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SOME SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF AUSTRALIANAMERICAN RELATIONS: WILL AUSTRALIA BECOME THE 51ST
STATE?
DAVID MOSLER
In the years since the 9/11 attack on America the world has been gripped by
a debate about the nature and future of American foreign policy. This has
now broadened into a wider, highly emotive debate on the character of the
‘American Empire’ and its impact on global culture and politics. Governing
elites, scribblers and intellectuals from nations on all continents are
embroiled with questions on American hegemonic power in its military,
economic, political and cultural dimensions. Australia, arguably the most
Americanised nation in the world, is now engaged in a fierce debate on these
issues which prompted the Fulbright Commission in Australia at its 2003
conference in Brisbane to consider as its central theme the divisive question
‘Are we all Americans now?’ Will the forces of global Americanisation
ultimately swamp the relatively young Australian nation just entering its
second century as a nation state?1
In this climate of the questioning of long-standing global paradigms, such as
the viability of nation states around the world (particularly an acute problem
in Sub-Saharan Africa and the island nations in the Pacific and the
Caribbean), the issue of the interface between Australian and American
sovereignty has come to the surface. The ultimate in Americanisation for
Australia would be its absorption into the American Union. Is American
statehood for Australia a possibility which deserves serious intellectual and
political analysis? I believe this proposition should now be subjected to
detailed examination, and if we take the mid-21st century as a time
framework for this to be achieved, a useful discussion can, and should,
ensue over the issue of American statehood for Australia (or, indeed,
Australasia).2
I would like to explore this issue (which I touched on in a recent book
Australia, the Recreational Society) in several ways:
1) Why, historically, do I believe this to be a possibility and an
issue worth
discussing? (I realize most Australians would initially, especially
now in the aftermath of the Iraq War and the current wave of antiAmericanism, overwhelmingly react negatively to such a
proposition);
2) Would Australians in the long term desire such an outcome?
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3) Would Americans want Australia to join the fifty existing
states?
The Historical Background
In its evolution as a nation state, Australia comes almost at the tail end of
the historical process of the development of the European nation state
system. Appearing in the final chapters of Anglo-Saxon expansion,
beginning in the second and third centuries AD, first coming across the
English Channel from northern Germany, the Anglo-Saxons displaced
Romano-Celtic culture and pushed north and west throughout the British
Isles and then across the Atlantic in the late medieval period. In the
eighteenth century, a convergence of land pressures, trade, and geostrategic
reasons brought them to Australia and the creation of a settler society in the
last decades of the century. The indigenous peoples were mainly
exterminated or displaced, and the doctrine of terra nullius enabled the
settlers to occupy the land with a clear conscience (until, of course, the late
20th century debate led to the seminal High Court Mabo [1992] and Wik
[1996] cases overturning the concept). To build a nation, however, was a
more difficult task, and, as will be made clear, a task in which the
Australian people have ultimately failed.
I maintain that the culture of Australia as it evolved rested upon three
pillars: its British heritage, its interventionist state model or the ‘nanny
state’ (the ‘Australian Settlement’ as formulated by journalist and historian
Paul Kelly), and its evolution as a recreational society. As I argued in
Australia, the Recreational Society, this has created a national character of
dependence, timidity and hedonism which inhibits national independence
and stunts policy formation in almost all areas of activity central to the
functioning of this particular nation state: foreign affairs, education,
defence, health, aboriginal affairs and cultural autonomy.
