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Abstract
The idea that Australia's wars of the twentieth century were ‘other people's wars’ has been fashionable for a generation and appears to have become popular during the Vietnam War years. This paper examines Australia's various military involvements to show that at the time of each there was majority support for them as most of the electorate judged them to be in Australia's interests and usually in those of the international community as well. To argue otherwise is to deny earlier generations of Australians their agency.
Notes
1. Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee, A Most Valuable Acquisition, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1988, p 189.
2. The even more recent interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were, of course, in this century.
3. On Keating, see www.dinkumaussies.com/Army/Sandakan; and on Howard, Weekend Australian, 28–9 August 1993.
4. T B Millar, Australia's Defence, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1969 (1965), p 9.
5. Sydney Morning Herald, 5 June 1994.
6. Craig Wilcox, (ed.), assisted by Janice Aldridge, The Great War: Gains and Losses—ANZAC and Empire, Australian War Memorial and Australian National University, Canberra, 1995.
7. Humphrey McQueen, Japan to the Rescue, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1991.
8. Published as a chapter in John Pilger, A Secret Country, Vintage, London, 1990.
9. Mannix in J Main, (ed.), Conscription, Cassell, Melbourne, 1970, p 84; Wobblies in Ian Turner, Sydney's Burning, Heinemann, Sydney, 1969, p 5; Boer War critics in R M Crawford, ‘A Bit of a Rebel’: The Life and Work of George Arnold Wood, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1975, pp 151, 155.
10. See, e.g., Humphrey McQueen, Social Sketches of Australia, 1888–1975, Melbourne, 1978, Stephen Alomes, A Nation at Last?, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1988, and Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Vintage, Sydney, 1988. For a short discussion of the use of the term ‘other people's wars’, see John Hirst, ‘“Other People's Wars”? Anzac and Empire’, Quadrant, October 1990, pp 15–20. See also, John A Moses, The Terror of Naivety and the Arrogance of Orthodoxy: Australian Historians and the First World War, Russel Ward Lecture, Armidale, 1999, and Anthony Cooper, ‘The Australian historiography of the First World War: who is deluded?’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol 40, no 1, 1993, pp 16–35.
11. Bruce Grant, Crisis of Loyalty. A Study of Australian Foreign Policy, Sydney, 1972, p 1.
12. George Johnston, My Brother Jack, London, 1964 (1967), pp 271–2.
13. C N Connolly, ‘“Manufacturing spontaneity”: The Australian offers of troops for the Boer War’, Historical Studies, April 1978, pp 210–32, and Craig Wilcox, ‘Australian involvement in the Boer War: Imperial pressure or colonial Realpolitik’, ch. 11 in John A Moses and Chris Pugsley (eds), The German Empire and Britain's Pacific Dominions, 1871–1919, Regina Books, Claremont, Cal., 2000. The latest account of Australia’s involvement in South Africa is Craig Wilcox, Australia's Boer War, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002.
14. E.g. Russel Ward, Australia Since the Coming of Man, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1982, p 170; C M H Clark, A History of Australia, vol 6, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1987, pp 40–1, 77–8.
15. Carl Bridge, ‘Australia's and Canada's wars, 1914–18 and 1939–45: Some reflections’, Round Table, no 361, September 2001, pp 623–32.
16. See my ‘The reason why. Australia and the Great War’, Quadrant, April 1994, pp 11–12.
17. This is a recurrent theme in the essays in Moses and Pugsley, The German Empire and Britain's Pacific Dominions.
18. For an analysis, see Brian Bond, A victory worse than defeat? British interpretations of the First World War, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Annual Lecture, London, 1997.
19. Most powerfully argued in David Day's The Great Betrayal, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1988, and Reluctant Nation, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992. But see also, e.g., Norman E Lee, John Curtin. Saviour of Australia, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1983, and Alomes, A Nation at Last?
20. The story is told in Paul Burns, The Brisbane Line Controversy, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998.
21. ibid., ch. 3.
22. For an eloquent recent treatment of the airmen's motivation, see Hank Nelson, From Wagga to Waddington: Australians in Bomber Command, London Papers in Australian Studies, no 5, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies London, 2002. See also, Don Charlwood, Marching as to War, Hudson, Melbourne, 1990.
23. Bruce Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1968.
24. Peter Love, ‘Curtin, MacArthur and conscription, 1942–43’, Historical Studies, October 1977, pp 505–11.
25. This is the argument of the essays in Carl Bridge and Bernard Attard (eds), Between Empire and Nation Australia's External Relations from Federation to the Second World War, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2000, and Carl Bridge (ed.), Munich to Vietnam. Australia's Relations with Britain and the United States since the 1930s, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1991. See also Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (eds), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity, Cass, London, 2003.
26. Wayne Reynolds, Australia's Bid for the Atomic Bomb, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2000.
27. Here I am at odds with W.J. Hudson, Blind Loyalty. Australia and the Suez Crisis, 1956, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1989.
28. Those in Cabinet who argued against the Suez commitment, led by R G Casey, the foreign minister, were concerned to placate Australia's other ally, the United States, and were not pushing an independent Australian line.
29. I have developed these points further in ‘Australia and the Vietnam War’ in Peter Lowe (ed.), The Vietnam War, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1998. For a recent overview, see David Martin Jones and Mike Lawrence Smith, Reinventing Realism: Australia's Foreign and Defence Policy at the Millennium, Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 2000.
30. The impact of Britain's plans to move into Europe is well treated in Stuart Ward, Australia and the British Embrace: The Demise of the Imperial Ideal, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.
31. There is a useful summary in G C Bolton, ‘The United Kingdom’, ch. 8 in W J Hudson (ed.), Australia in World Affairs, 1971–1975, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1980.
32. The Bulletin, 8 April 1967.
33. Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian identity: The problem of nationalism in Australian history and historiography’, Australian Historical Studies, April 2001, pp 76–90.
34. The recent Iraq war was different, but it is beyond the scope of this article.
35. For early analyses, see Bob Breen, Mission Accomplished East Timor, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000, and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, East Timor in Transition, 1998–2000, Canberra, 2001.
36. For a balanced, scholarly analysis of the Morant affair by a non-Australian, see Arthur Davey (ed.), with commentary, Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers, Van Riebeek Society, second ser., no18, Cape Town, 1987.