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Australia's changing relationships with Britain and the US

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The Fall of Singapore "Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially, that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war. No harder task can

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Paul Keating (Australian PM) attacks Great Britain for their failure to defend Australia during WWII.

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Paul Keating (Australian PM) attacks Great Britain for their failure to defend Australia during WWII.

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During question time in parliament in 1992.

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Paul Keating Attacks The Cultural Cringe HD

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John Curtin speaks about Australia switching allegiance.

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John Curtin speaks about Australia switching allegiance.

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Britain Colonises Australia, 1788 (left). Australian flag (right). 

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Britain Colonises Australia, 1788 (left). Australian flag (right). 

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What do these images have in common? What does it say about Australia's relationship to Britain/UK?

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https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10314618408595704?journalCode=rahs19

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Australia's role in the Indonesia National Revolution 1949

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Workers Online : History : 2001 - Issue 106 : Indonesia Calling

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The Wharfies, the Seamen and 13 other Australian unions sponsored a film, Indonesia Calling that played a role in defeating Dutch censorship and in informing Australians about the trade union campaign for Indonesian people. The Commonwealth Censor banned for export on the grounds that it might offend a friendly nation, The Dutch!!

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Australia & Indonesia's Independence: The Transfer of Sovereignty (Primary Source)

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Australia & Indonesia's Independence: The Transfer of Sovereignty (Primary Source)

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Speech by Alexander Downer in 1998.

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Speech by the Hon Alexander Downer, MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs, at the launch of the book 'Australia & Indonesia's Independence:The Transfer Of Sovereignty: Documents 1949', Borobadur Hotel, Jakarta, 9 July 1998

Next year marks fifty years since the Netherlands transferred sovereignty to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia. In the lead-up to that milestone, I am delighted to launch Australia & Indonesia's Independence: The Transfer of Sovereignty: Documents 1949.

This book, which was produced by my Department's Historical Documents Project Section, is the last of three volumes of historical documents on Australia's diplomatic policy toward Indonesia in the years 1947-1949.

Indonesia's struggle for independence during those years challenged Australia's capacity to respond positively to change in Asia. These were momentous times and the history of how the events were perceived in Australia and the way we reacted to them, is a fascinating one.

The basic story of Indonesian independence is of course well-known, even if the part Australia played in it is not as widely appreciated. After the Second World War ended, Indonesia's nationalist leaders, Sukarno and Mohammed Hatta, proclaimed the independence of the Republic of Indonesia on 17 August 1945.

But it took more than four years of diplomatic negotiation and at times bitter fighting before the Indonesian Republic finally gained its independence from the Netherlands in December 1949. On 20 July 1947, the Netherlands abandoned negotiating with the Indonesian nationalist leaders and launched a carefully planned military offensive against the Republic in Java and Sumatra.

Ten days later, Australia took a crucial diplomatic step and referred the conflict in Indonesia to the United Nations Security Council as a breach of the peace under Article 39 (Chapter VII) of the UN Charter.

The move had immediate results. Australia's action encouraged the United Kingdom and the United States, although reluctantly, to take a stance against their European ally, the Netherlands. The Security Council ordered a cease-fire on 1 August 1947 and established a Committee of Good Offices to broker a truce agreement in Indonesia and to assist the Dutch and the Indonesian Republic to reach a political agreement as a basis for Indonesian independence.

The Indonesian Republic nominated Australia to sit with the Dutch nominee, Belgium, and the United States on this Committee. Australia's representatives on the Committee, Justice Richard Kirby and Tom Critchley, did as much as they could to make the Renville Truce Agreement of January 1948 fair to the Republic. And when political negotiations bogged down after the signing of the Truce Agreement, Critchley devised a comprehensive plan to break the deadlock.

Although the Republic accepted Critchley's plan as a basis for negotiation, the Netherlands declined to do so. After again breaking off negotiations, the Dutch launched a second military offensive against the Republic in December 1948.

It is at this point that the last book of documents in our series begins. Frustrated at the rather weak international response to the second Dutch offensive, Australia participated in an Asian Conference convened by India's Prime Minister, Nehru, in New Delhi to concert regional support for the Indonesian Republic. Australian policy at the time, as it is now, was that "its security and prosperity is bound up with the security and prosperity of all Asian countries, and this depends on mutual co-operation and respect in the area". (Document 116)

The unprecedented demonstration of regional solidarity in New Delhi undoubtedly helped a majority in the Security Council to agree on 28 January 1949 to order the restoration of the imprisoned Republican Government to its capital, Yogyakarta, and for the resumption of negotiations between this Government and the Netherlands.

In response, the Dutch devised a plan, named after its originator, Louis Beel, that sought to transfer sovereignty - without first restoring the Republic - to an Indonesian federal Government which they would create and which they would indirectly control.

