‘Falsified by History’: Menzies, Asia and Post‐Imperial Australia

Abstract

Abstract This essay won the 2007 History Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Australasia & Pacific Section. Former Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies gave the East‐West Center's 1969 Dillingham Lecture at the University of Hawaii. Menzies, then almost four years into retirement, seized the opportunity not only to give his assessment of contemporary politics in the Asia‐Pacific, but also to assert that he had been ‘the first Australian Prime Minister to put Australia squarely into the Pacific rather than the Atlantic world’. In recent years, senior Liberals have echoed this sentiment and, like the Dillingham Lecture, pointed to Menzies's April 1939 radio address as initiating ‘engagement with Asia’. In this address, Menzies had suggested that: ‘In the Pacific we have what I might call primary responsibilities and primary risks’. The Dillingham Lecture constitutes Menzies's most considered attempt to claim ownership of Australia's regional relations, but similar arguments can be found in his autobiographical writings. Several Liberal contemporaries made similar assertions in the mid‐to‐late‐1960s, attempting to align themselves with increasingly resonant narratives about an emergent Asia. While acknowledging that the emergence of Australia's regional dialogue with Asia has been a bipartisan process, this article argues that such narratives, rather than confirming and extending the teleologies posited by past and contemporary policymakers, instead issued from the decline of Britishness as a foundational national story and the exigencies of Australia's emergence into post‐imperial nationhood. As such, they can more usefully be understood as interventions in a longstanding conversation about nation and belonging than as markers of a putative shift in foreign policy orthodoxy or, alternatively, as concern about material Asian realities.