Misreading Menzies and Whitlam reassessing the ideological construction of Australian foreign policy

Abstract

Conventional understandings of Australian foreign policy hold that a decisive break with the past in external relations occurred only after 1972 and the arrival of Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister. Whitlam, it is claimed, began the process of severing out-dated imperial attachments to Britain, thus setting Australia on an independent course in world affairs based on a more mature assessment of the national interest that defined Australia as part of a wider Asia region. In contrast, the period between 1949 and 1972—an era dominated by the premiership of Sir Robert Menzies—is seen as a time of docile subservience to great power protectors, which sustained a conservative and reactionary monoculture at home while alienating Australia’s Asian neighbours abroad. This study contends that this understanding of the beginning of the ‘modern’ era in Australian foreign policy does not accord with the historical evidence. It is, instead, an image that has been ideologically constructed to legitimize Whitlam’s self-proclaimed revolution in foreign affairs and to validate the abortive attempt to integrate Australia into Asia during the 1980s and 1990s. The ruling foreign policy orthodoxy, however, is one that is widely accepted, and little questioned, in Australian academic and journalistic circles. Yet it rests on a profound, and often intentional, misreading of Australian foreign policy during the Menzies era. In effect, the pillars that have supported Australian foreign policy for over two decades since 1972 are myths manufactured in hindsight.