Australia worked actively against the Beel Plan. It sought to press the Dutch to first restore the Indonesian Republic - without which there could be no genuine negotiations for Indonesian independence - and even threatened to take the matter to the UN General Assembly. In response to international pressure, the chief Dutch negotiator in Batavia, J.H. van Roijen reached an agreement on 7 May 1949 with a Republican delegation headed by Mohammed Roem and assisted by Australia's Tom Critchley.

Under this agreement, the Republic agreed to cease hostilities against the Dutch army and the Netherlands agreed to restore the Republican Government to Yogyakarta.

On 5 July 1949, Sukarno and Hatta returned in triumph to Yogyakarta in an occasion captured on the cover photograph of our book. It was an important symbol: the first occasion on which the Dutch were obliged to give up territory they had taken and an overt recognition of the failure of their military action of December 1948.

After the Roem-Van Roijen Agreement, from August to November 1949, the Dutch convened a Round Table in The Hague conference consisting of delegations of the Netherlands, the Indonesian Republic, and the Dutch-sponsored federal Indonesian states, all assisted by the reconstituted UN Commission for Indonesia.

The task of the Conference was to negotiate the transfer of sovereignty to an Indonesian federal State. The Conference almost foundered on two issues: the status of West New Guinea and the question of the debts to be assumed by the new Indonesian State. Critchley helped to broker an agreement on both questions: first by urging the parties to leave the issue of West New Guinea to post-independence political negotiations and secondly by urging the lessening of the debts to be taken over by Indonesia. Critchley was not altogether successful: the United States settled with the Netherlands on a level of debt to be assumed by Indonesia much higher than either Critchley or the Republic thought was fair.

But the negotiations bore fruit and on 27 December 1949, the Netherlands transferred sovereignty to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia. On the same day the Australian Government led by Robert Menzies recognised the new State de jure.

On that day Australia helped to bring to fruition one of the first successes of the United Nations and of regional diplomacy: an end to the fighting in the Indonesian archipelago and the bringing into being of a new and great member of the world community.

Nearly fifty years have passed since the turbulent events documented in this book. Today, we find ourselves in a period of similarly rapid regional and global change. Against this background, Australia and Indonesia are again working in close harmony, increasingly linked by a complex web of economic, political, strategic and social interests. An important element in this partnership is the need for mutual understanding in the widest sense, including knowledge and understanding of the history of both countries.

This book and the series of which it is part makes a major contribution to meeting that need. I wholeheartedly commend it to you and have pleasure in declaring it launched.
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Australia & Indonesia's Independence:The Transfer Of Sovereignty: Documents 1949

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Speech by the Hon Alexander Downer, MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs, at the launch of the book 'Australia & Indonesia's Independence:The Transfer Of Sovereignty: Documents 1949', Borobadur Hotel, Jakarta, 9 July 1998 Next year marks fifty years since the Netherlands transferred sovereignty to the Republic of the United States of Indonesia.

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''Another look at Curtin and MacArthur" - AWM

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''Another look at Curtin and MacArthur" - AWM

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Another look at Curtin and MacArthur
Peter Edwards

Sixty years ago today, on 1 June 1942, the three men who shaped Australia's wartime strategy had another of their frequent meetings. The significance of what was said at that meeting - and also what was not said - has, I think, been underestimated by most Australians. I would like to explain why I think that.

The three men were the Prime Minister of Australia, John Curtin; the Secretary to both the Defence Department and the War Cabinet, Frederick (later to become Sir Frederick) Shedden; and the Commander-in-Chief of the South-West Pacific Area, General Douglas MacArthur. They formed the nucleus of what was called the Prime Minister's War Conference, which essentially comprised whoever the Prime Minister decided he wished to attend. A body comprising a Prime Minister, a public servant and a foreign general flouts almost every constitutional convention. Nevertheless, this anomalous body was, as David Horner has pointed out, rather more important than the theoretical centres of executive authority - the Cabinet, the War Cabinet, the Advisory War Council - in taking the crucial decisions on Australia's strategy.

Last year, when I was invited to give the John Curtin lecture at the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library, I was looking at the records of the Prime Minister's War Conference, among other records. Frankly, I was wondering if there was anything fresh that one could say about a Prime Minister, and a period of Australian history, that have been the subject of so much historical examination. I was quite surprised to come across a passage in the minutes of the conference. The meeting was prompted by the entry of three Japanese midget submarines into Sydney Harbour the previous day, but the meeting addressed much wider strategic concerns. The passage that struck me reads as follows:

The Commander-in-Chief desired to point out the distinctions between the United States and the United Kingdom in their relations and responsibilities to Australia. Australia was part of the British Empire and it was related to Britain and the other Dominions by ties of blood, sentiment and allegiance to the Crown. The United States was an ally whose aim was to win the war, and it had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia. Its interest in Australia was from the strategical aspect of the utility of Australia as a base from which to attack and defeat the Japanese. As the British Empire was a Commonwealth of Nations, he presumed that one of its principal purposes was jointly to protect any part that might be threatened. The failure of the United Kingdom and U.S.A. Governments to support Australia therefore had to be viewed from different angles.

The Commander-in-Chief added that, though the American people were animated by a warm friendship for Australia, their purpose in building up forces in the Commonwealth was not so much from an interest in Australia but rather from its utility as a base from which to hit Japan. In view of the strategical importance of Australia in a war with Japan, this course of military action would probably be followed irrespective of the American relationship to the people who might be occupying Australia.

I should say immediately that this is not a newly discovered document that has just emerged from archival research. Under the "thirty-year rule" for Australian archives, it has been in the public domain since the 1970s and was published in 1982 in the series of Documents on Australian Foreign Policy. The record of the meeting in which this passage appears has been seen by two leading historians, David Horner and David Day, but both of them have referred mainly to matters that arose later in the meeting. As far as I am aware, there has been only the briefest passing mention of this passage in any history of Australia's wartime strategy, of Australian-American relations, or indeed of Anglo-Australian relations. Why do I think that we historians (and I include myself in this criticism) have been guilty of overlooking or underestimating the importance of this document, and especially the passage I have just quoted?

It is necessary to go back and quickly recall some of the main features of the previous six or seven months. Curtin, you will recall, had become Prime Minister on 7 October 1941, just two months before Pearl Harbor and the beginning of the Japanese thrust southward through east and south-east Asia. Australia had placed its faith in its membership of the British Empire, but the Empire's Singapore strategy was sunk along with the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse. In the most traumatic months of Australia's national history, Singapore fell; thousands of Australian troops became prisoners of war of the Japanese; Darwin and other Australian towns were bombed; and the prospect of enemy invasion came ever closer. Many Australians felt that the failure of British strategy at Singapore had left Australia exposed and vulnerable. Curtin and Winston Churchill exchanged telegrams that were often tense and sometimes bitter. In late December Curtin, in what was intended as a routine New Year's statement for a newspaper, made his famous assertion:

Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.

This not only angered Churchill but shocked many Australians, who generally thought of themselves as a British community in the Antipodes. Moreover, it was received just as poorly in Washington as it was in London. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made it clear that he thought that Curtin's statement smacked on panic and that he and Churchill would be sticking to their "beat Hitler first" strategy. The war in the Pacific would be regarded as a holding war, while priority was given to defeating the principal enemy in Europe. Australians wondered whether allied forces in this part of the world were strong enough even for a holding strategy. Many panicked and fled inland.

Relief seemed to be at hand in March 1942, when the American commander in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur, was ordered to escape the disaster in that American colony and to proceed to Australia, to become the Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed command known as the South-West Pacific Area. The Australian public received him with rapturous acclaim. Supremely confident in demeanour, looking every inch the masterful commander, MacArthur seemed to personify the figure of whom Australians had long dreamt - the American who would save Australia from the depredations of the Japanese. At their initial meeting, MacArthur told Curtin: "You take care of the rear and I'll take care of the front, and we'll see this through together." To all appearances, the two men quickly formed a close working relationship, which was institutionalized in the Prime Minister's War Conference. As I have mentioned, this comprised Curtin, MacArthur, Frederick Shedden and anyone else Curtin decided to invite.

By the end of May Australia's position remained delicate. Japan's naval attack had been blunted in the battle of the Coral Sea, but the naval battle that would prove to be truly decisive in the Pacific - Midway - was still a few days away. The Japanese thrust through New Guinea, leading to crucial battles on the Kokoda Track and elsewhere, were still to come. To underline Australia's vulnerability, on the last day in May three midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour, missing their principal targets but causing some loss of life.

This was the position when the Prime Minister's War Conference met in Melbourne on the morning of 1 June 1942. Those present were Curtin, MacArthur, Shedden, and MacArthur's chief of staff, Major General Sutherland. They discussed whether there should be a public statement on the midget submarine raid, then MacArthur was shown Australian telegrams to and from the Minister for External Affairs, Dr H. V. Evatt, who was in London seeking reinforcements from the British. The cables showed that Evatt was having little success. This prompted what was evidently a long monologue by MacArthur on the strategic position. The summary in the minutes (presumably prepared by Shedden) cover three and a half pages, with no evidence of any intervention or response by Curtin. It begins with the two paragraphs that I have read out.

Why does this passage deserve more attention than it has yet been given? There are several points that need to be made. At the broadest level, this puts a nail through the heart of a popular myth, which professional historians have been qualifying or rejecting for about thirty years but which still holds a strong place in popular thinking. It is still repeated, as recently as last month's celebration of the Coral Sea anniversary or last year's celebration of the 50th anniversary of ANZUS and its formal invocation after the events of 11 September. The myth traces the origins of the Australian-American alliance to the events of 1942, especially Curtin's appeal to the United States, his relationship with MacArthur, and the battle of the Coral Sea. The myth comes in two versions, to meet conservative or radical political tastes. The conservative version says that the Curtin-MacArthur combination bore fruit when Australians and Americans joined forces on the Coral Sea to defeat the Japanese threat. Since then, Australians and Americans have fought side by side to defend freedom and democracy in every major conflict, from Korea to Afghanistan. The left-wing or radical nationalist version said that Curtin broke the imperial mould of Australian thinking by appealing to America and then forged a close alliance with the United States, based on mutual support and respect. This endured, but unfortunately conservative governments turned Australia into a mere satellite, continuing the tradition of Australians fighting "other people's wars". I would suggest that both are wrong. MacArthur, as much as Roosevelt, made it clear that the United States did not see Australia as anything more than a temporarily convenient base. It was a later Liberal-Country party government that secured the ANZUS alliance and a Labor government in the 1980s that reshaped it to suit the times.

This passage also gives us a new perspective on the relationship between Curtin and MacArthur. We have always known that President Roosevelt did not welcome Curtin's statement that "Australia looks to America", which he thought smacked of panic. We have long known that military planners in Washington, including a rising general named Dwight D. Eisenhower, saw Australia principally as a convenient base. But Australians have not been told that MacArthur himself told Curtin that the Americans saw Australia only as a convenient base, not as a people who deserved American support. This message was being delivered, not by officials in Washington or diplomats in Canberra, but by the very man who worked so closely with the Australian Prime Minister that Curtin was accused of surrendering Australian sovereignty to the American general. Australian foreign policy throughout the twentieth century can be seen as, in part, a constant search for influence at the policy-making heart of its principal "great and powerful friend", first Britain and then the United States. Curtin was trying to use MacArthur as an avenue to influence the political and military figures in London and Washington who shaped Allied strategy. This passage shows that this tactic was fruitless.

The timing is significant. This meeting took place after the battle of the Coral Sea, but MacArthur pays little attention to that. Later in the meeting he told Curtin that the truly important naval battle in the Pacific was about to take place, and that this would decide whether Australia was cut off from the United States. He was right. The battle of Midway took place a few days later. Fortunately for Australia it was an American victory, but it was an American victory, in which the Australians played no major part. Only much later was the battle of the Coral Sea elevated to iconic status in Australian-American relations.

The terms in which MacArthur delivered what was clearly a carefully prepared message deserve attention, especially his reference to the "ties of blood, sentiment and allegiance to the Crown" that linked Australia to Britain. Curtin's statement about looking to America gave voice to a strand in Australian official and public thought that goes back at least as far as 1908, when Alfred Deakin risked the wrath of British imperial authorities by inviting President Theodore Roosevelt's Great White Fleet to visit Australia. That fleet visit attracted huge crowds, whose enthusiasm was encapsulated in a song called "Big Brother", written by a Western Australian newspaperman while the fleet was anchored off Albany. The chorus went:

We've got a big brother in America,
Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam!
The same old blood, the same old speech,
The same old songs are good enough for each,
We'll all stand together, boys,
If the foes want a flutter or a fuss,
And we're hanging out the sign
From the Leeuwin to the Line
This bit o' the world belongs to us!

From Deakin to Curtin, Australian leaders looked anxiously for evidence that Americans saw Australia not just as a friend and ally but as kith and kin, another predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking, Judaeo-Christian civilization, a younger brother who deserved to be saved from an oriental enemy.

Now, with the most feared oriental foe on Australia's doorstep, Curtin had made his appeal, and MacArthur was spelling out America's rejection of it with brutal clarity. To borrow a phrase from a later period of Australian-American relations, Australia was seen as nothing more than "a suitable piece of real estate", conveniently placed to be the base for the counterattack against the Japanese. Americans could not care what colour the Australians were, nor what language they spoke; they did not see them as kith and kin. The Australian landmass offered a geographically convenient base for American forces, and that was all that mattered to American policy-makers.

All too clearly, MacArthur was throwing Curtin's reference to "traditional links [and] kinship with the United Kingdom" back in the Prime Minister's face. He was asserting that it was precisely to those links and that kinship that Australia should look for its security. Curtin and MacArthur were equally frustrated by the reluctance of either Britain or America to give greater support to the South-West Pacific Area, but MacArthur was drawing a moral distinction between Britain and America. According to MacArthur, if Britain provided too little military support for Australia, it was failing in its moral duty, its fundamental obligation to a fellow member of the British Empire and Commonwealth. By contrast, he argued, Washington was perfectly entitled to make cold-blooded decisions about the deployment of American forces in the light of its global strategy, without the slightest sense of obligation to Australia for its own sake. Australia had ties of blood and sentiment with Britain, but not with the United States.

What MacArthur said to Curtin helps to explain many things, both in the tragically short remainder of Curtin's life and in subsequent decades. We can now better understand why Curtin turned so emphatically to praise Australia's "traditional links [and] kinship with the United Kingdom" in the next couple of years. For the rest of the war, and especially during the election campaign of 1943, he identified himself whole-heartedly with British race patriotism. He became the only Australian Prime Minister to appoint as Governor-General, not a minor British aristocrat, but a royal duke. In 1944 he took to the Prime Ministers' Conference in London a proposal to coordinate even more closely the foreign policies of the member nations of the British Empire. Historians have sometimes puzzled over this shift in Curtin's supposed leanings. We can now assume that he "wrapped himself in the Union Jack", as some commentators described it, precisely because MacArthur had told him so bluntly that Australia had no other choice. It should certainly not look to Uncle Sam as a protective big brother.

Moreover we now have a clearer understanding of Curtin's own relations with, and attitudes towards, the Americans for the rest of the war. In 1997 the National Library published a collection of notes on the off-the-record briefings given by Curtin to a group of reporters. The editors, Clem Lloyd and Richard Hall, claim that these briefings present a picture, not of "a man struggling with illness and crushed by the burdens of wartime leadership" but rather of "a Prime Minister acute in analysis, vigorous in language and confident of his decisions". But they note that Curtin said remarkably little about MacArthur in these off-the-record briefings, and that he was "mostly negative about the American war leaders and their policies". He showed, they say, not "the veneration and gratitude of an Australian Prime Minister for a great and powerful friend" but "a sort of wearied resignation about what must be... [or] a sardonic emphasis on motivations and outcomes that borders on contempt". Lloyd and Hall do not explain the basis of that attitude. Perhaps a close look at the meeting of 1 June 1942 helps to explain it.

Why has this this encounter between Curtin and MacArthur not become more prominent when we discuss history of Australian-American relations? We know that Curtin was a sensitive man who felt deeply the responsibilities of wartime leadership. We can only guess at how keenly he must have been hurt by this uncompromising rejection of his appeal to the United States. Nevertheless, he kept resolutely quiet about it, as did that epitome of the discreet bureaucrat, Frederick Shedden. They probably did themselves, the government, the Labor Party and the nation a service by so doing. It would have been much more difficult in later years to establish, and then to maintain over half a century, an alliance which governments of all persuasions have seen as vital, if Australians generally had known that MacArthur had told Curtin that the United States saw no interest in preserving Australia's territorial integrity and that Americans had no special regard for the Australian people. The myths of the Curtin-MacArthur relationship have played an important part in the rhetoric of Australian-American relations for half a century, but they are none the less myths.

When I made many of the points I have just made in my John Curtin lecture last year, my friend David Day, Curtin's most recent biographer, wondered aloud whether the Perth water had done something to my brain. He said that there was nothing new in the document because it had already been published in the Documents on Australian Foreign Policy series and because he had quoted it in his book The Great Betrayal. As I have already said, the first point is correct, but I was noting that the passage had been little addressed by historians, and the passing reference to it in The Great Betrayal does not invalidate that point. But more importantly Day said that it only goes to show that the Americans will always act in accordance with what they perceive to be their own national interests at the time. In essence, therefore, nothing has changed since June 1942. I beg to differ. The big difference is that, since September 1951, Australia has had an alliance relationship with the United States. The Americans have an interest in preserving their reputation as a reliable ally, and consequently they have a different sense of their obligations to Australia. Because there is an alliance, and now an alliance that has been invoked following an attack on the American homeland, it is unlikely that any American official will talk to an Australian leader in the same terms as MacArthur used to Curtin, precisely sixty years ago today.

But for the decade between Curtin's appeal and the negotiation of the ANZUS Treaty, Australia was not able to gain any assurance of American strategic support. This passage does much to explain why. I suggest that, whenever Curtin's statement of December 1941 is quoted as a turning-point in Australian-American relations, we should remember the terms in which MacArthur spoke to Curtin on 1 June 1942

Footnotes

1. David Horner first drew attention to this body in High Command: Australia and Allied Strategy 1939-1945 (George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1982), and reiterated it in Inside the War Cabinet: Directing Australia's War Effort 1939-1945 (Allen & Unwin, St Leonards NSW, 1996) and Defence Supremo: Sir Frederick Shedden and the Making of Australian Defence Policy (Allen & Unwin, St Leonards NSW, 2000).