As my colleague Tony Burke, has eloquently written in his recent book, In
Fear of Security (2001), it was intrinsic to the world view of this isolated
Anglo-Saxon white tribe in Australia, as for its analogue in South Africa, to
guard against invasion by retaining the constant threat of the ‘other’:
whether physically or culturally. The fear of invasion was prompted by
constant anxiety of being overwhelmed by alien peoples and cultures, thus
destroying its essential Britishness. This has led, as Burke argues, to a
constant search for certitude by Australian governments, especially John
Howard’s, and a need to place oneself under the control of the US—Foreign
Minister Downer is even more rabid in this respect—and keep the ‘other’ at
bay. Hence the refugee issue presented in the one-issue federal political
campaign of 2001. Old Australia despises the possibility of becoming
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
41
‘Asian’ and desperately desires to remain Anglo-Saxon—whether British or
American. This has manifested itself in what Carol Johnson calls the
‘revenge of the mainstream’ politics with the Republic, refugee and
immigration issues.3
Why do I, however, argue that Australia will drift to statehood in the US,
especially during this current cycle of anti-Americanism (higher than at any
time since the Vietnam War)? I go back to the creation of the Australian
nation state in 1901, which was achieved without great enthusiasm or depth.
The Australians shed no blood, remained British citizens, left foreign affairs
under British domination, went to war when told to by Britain under what
looks like a British flag, invaded a weak Muslim nation which did not
threaten Australia in 1915, and in the 1930s the Western Australians voted
to secede but gave up meekly when this was rejected by the British
Parliamentary Committee with whom they had placed their request. In the
Great Depression the British creditors mercilessly squeezed their Australian
debtors and the Mother Country was unable to defend Australia after the fall
of Singapore in 1942. Australia, therefore, emerged in the modern era as a
kind of anti-nationalist state unaccustomed to acting independently and,
except for possibly sport and war, seemed not to manifest a great deal of
ardour for a strong or autonomous national identity (down to the
extraordinary resounding and anti-nationalist defeat of the Republic
Referendum in 1999).
With the events of the Second World War and the Cold War this pattern of
subordination (obsequiousness?) was transferred to the US out of necessity,
but not without great regret by the old elite imbued with Tory AngloAustralian contempt for American culture and political style. The Australian
nation clung to the illusion of Empire with membership of the
Commonwealth of Nations (today a pathetic atavism which promotes
neither good will nor democracy) and for a time avoided globalisation. The
Australian ruling elite, down to the present, was largely undereducated,
timid, and provincial; soon, however (in spite of ‘hereditary’ antiAmericanism), they did the bidding of the Yanks and the global capital
markets with consummate ease. The globalisation of American power
would blend all the trans-national patterns of homogenisation industrialisation, modernisation, Americanisation, globalisation - into one
massive blast of domination by the US thereby blurring the dividing lines of
culture and sovereignty between the US and Australia.4 When the US told
Australia to jump, jump it would do indeed: conflicts in Korea, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, and Gulf Wars I and II were joined enthusiastically by
Australia.5 In 2003 the US wishes to add to its communications bases,
already enjoying extra-territoriality, with permanently based troops on
Australian soil.
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Historically then, Australia placed itself firmly under the protection of the
British Empire and, since 1942, increasingly the Americans to preserve its
place in the Anglophone world culturally and geopolitically. In many
respects today, however, the argument has moved on to a new transnational
phase in the era of globalisation in which new forms of global organization
increasingly transcend national boundaries. The WTO, IMF, UN, EU, and
many global organizations, have moved inexorably to diminish national
sovereignty and transfer decision-making from nation state institutions to
transnational bodies. Tony Burke concludes in his book that this may mean
a new historical epoch for Australia: ‘In the increasingly borderless world of
globalisation our dominant images of sovereignty and security are failing
us…[and] our security can no longer be thought in isolation from the
security of others...’ 6 The nation state system, really only a stable political
paradigm for Europe for a relatively short period of time (with hundreds of
border and national changes in the last four hundred years since the Treaty
of Westphalia in 1648 established the basic outlines of the European nation
state), may be in its final stage of evolution toward new global structures to
deal with economic, political, security and environmental policies.
Why has the governing elite of Australia pursued these anti-nationalist
policies?
This has led Australian governments to pursue policies attuned to foreign
entities - the British, the Americans, the Japanese, the global capital markets
- conservative and labour alike, to protect it from foreign invasion and to
make a quick buck. This has brought massive cultural imperialism, but that
has always been viewed as a small price to pay for profits and a weak sense
of Australian nationhood was not offended anyway. Thus the farm is sold
off: electricity, water, ports, airports, basic resources, manufacturing, etc—if
it has value, sell it. Among the possible paradigms to explain this apparently
treasonous behaviour are: (1) treason; (2) slash and burn; (3) stupidity; (4)
ideological; and (5) combination of the first four.
--Model One: Treason Model (using the Crimes Act, 1914)
This conspiracy theory is hard to prove and
improbable that the political classes are ‘agents of
foreign power’.7
--Model Two: Slash and Burn Model
From the colonial period the ethic was to dig and
loot and make money as quickly as possible; the
same in other colonial societies such as South
Africa, the US West, and Rhodesia.
--Model Three: Stupidity Model
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43
An undereducated, short-sighted and insular elite
throughout Australian history that has no strong
sense of national destiny or true independence as a
nation state.
--Model Four: Ideology Model
This is economic rationalism run amok; see the
works of Michael Pusey, John Carroll and Hugh
Stretton. This sacrifices national interests in the
name of neo-liberal ideological purity.
--Model Five: Combination Model
All of the above, but in differing proportions over
time.
The historical explanation for the causes of the weak nationalism of the
Australian governing elites, therefore, is complex and difficult to explicate
in definitive terms; however, the lack of an aggressive and self-conscious
elite determined to find a place in the world for an Australian identity is an
unquestioned fact of Australian history. The awakening of a strong
Australian nationalism in the near future is most unlikely; to the contrary,
the probability is for the sense of a strong and autonomous Australian
nationalism (which would lead to independent foreign and military policies)
to diminish rather than grow in the decades ahead.
How is this anti-nationalism manifested in policy formation and
behaviour?
The historical pattern, therefore, has produced an Australia, which does not
want to be a fully independent nation.
Consider the following: Australians have:
no flag of their own: the British flag imbedded in the corner (as
does Hawaii);
no love of Federation: weak sense of nationhood from the
beginning;
no joy in replacing Empire with Yanks after 1942: still quasi-colonial status
(eg., Iraq War);
no PM living in the Lodge: Howard lives in Sydney rather than
Canberra;
no Republic: defeat of the 1999 Referendum;
no broad knowledge of nation in public discourse or popular culture;
no national bushfire plan, organization, communication system, or force
(especially ironic and disastrous when Canberra burned in 2003);
no effective national water plan even with the worst drought in history 2001-3 and a
grave crisis in the nation’s most important river system in the Murray-Darling Basin.
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The rundown of public sector spending over the last decade, within this
framework of a weak sense of national identity, has dramatically hit health
and education sectors and infrastructure and transport problems (for
example, a third airport in Sydney or a VFT) have been left untouched.
Defence expenditures are so low that Australia is now a virtually
undefended nation. With recent troop commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq,
and large ongoing troop deployments in East Timor, Solomon Islands and
Papua New Guinea, stretching the ADF almost beyond capacity, this leaves
roughly 3000 troops to defend the nearly 3000 square miles of the
Australian mainland. With the Defence budget a paltry 1.9% of GDP, the
lack of a credible ADF seems to border on the foolhardy. With the war on
terror heating up in the region to the north of Australia, now viewed as the
‘arc of instability’ (from the Indonesian archipelago to Vanuatu), and the
aging fleet of F-111 strike aircraft designated to be replaced ten years early
in addition to an antiquated tank force, the fiscal and policy reaction of
Australian governing elites to geopolitical strategic needs seems strange
indeed!8
Thus Australia has evolved as a kind of non-nation, an anti-nationalist state
or simply a nation with a weak veneer of national cohesion. Federation in
1901 did not sweep through the masses with popular enthusiasm nor did it
produce strong national attachments. Indeed, in the 1930s the Western
Australians voted to secede and only gave up when the British Parliament (
through a standing committee) told them to go home and have a cold
shower, which they dutifully did and that was the end of that story.9 The
Centenary of Federation was also not an outpouring of emotion and of the
thousands of Federation events in 2001 only about 5% involved the actual
historical fact of nation state formation (endless footy matches, beard
growing contests, etc).10
No matter how one conceives it, therefore, the Australian nation state has a
weak national culture, is not very resistant to foreign domination, and has a
mostly passive culture with a concomitant national personality of timidity.
The key elements of national identity and emotional identity with the state
are absent from the national psyche; indeed, the advocacy of these is often
viewed as anti-Australian or bad form or ‘being too much like the emotional
and jingoistic Yanks’. The Australian personality, therefore, is essentially
conformist, timid, passive and indifferent to large causes and ideas. This has
prompted Donald Horne, after a lifetime of analysing Australian society to
conclude, sadly for him, that it is a culture which does not seem to have a
place in it for large ideas, with anti-intellectualism on the rise in the general
public and even in the universities. This has prompted many academics to
leave Australia as the culture and the higher education sector is dumbed
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
45
down.11 To maintain strong intellectual interests is to face the possibility of
social exclusion or to be charged with being ‘over the top’.
Many observers, past and present, have commented on the timidity of the
Australian character. Sylvia Lawson, in a piece entitled ‘Overcoming the
fear of freedom’, paraphrasing Erich Fromm’s famous formulation, argues
that the Australian electorate cannot face full independence and autonomy
from the British Crown.12 An American academic visitor from Princeton,
Aaron Friedberg, alleges that Australians ‘…to Americans …occasionally
seem parochial and, at times, timid.’ Don Watson, historian and former
speechwriter for Paul Keating, has echoed these remarks on the timidity of
Australia and Australians in his recent essay Rabbit Syndrome. The
socialization of the Empire was to create a population always deferring to
their superiors and thus has it remained.13
If Australia does not want to be a nation then why not a US state?
Few Australians, however, until recently, have gone the next step and
advocated statehood for Australia. But in the intellectual alienation now so
pervasive, such as with Donald Horne (see, for example Looking for
Leadership: Australia in the Howard Years, 2001) and Phillip Adams
(every Saturday in The Australian), voices have been heard on this issue.
Both Bob Ellis, the famous/infamous playwright, and Guy Rundle, co-editor
of Arena Magazine and genius writer for the political satirist Max Gillies,
have suggested that Australia simply sits at the wrong point in the historical
cycle to be truly a nation-state. Ellis, in typically Ellis jaundiced style states
that he sometimes gets up in the morning with ‘a gnawing feeling that
Australia might be a lemon’; Rundle concludes that Australia ‘…is no
nation to speak of…the truth is we got going too late to have a national
culture.’ Don Watson has suggested this in Rabbit Syndrome, published in
2001, in which he argues that Australia is too timid and culturally stillborn
to be an independent nation state. He, therefore, concludes, in a very dark
and melancholy essay, that it might as well join the US to make de jure
what is now de facto: it is a colony of the US.14
From economists and public servants the issue has come up, or been implied
by the logic of the issue, within the context of the debates over the Free
Trade Agreement negotiations with the US and on dollarization. The
Governor of the Reserve Bank, Ian McFarlane, came out in 2000 in favour
of a currency union with New Zealand; in 2001 the Chairman of the
Australian Stock Exchange, Maurice Newman, went further and advocated
Australia’s adoption of the US dollar as Australia’s domestic currency.
