Australia's focus on Asia

Australia's focus on Asia

MELBOURNE (JP): Jamie Mackie, retired professor of politics at
Australia National University, believes that Australia's turn
towards Asia did not start with former prime minister Paul
Keating and his foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans.

An attempt to prove the point was made at a conference here
titled New Directions in Australian Foreign Policy, Australia and
Indonesia 1945-1950.

The conference, held at Monash University from May 31 to June
1, was dominated by what Mackie terms as the Golden Oldies: J.E.
Isaac, retired professor of economics of Monash University, T.K.
Critchley, former Australian ambassador to Indonesia, and J.W.
Burton, former secretary of the Department of External Affairs,
who was not able to attend in person and communicated via video.

While there were also younger speakers, still up and coming in
their academic professions, the "Golden Oldies" stood out because
they had been active players and participants in the role played
by Australia in Indonesia's struggle for independence.

Isaac accompanied the then professor William Macmahon Ball on
his goodwill mission to Indonesia in 1945, Critchley was
Australian representative for the Good Offices Committee (Komite
Tiga Negara) in 1948, and Burton was Departmental Private
Secretary to Minister for External Affairs H.V. Evatt, before
becoming Secretary of the Department in 1947.

These speakers not only set the scene, they told their stories
in the first person, in "history as it happens" style, which
later made the papers of the younger speakers a little dry by
comparison.

The 1940s was an era of Australia looking toward Britain and
the United States, where the concept of Europe as the center of
culture and civilization was prevalent throughout the nation.

It therefore must have been an indication of significant
foresight for the then prime minister Ben Chifley and his
external affairs minister to show support for, and their
subsequent involvement in, the nationalist movement in Indonesia.
The name Asia was not even used at the time. Various places in
the region were referred to as the "Orient" or the "Islands".

Two aspects stood out as the stories flowed from the Golden
Oldies: the unusual awareness of Australia's policy makers in
seeing that the nationalist movement in Indonesia had to be taken
seriously and Australia's reluctance to share a national border
with this nation. The legacy of this personality split survives,
to a degree, until this day.

When he accompanied Macmahon Ball to Indonesia in 1945, J.E.
Isaac recalled, they were on a fact-finding mission to see what
role Australia could play. Australia was keen to raise its
profile, while the sole concern of the British was to win the
war. Isaac revealed that External Minister Evatt was increasingly
disillusioned with Britain and the U.S. then. Isaac and Macmahon
Ball made friends with nationalist leaders such as Sukarno and
Hatta.

This friendship would later distinguish them from the British,
who kept referring to these leaders as "natives".

According to Jamie Mackie, there was then an element of
parallelism between Indonesian and Australian nationalist
sentiments. The Australian officials, mostly younger than their
British counterparts, often found themselves being lectured and
patronized by Dutch officials for being "too idealistic and
easily influenced".

No doubt this was aided by Prime Minister Chifley's sense of
fair play. Though he denied the allegations that the Waterside
Workers Federation dictated the policy -- when they banned Dutch
ships from sending arms to Indonesia -- Chifley quietly went
along with the ban.

Burton recalls that Chifley was initially quoted as pro-Dutch.
However, he said, he was also a person of sharp intuition. "At
that time there was not much information about Southeast Asia in
general. Chifley and Evatt realized that Australia was dealing
with a new nation," said Burton. "Chifley quickly became annoyed
when he discovered that the Dutch were sending arms to
Indonesia."

Burton did not see a turnaround in Australia's foreign policy.
There were, rather, attempts at new directions. "Australia at the
time hadn't come to terms with the fact that it was in Asia, and
it was still very much under the UN and U.S. umbrella," he said.

This refusal to accept the geographical reality, it appears,
translated into the discomfort of being too close to an Asian
nation. Australia did not support Indonesia's claim on West
Irian, preferring to have the Dutch colonial presence as a
buffer.

Critchley, on the other hand, working in the Good Offices
Committee, recalls that while they were dealing with invisible
boundaries, it was clear that the nationalists would not be
satisfied without West New Guinea.

According to Critchley, while the Netherlands tried to prevent
Indonesia from forming the republic and obtaining the UN's
support, if failed because it did not anticipate the strength of
international reaction to its second Police Action, and it
underestimated the strength of Indonesian nationalism and
determination to form the republic.

"While they went ahead with the December military action, they
were continually harassed by guerrilla movements, which they
thought would have died down quickly.

"The Sultan of Yogya refused to cooperate, and the Federalists
increasingly resented the Dutch's pressure and appreciated the
support of the nationalists," said Critchley, whose fervor for
Indonesia has not died down.

Australia has grown into a more mature nation, a far cry from
the heady days of the 1940's idealism. It has progressed a fair
way in the new direction of its foreign policy. There is no doubt
that Keating and Evans added a significant push, which appears to
follow the same direction as that taken by the present Howard-
Downer team.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne.