Asia, where Australia's primary strategic interests lay—had succeeded in tying Australia closely to it. Yet, despite all the available archival evidence, the widely accepted view in Australian academic circles still suggests that after a promising start in which Ben Chifley's Labor government (1945–1949) supported Indonesia's quest for independence from Dutch colonial rule and, more generally, strove to expand Australia's regional links, the appointment of Robert Menzies as prime minister in December 1949 reversed Australia's incipient engagement by making earlier fruitful collaboration difficult to sustain. Menzies's "Britishness," his alleged suspicion of Asia and Asians and his staunch support for U.S. (and British) containment of Communism are said not only to have sat uncomfortably with Asian demands for self-determination but also to have antagonized important regional actors.

Far from engaging with Asian neighbors, the Liberal-Country Party Coalition government distanced Australia from them. According to the dominant scholarly opinion, this hiatus in Australia's postwar regional diplomacy came to an end in December 1972 with the arrival in Canberra of a new Labor administration led by Edward "Gough" Whitlam. Determined to end two decades of alleged conservative neglect of Asia, Whitlam set about to rediscover not only Asia for Australia but also Australia for Asia. He thus began, in earnest, to enmesh Australia with its neighboring region. This standard narrative of Australia's policy of regional engagement under the Labor and coalition governments of the early Cold War is critically examined in detail in a series of articles I coauthored with David Martin Jones, including Andrea Benvenuti and David Martin Jones, "Myth and Misrepresentation in Australian Foreign Policy: Menzies and Engagement with Asia," Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (2011), pp. 57–78; and David Martin Jones and Andrea Benvenuti, "Tradition, Myth and the Dilemma of Australian Foreign Policy," Australian Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 60, No. 1 (2006), pp. 103–124. See also David Martin Jones and Mike Lawrence Smith, "Misreading Menzies and Whitlam: Reassessing the Ideological Construction of Australian Foreign Policy," Round Table, Vol. 355, No. 1 (2000), pp. 387–406.

As Dan Halvorson makes abundantly clear in his stimulating and well-researched book on Australia's regional policy, the conventional "narrative of Australia's engagement is a myth" (p. 3). Born out of "the bitter ideological debates over Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War," that narrative has been promoted and popularized by left-leaning scholars intent on rewriting Australia's recent past from what Halvorson describes as a "radical national" perspective (p. 3), using David McLean's definition of "radical-national" in "From British Colony to American Satellite? Australia and the USA during the Cold War," Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2006), p. 661. I would instead call it simply a leftist perspective. Given Australian academia's marked turn to the left over the past four decades, the conventional narrative has gained increasing traction in academic (and media) circles to the point that it...