These debates are still operative (although the New Zealand Finance
Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Michael Cullen, recently commented
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that he did not see much hope for a Currency Union at this time15) and as
the dollarization movement gains ground globally (eg, Ecuador which did
dollarize) the indications are that the issue will not disappear. Statehood
could not be far behind if Australia dollarizes for the natural extension of
dollarization, as with the possible Currency Union of Australia and New
Zealand, would be potential unification of the nation states dollarizing. In
both debates the sovereignty of Australia is an implied or overt issue: the
reduction of barriers, in both monetary terms and trade relations, inevitably
will have these consequence of encroachment of the US on the sovereignty
of Australia.
One should, in this debate, consider the following advantages to American
statehood for Australia and Australians; they would:
have access to the world’s best higher education system;
have large savings on embassies;
become part of the world’s most effective defence system;
merge with the strongest currency in the world (even with recent
falls);
be part of the world’s biggest economy;
have teams in the NBA (basketball), American League (baseball) and
NFL(gridiron);
be part of the world’s dominant film, arts and entertainment industry;
and, to meet a long-standing demand by the Left, have a Constitution, which
brings
both a Republic and a Bill of Rights to Australia.
But does the US want Australia as the 51st state?
Expansion was always intrinsic to the American historical experience from
its founding as a Puritan colonial society in the seventeenth century down to
the present. Daniel Boone punched through the Cumberland Gap in 1775 as
the soon-to-be revolutionary Americans pushed west. Commentators in the
first decades of national existence, such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,
and in the early nineteenth century, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, took
special notice of the restlessness at the heart of American character. In 1845,
the journalist and editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic
Review, John Lewis O’Sullivan, enunciated the concept of Manifest
Destiny, thus formulating a nineteenth century version of an American
Manichean sense of apocalyptic history, teleology and eschatology with
roots in its ancient Middle Eastern and Judeo-Christian heritage.16 The sense
of urgency and mission was also highlighted in the 1850s by Horace
Greeley, the editor of the New York Herald Tribune, radical, and
unsuccessful candidate for the Liberal Republicans in the 1872 presidential
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
47
election, when he gave the immortal advice to Americans to ‘Go west,
young man.’ Millions would take up the challenge and the assault on the
West, and then into the Pacific, was on in earnest. At the end of the century,
when the frontier was gone, this fact was postulated as marking a crucial
watershed in American history by Frederick Jackson Turner who viewed the
availability of free land as central to American character formation
(democratic, egalitarian and aggressive).17
As the US pushed west in the nineteenth century, first into the Ohio Valley
and then to the trans-Mississippi west with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803,
the thirst for space was unquenchable. William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary
of State, then under President Andrew Johnson, to the ridicule of the nation
calling it ‘Seward’s Folly’, bought Alaska from the Russians for $US7.2
million in 1867, something like the income per hour of an eight hour
working day now.18 American expansion in the Pacific continued with the
ejection of Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii in 1893 (US territory in 1900).
The US desired the space roughly 10 degrees latitude north and south of the
Equator to secure trade to the Western Pacific. This reflected the aims of
Matthew Perry’s geostrategic Mission to open up Japan in 1854, and in
1898 the US became a major western Pacific and Caribbean power from the
Spanish-American War (taking the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island in
the Pacific and Puerto Rico and de facto control of Cuba in the Caribbean
from the Spanish in what Secretary of State John Hay at the time called a
‘splendid little war’). The Americans thus displaced the British, Russians
and French as the major Pacific hegemon and this would bring them into
direct conflict with Japan and China in the twentieth century. President
Theodore Roosevelt cemented his view, and those of the US geostrategic
theorist Admiral Mahan, about the importance of the Pacific, with the world
tour by the Grand Fleet (called the ‘Great White Fleet’ by the Aussies) in
1908. The new strength of America in the Pacific built up to December 7,
1941. Was the Pacific big enough for the US, Japan, Russia and China?
The continental US was completed with statehood for Arizona and New
Mexico in 1912, the same year the Mexican nationalist/bandit Pancho Villa
killed 17 people in a cross-border raid from Mexico. In 1959 the US added
two more final states with Alaska and Hawaii,19 thus creating the 50 states
with a strong Pacific presence. Very few Americans have been killed on US
soil, excluding Hawaii, in wartime; 6 were killed on US soil in WWII as
Stanford’s David Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winner, pointed out two years
ago in the keynote address at the Fulbright Symposium in Melbourne.20
Americans want to keep it that way. Thus, 11 September 2001 was a deep
shock, and the US will never pull out of Western Pacific now and with this
attack on US soil the need is more urgent for a secure base. Without a
secure strategic position in the Western Pacific, with the withdrawal from
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Subic Bay Naval base and Clark Air Force base in the Philippines (early
1990s) and likely to leave Okinawa under pressure from the resurgent
Japanese and local Okinawans, the US needs a new base in order to secure
its geostrategic position and fight the war on terrorism.
Thus, with the addition of Hawaii and Alaska to the forty-eight continental
contiguous states (the ‘lower 48’ as Alaskans call them), one has a transPacific American Empire. It stretches some 3000 miles from the West Coast
of America to Honolulu (and colonial island outposts beyond such as
American Samoa, Wake Island and Guam) and a thousand miles up the
coast to Alaska, which contains essentially a chunk of Canada in its
southeastern section. An Australian state, in this era of global electronic
communication, should not present communication problems compared to
when my great uncle attempted (unsuccessfully) to find gold in Alaska in
the great Alaska-Yukon gold rush in 1897-98 which sparked my home town
of Seattle off into its first great boom (followed in the next century by
Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Starbucks).
Excluding the 500 nations of Native Americans, and Hawaii’s Polynesian
Kingdom, is there precedent for America to absorb independent nations into
the fold of the United States? Actually, this has happened three times: in
1845, 1848, and in 1865. Texas declared independence from Mexico in
1836 and established itself as the Lone Star Republic after a war of
independence. After 10 years, coming into the start of the Mexican War, it
joined the expanding US. In 1846, with the Mexican War underway,
California set itself up briefly as the Bear Flag Republic and kept its
independence for a short period until the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo
ceded the Southwest to the US at the conclusion of the Mexican War in
1848. The continental empire of America, however, soon split in 1861 in the
War Between the States, but in 1865, after its bloodiest war in history, the
US had to reabsorb the Confederate States of America into the US. Thus its
third and final absorption of an independent nation took place; one which
proved to be extraordinarily difficult for over a century until the Civil
Rights era of the 1950s-60s. Thus the history of absorption of other nations
has been difficult and at times bloody; these precedents, however, are
unlikely to point to problems for Australia, which would ape
Czechoslovakia with a velvet revolution in reverse.
The constitutional process of absorption of new states into the United States
of America is relatively simple. Article IV, Section III, Part 1, of the United
States Constitution declares that ‘new states may be admitted by the
Congress into this Union…’ Most states have come in without great fuss.
Some, however, presented special problems; Utah was admitted as a state in
1896 only after the Elders of the Mormon Church denounced polygamy
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
49
after divine revelation conveniently pointed the way to new political
realities (in 1890). On the whole, projecting from the historical pattern,
Australia’s passage to statehood in constitutional terms should not be
difficult.
Conclusion
Presently Australia is very useful to the needs of US foreign policy as
shown by its participation in past and present wars: WWII, Korea, Vietnam,
Afghanistan, and both Gulf Wars. Australia is host to very important
strategic American bases for communication systems and is a stable
political environment. Its population is well educated and passive: that is, an
ideal location for a strategic base in the Western Pacific.
In the new century the US administration has kept the pressure up on
Australia. Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, in a recent
visit, commented that if war broke out with China over the Taiwan issue he
would expect Australia to make a contribution. With the ending of base
agreements with the Philippines in the early 1990s, and increasing
instability in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, Australia looms as a
reliable nation state for a military base in the region, especially with the
constant escalation in the war against terrorism.
In May, 2003, the desire of the US to have bases in Australia was made
official with the request for the permanent stationing of troops in Australia,
either in a US facility or, more likely because of political sensitivities, on
already extant Australian bases. These would be forward bases for the war
on terrorism and would add to previous agreements on the use of Northern
Australia for joint exercises and pre-positioning of equipment and
maintenance facilities. The American Secretary of Defense, Donald
Rumsfeld, sees this as part of a major re-think of forward deployment of
troops in the Western Pacific. Australian politicians ducked for cover on the
issue (shades of orders from Australia’s Yankee overlords) but the lead
editorial in The Australian, as well as the paper’s foreign editor Greg
Sheridan, voiced qualified support for the deployment of US troops here on
a permanent basis but not necessarily in a separate US facility. Australia’s
proximity to Asia makes it the ideal location for a Western Pacific base to
fight terrorism in Southeast Asia (especially in the Philippines where it is
already operating) and, again suggested by Richard Armitage, Australia
could be a useful partner in the developing global defence missile system
with the US. The latter proposition was welcomed by Foreign Minister
Downer a few months later (December 4), however, it was unclear precisely
what the Australian contribution would entail in the controversial (and
potentially $US one trillion) program.21
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The historical pattern, therefore, has a thrust of inexorability: spread of
American power to the West since its inception and increasing sovereignty
of the Western Pacific over the past two centuries. The cultural and
geostrategic dominance of the American state has been enhanced and
accelerated by globalisation and the (possible) success of the Bush Doctrine
in the Second Gulf War. The US is now the sole superpower and hegemon
and is likely to remain so over the next generation. The discussion of issues
which could lead to statehood for Australia have already begun over the
questions of dollarization and trade, and the possibility of statehood seems
inevitably to emerge over the next fifty years. To raise it now seems both
prudent and prescient for Australians, Americans and all residents in the
Pacific Basin.22
ENDNOTES
111
The debate is not quite as significant for Australia historiographically or politically as the
current ‘black armband history’ debate led by pugnacious antagonists Robert Manne (Left)
and Keith Windshuttle (Conservative), but sometimes just as intense. See Windshuttle’s The
Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Macleay Press, Paddington, 2002 and Manne’s response
as editor in Whitewash: on Keith Windshuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Black
Inc., Melbourne, 2003; for commentary see Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History
Wars, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2003 and a scathing review by Gregory
Melleuish in The Australian, 3 September 2003, p. 15. See also Inga Clendinnen,
‘Dispatches from the history wars’, The Australian Financial Review (‘Review’ section), 31
October 2003, pp. 4-5.
2
The level of intensity of the debate will no doubt be increased in the aftermath of President
Bush’s visit to Australia and the deliver of a speech to a joint sitting of Parliament in late
October 2003.
3
Anthony Burke, In Fear of Security, Australia’s Invasion Anxiety, Pluto Press, Annandale,
2001, pp. 184-185; Carol Johnson, Governing Change: from Keating to Howard, University
of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 2000, pp. 38-54.
4
See David Mosler and Bob Catley, America and Americans in Australia, Praeger, Westport,
Conn; 1998; Philip Bell and Roger Bell, Implicated: the United States in Australia, Oxford
University Press, Melbourne, 1993 and, Philip Bell and Roger Bell, (eds)., Americanization
and Australia, University of NSW Press, Sydney, 1998, passim.
5
Including, of course, fighting for the British Empire when asked to do so in the Maori Wars
(1863), Sudan (1885), Boer War (1899-1902), and the Malayan Emergency (1950-1963; the
Emergency itself lasted from 1948 to 1960).
6
Burke, op. cit., p. 331.
7
Under the Crimes Act, 1914 (Commonwealth), which covers treason and sedition in Part II,
Section 24B(g) states that it is seditious ‘to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between
different classes of Her Majesty’s subjects so as to endanger the peace, order or good
government of the Commonwealth.’ Many critics of the Howard government (1996-present)
would argue that the Prime Minister’s policies on refugees (allegedly part of a life-long
general pattern by Howard of employing the divisive tactic of ‘wedge politics’), and the
selling off of Australia’s public assets, constitute the ‘endangerment’ of the stability of civil
society in Australia, but it is extremely unlikely that any court of law would come to such a
conclusion. (Provisions of this Act, however, were used in the Cold War cases against CPA
members Sharkey [79 CLR 121] and Burns and Ransley [79 CLR 101]).
AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES
8
51
This whole situation greatly alarms even the most ardent government supporters: see the
editorial in The Australian, 7 August 2003, p. 12. The government (at the end of 2003)
seems likely to choose the heavy American Abrams tank over the lighter British Chieftan or
the German Leopard in order to mesh with American strategic needs (with even the
possibility of the tank force stationed in the US, providing greater mobility, and an American
base in the Northern Territory): The Australian Financial Review, 31 October 2003, p. 7 and
The Weekend Australian, 8-9 November 2003, pp. 1,6.
9
Ironically, to add farce to indecisiveness, the electors of Western Australia simultaneously
voted out the very conservative state government that had put the independence proposition.
10
David Mosler, Australia, the Recreational Society, Praeger, Westport, Conn;, 2002, p. 82.
11
Horne quoted in Mosler, op. cit., p.148; on academics deserting the universities see also
Jim Buckell, ‘Brains on the Run’; On the dumbing down of universities see Luke Slattery, ‘A
plug for the cultural gaps’, The Australian Higher Education, pp. 33, 36, 4 September 2002
and Mosler, Recreational Society, pp. 127-151, especially 136-138.
12
The Australian Financial Review, 20 August 2002, pp. 4-5.
13
The Australian, 20 August 2002, p. 11; Don Watson, Rabbit Syndrome, Black Inc,
Melbourne, 2001, pp. 25, 56.
14
Quotes in Mosler, Recreational Society, pp. 159-160 and see final chapter of book on
statehood for Australia; Don Watson, Rabbit Syndrome, pp. 25, 54-56; this was also the topic
of a paper delivered by the author at the Fulbright Conference (Brisbane) in 2003 which is
the basis of this article.
15
Interview on Channel 9, The Business Show, 25 May 2003.
16
Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: the Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic
Faith, Yale University Press, New, Conn; 1993.
17
In the twenty-first century, the agricultural society in the Midwest and the Rockies is
collapsing under the double effect of draught and agribusiness takeovers; this area of
America is depopulating and moving on to the Southwest and the Pacific Coast: see Nicholas
Kristof, ‘America’s Failed Frontier’, The New York Times, Op-Ed page, 3 September 2002.
18
The Alaskan economy is worth $US17 billion per year and thus close to $US50 million per
day: The New York Times, 23 October 2002, p. 1.
19
Parenthetically, I happened to be working in the old Russian fishing and fort village of
Wrangell, named after the Russian Admiral Baron von Wrangell, in a salmon cannery in
1958 when it went through Congress and participated in the highly inebriated frontier
celebrations—Alaskans, however, rarely needed an excuse to get drunk.
20
David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, Oxford University Press, New York, 1999, pp. 848849.
21
The Australian, 22 May 2003, p.1, 23 May 2003, pp.4,10, 14 July 2003, p.1, and 6
December 2003, pp.1,19; for an overview and analysis of these strategic military plans see
Kurt Campbell and Celeste Ward, ‘US forces seek home closer to the flame’, The Australian
Financial Review (‘Review’ section, reprinted from Foreign Affairs), 24 October 2003, pp.
6-7.
22
The debate over the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emption at the of 2003 is, of course, extremely
heated and ranges from supporters who see it as seminal as the Truman Doctrine of
containment in 1947 (ending ultimately in the defeat of Communism) to critics who see it as
a complete catastrophe for the peace of the world and the beginning of the end of America as
a hegemonic power. The verdict, however, must wait the test of time.