2. Minutes of Prime Minister's War Conference, Melbourne, 1 June 1942, p. 2: JCPML.

3. W. J. Hudson and H.J.W. Stokes, eds., Documents on Australian Foreign Policy 1937-49, volume V, AGPS, Canberra, 1982, Document 510, pp. 818-23.

4. The only reference of which I am aware is David Day, The Great Betrayal: Britain, Australia & the Onset of the Pacific War 1939-42 (Angus & Robertson, Sydney and London, 1988), pp. 338-39, which quotes a couple of phrases from this passage, but does not discuss its significance in Australian-American relations.

5. Norman Harper (ed.), Australia and the United States, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 135-39, includes the full text and a reproduction of the Melbourne Herald article of 27 December 1941.

6. Norman Harper (ed.), Australia and the United States, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 135-39, includes the full text and a reproduction of the Melbourne Herald article of 27 December 1941.

7. "Dryblower" Murphy's song, quoted in Neville Meaney, The Search for Security in the Pacific 1901-1914 (Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1976), p. 169.

8. Clem Lloyd and Richard Hall (eds.), Backroom Briefings: John Curtin's War (National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1997), pp. 13-14; 31-35.

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Remembering 1942 - Another look at Curtin and MacArthur | The Australian War Memorial

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Sixty years ago today, on 1 June 1942, the three men who shaped Australia's wartime strategy had another of their frequent meetings. The significance of what was said at that meeting - and also what was not said - has, I think, been underestimated by most Australians.

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"GENERAL MACARTHUR IN MELBOURNE THIS MORNING" - The Argus Newspaper, 21 March, 1942

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"GENERAL MACARTHUR IN MELBOURNE THIS MORNING" - The Argus Newspaper, 21 March, 1942

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GEN. MacARTHUR IN MELBOURNE THIS MORNING WANTS MINIMUM OF DISPLAY - The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957) - 21 Mar 1942

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Australian (BCOF) occupation of Japan after WWII.

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Australian (BCOF) occupation of Japan after WWII.

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Australia fought Japan in WWII. After the Japanese surrendered, a British  force (including a large number of Australians)occupied Japan for a number of years to keep the peace and bring Japan back into the fold. What does this source say about Australia's post-war relationship with Japan?

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British Commonwealth Occupation Force 1945-52 | The Australian War Memorial

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Participation in the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) marked the first time that Australians were involved in the military occupation of a sovereign nation which it had defeated in war. BCOF participation in the Allied occupation of Japan was announced on 31 January 1946, though planning and negotiations had been in progress since the end of the war.

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John Curtin turns to America - Remembering 1941, 75 years on in 2016

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John Curtin turns to America - Remembering 1941, 75 years on in 2016

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This December will mark the 75th anniversary of one of the most momentous developments in Australian foreign policy, war-time Prime Minister John Curtin's famous turn to America.

As we relax after Christmas and tune in to the Boxing Day Test, it may be worth reflecting on Curtin's New Year's message to the Australian people, published in the Melbourne Herald on 27 December 1941. Writing three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Curtin declared: '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.'

His statement was attacked by conservative political opponents, angered the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and astonished the American president Franklin Roosevelt.

For Curtin was ahead of the US in his thinking about strategy and priorities for the war in the Pacific. Yet his initiative boosted Australia's defences against the threat of invasion, laid the ground for the post-war ANZUS treaty, and forged an alliance which has been central to Australian foreign policy and defence strategy ever since.

It is often said that the most weighty decision for any government is sending armed forces into harm's way. These decisions involve the need to assess national interests, the security of the Australian people, the risk to defence personnel, the prospects of success and the risks and consequences of failure.

But Curtin's decisions were on an entirely different plane. National interest can be a complex, multi-layered and often contested concept. Yet everyone would agree that a country's most fundamental interest is to maintain its territorial integrity and political independence. This is the challenge that confronted Curtin. He remains the only prime minister to have led our nation through an existential threat, the only prime minister to have contemplated the imminent invasion, devastation and destruction of Australia.

He rightly described this as our darkest hour. 'Men and women of Australia,' Curtin said in a broadcast address to the nation to announce that Australia was at war with Japan. 'The call is to you, for your courage; your physical and mental ability; your inflexible determination that we, as a nation of free people, shall survive. My appeal to you is in the name of Australia, for Australia is the stake in this conflict.'

A passionate anti-war campaigner during World War I, Curtin became an advocate of greater defence self-sufficiency for Australia in the face of Japanese militarisation in the 1930s. His decisions following the outbreak of the Pacific War were driven by a relentless focus on the defence of Australia. He defied Churchill by insisting on the return of Australian troops from other theatres; he forged a new military partnership with the US; and he insisted on a role for Australia in decision-making on the course of the war in the Pacific.

Forged in the crisis of the Pacific War, the alliance has endured and has been immensely valuable to both countries. The alliance's enduring nature reflects the fact that Australia and the US have shared histories, mutual interests and common values. Those values include our commitment to democratic political systems, open economies and free and just societies.

