Biting the dust: The imperial conventions within republican pretences

Abstract

This paper looks to the realm of foreign policy in order to see what of relevance to Australia's republican question might now be brewing there. Talcing its cue from some recent shifts in the terms of party political debate — where Keating's reassertion of the theme of ‘imperial betrayal’ on the Kokoda trail appears to have struck a responsive chord in an international context where greater economic stringency is threatened — the paper suggests that a form of ‘pretend republican’ politics may now be emerging. The purpose of the ensuing argument is to foreclose some of the possible routes through which this regressive form of populist nationalism might otherwise develop. It argues, first, that the general history of postwar Australian foreign policy is something quite different to the mythic story of a loyal ally, so impeding the access the access of pretend republicans to a useable past. Second, the paper argues that the sustained efforts by recent Labor governments to ‘enmesh’ the Australian economy in Asia, far from being an index of post‐colonial maturity, have provided fertile ground for the regeneration of a variety of modes of argument and thought that are properly described as colonial in form. In that sense, some old imperial traditions are made stronger by the movement towards a ‘pretend republican’ discourse.