The alliance remains as central to Australia's security today as it was in Curtin's time. It acts as a deterrent to potential aggressors, provides our defence forces with leading edge technologies and opportunities for cooperation, training and intelligence sharing, and gives Australia an ability to influence the world's leading great power.

For the US, Australia is a trusted partner with a sophisticated and professional defence force capable of taking part in joint operations, a source of independent advice and counsel, and an important country in a region which is critical for world affairs.

It is in the US's best interests for Australia's voice to be an independent one, and for our perspective on the region to be unique. The US is better served in this region by an independent and confident Australia. This is why, for modern Labor, the US alliance is one of the three pillars of our foreign policy, along with strong relationships in our region and multilateral engagement with the world. However, being in an alliance does not mean Australia must agree reflexively with every aspect of American policy or make its foreign policy subservient to that of our partner.

Historically, Liberal governments have tended to treat Australia's role in the alliance as one of subservience, from Holt's 'All the way with LBJ' to Howard's 'deputy sheriff' doctrine. But, as Kim Beazley has said, Australians want an alliance, not compliance. Labor has remained committed to the alliance while being willing to disagree with American policy when we judge that it does not reflect Australian interests, as in the cases of Vietnam and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. As Simon Crean told George W Bush when he addressed parliament: 'Of course, on occasions, friends do disagree - as we did, on this side, with you on the war in Iraq. But such is the strength of our shared values, our interests and our principles that those differences can enrich rather than diminish, can strengthen rather than weaken, the partnership.'

So as we approach the 75th anniversary of Curtin's message, we should reaffirm Australia's commitment to a strong alliance with the US. The US alliance remains critical to Australia as we face today's challenges: the threat of terrorism, the emergence of a multipolar strategic environment in Asia, regional military build-ups and territorial disputes, the dangerous behaviour of the regime in North Korea, the need to ensure stability and prosperity for our Pacific neighbours, and cross-border issues ranging from cyber security to climate change.

President Obama's pivot to Asia recognises both the region's importance to US strategic interests and, in turn, the importance of US engagement to the region's security. After the presidential election, and regardless of the outcome, Australia should continue to work closely with America. We should urge the new administration to maintain a focus on the Asia Pacific, given the region's role as a key driver of geopolitical and geoeconomic change. We should encourage the US to continue to support a rules-based international order capable of evolving and reforming in response to the aspirations of emerging powers. And we should remind our friends that providing leadership on international security and stability not only serves America's own interests but creates the fundamental preconditions for freedom and prosperity around the world.

As the Lowy Institute's Michael Fullilove has argued, the alliance not only serves Australia's interests by providing protection from strategic threats. It also supports progressivism in foreign affairs through America's role in promoting democracy and human rights and providing an umbrella of security and prosperity under which these values can thrive.

The contemporary relevance of Curtin's remarkable turn to America is the need for Australia to pursue its interests through independent foreign policy and defence self-reliance within an alliance framework. Seventy five years on, Australia still looks to America as its key partner in global efforts to ensure stability, security and peace.
Senator Penny Wong is Opposition Leader in the Senate and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs. She is visiting the US from 2-4 October for discussions on security and trade issues at the Australian American Leadership Dialogue's annual Honolulu Leadership Dialogue.

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John Curtin's turn to America, 75 years on

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This December will mark the 75th anniversary of one of the most momentous developments in Australian foreign policy, war-time Prime Minister John Curtin's famous turn to America. As we relax after Christmas and tune in to the Boxing Day Test, it may be worth reflecting on Curtin's New Year's message to the Australian people, published in the Melbourne Herald on 27 December 1941.

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John Curtin and General MacArthur in Melbourne, 1942.

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John Curtin and General MacArthur in Melbourne, 1942.

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"AUSTRALIA LOOKS FIRST TO U.S." - Daily Telegraph, 28 December, 1941

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"AUSTRALIA LOOKS FIRST TO U.S." - Daily Telegraph, 28 December, 1941

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AUSTRALIA LOOKS FIRST TO U.S. - Curtin, surveying Pacific strategy, says:

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'The Task Ahead' by John Curtin (Speech) (Primary Source)

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'The Task Ahead' by John Curtin (Speech) (Primary Source)

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[First published in The Herald (Melbourne), 27 December 1941]

By John Curtin

That reddish veil which o'er the face
Of night-hag East is drawn ...
Flames new disaster for the race?
Or can it be the dawn?

So wrote Bernard O'Dowd. I see 1942 as a year in which we shall know the
answer.

I would, however, that we provide the answer. We can and we will. Therefore I
see 1942 as a year of immense change in Australian life.

Those two facts involve two lines of action - one in the direction of external
policy as to our dealings with Britain, the United States, Russia, the
Netherlands East Indies and China in the higher direction of the war in the
Pacific.

Now with equal realism, we take the view that, while the determination of
military policy is the Soviet's business, we should be able to look forward with
reason to aid from Russia against Japan. We look for a solid and impregnable
barrier of the Democracies against the three Axis Powers, and we refuse to
accept the dictum that the Pacific struggle must be treated as a subordinate
segment of the general conflict. By that it is not meant that any one of the
other theatres of war is of less importance than the Pacific, but that Australia
asks for a concerted plan evoking the greatest strength at the Democracies'
disposal, determined upon hurling Japan back.

Australian internal policy has undergone striking changes in the past few weeks.
These, and those that will inevitably come before 1942 is far advanced, have
been prompted by several reasons. In the first place, the Commonwealth
Government found it exceedingly difficult to bring Australian people to a
realisation of what, after two years of war, our position had become. Even the
entry of Japan, bringing a direct threat in our own waters, was met with a
subconscious view that the Americans would deal with the short-sighted,
underfed and fanatical Japanese.

The announcement that no further appeals would be made to the Australian people,
and the decisions that followed, were motivated by psychological factors. They
had an arresting effect. They awakened the somewhat lackadaisical Australian
mind the attitude that was imperative if we were to save ourselves, to enter an
all-in effort in the only possible manner.

I make it clear that the experiment undertaken was never intended as one to
awaken Australian patriotism or sense of duty. Those qualities have been ever-
present; but the response to leadership and direction had never been requested
of the people, and desirable talents and untapped resources had lain dormant.

The year 1942 will impose supreme tests. These range from resistance to
invasion to deprivation of more and more amenities ...

Australians must realise that to place the nation on a war footing every citizen
must place himself, his private and business affairs, his entire mode of living,
on a war footing. The civilian way of life cannot be any less rigorous, can
contribute no less than that which the fighting men have to follow.

I demand that Australians everywhere realise that Australia is now inside the
firing lines.

Australians must be perpetually on guard; on guard against the possibility, at
any hour without warning, of raid or invasion; on guard against spending money,
or doing anything that cannot be justified; on guard against hampering by
disputation or idle, irresponsible chatter, the decisions of the Government
taken for the welfare of all.

All Australia is the stake in this war. All Australia must stand together to
hold that stake. We face a powerful, ably led and unbelievably courageous foe.

We must watch the enemy accordingly. We shall watch him accordingly.

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'The task ahead' by John Curtin, 27 December 1941

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First published in The Herald (Melbourne), 27 December 1941] By John Curtin That reddish veil which o'er the face Of night-hag East is drawn ... Flames new disaster for the race? Or can it be the dawn? So wrote Bernard O'Dowd. I see 1942 as a year in which we shall know the answer.

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John Curtin speaks about Australia switching allegiance.

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John Curtin speaks about Australia switching allegiance.

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Australian Prime Minister John Curtin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in London, 1942.

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Australian Prime Minister John Curtin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in London, 1942.

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Do they look happy with eachother?

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"BRING OUT A BRITON" - Propaganda Poster after WWII. (Primary Source)

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"BRING OUT A BRITON" - Propaganda Poster after WWII. (Primary Source)

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This poster is promoting Australian sponsorship of British people to move out to Australia after WWII. What does this say about Australia's relationship with Britain after WWII?

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John Curtin and Winston Churchill clash over Australian troops coming to defend Australia.

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John Curtin and Winston Churchill clash over Australian troops coming to defend Australia.

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John Curtin

The new Prime Minister had a background as a socialist union organiser and left wing journalist, and he had worked his way up through the ranks of the Labor Party.

Through the 1920s and 1930s Curtin and the Labor Party had refused to endorse the Singapore strategy whereby Australia supported, financially and militarily, the construction of a large British naval base at Singapore as the primary line of defence against potential Japanese expansion into the South Pacific and South Asia.

Curtin had campaigned during the 1940 election that the 'primary responsibility of any Australian Government was to ensure the security and integrity of its own soil and people before contributing to a common cause'.

War with Japan

Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on 7 December 1941, which immediately led the United States and Great Britain to declare war on Japan.

The next day Australia declared war on Japan, the first declaration of war Australia had ever made independently of Britain.

In his New Year's message delivered on the radio on 26 December 1941 and published in the Melbourne Herald the next day, Curtin announced that: '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.' This decisive move away from Great Britain infuriated British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

On 15 February 1942 Singapore fell to Japanese forces and the defensive strategy that Australia had invested so much into over the previous 15 years was in ruins. A portion of the Australian 8th Division had been part of Singapore's defences. More than 15,000 of these soldiers were captured, of whom more than 7,000 would die as prisoners of war.

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1942: Australian troops return to fight in the Pacific