Adolescent Country:
Why Australia is Not a Maritime
Nation
Professor Michael Evans
Hassett Chair of Military Studies
Paradox and Australia’s Strategic
Dilemma
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‘To see that Australia is a set of paradoxes
is, perhaps, the beginning of an ability to
understand it’ – Jeanne MacKenzie, The
Australian Paradox (1962)
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Abundance of physical space but
psychology of coastal confinement
Idealisation of bush but reality of
suburbanism
Materialism (standard of living) before
metaphysics (the art of living)
United by ANZAC mythology but
divided over national defence
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Greatest Paradox: Lack of Maritime
Identity
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Australia is a classic trade dependent
maritime state whose interests are tied to
a larger offshore Asian and Oceanic geostrategic region - Saul B. Cohen, Geography
and Politics in a Divided World (1964)
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Australia is an island-continent
without a maritime identity
Australia does not belong to the great
Anglo-American tradition of maritime
history but to ideology of ‘the fatal shore’
Attempts at Dominion navalism replaced
by ANZAC after World War 1
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The Price of Paradox: A State of
Strategic Adolescence
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Paradoxes of Australia’s national
culture impede maritime consciousness
Coastal lifestyle not synonymous with
oceanic-consciousness
Australian culture upholds a strong
continental ethos
Encourages strategic thinking inimical to
emergence of a mature appreciation of
value of the sea
This will not be overcome quickly or
easily in 21st century
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Why Maritime Strategy
Matters
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A national maritime strategy [is systemic
and] defines fundamentally a state’s longterm future relationship with the sea and
involves the comprehensive integration of all
elements and partnerships – military,
commercial and institutional – Chris Parry,
Super Highway: Sea Power in the 21st
Century (2014)
‘Rid yourselves of the old notion – held by so
many for so long – that maritime strategy
exists solely to fight and win wars at sea, and
the rest will take care of itself’ – Admiral
Michael Mullen, CNO, USN, June 2006
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Australia’s Challenge: A
Nation without OceanicConsciousness
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America has a great maritime tradition,
which Australia really has not – H. C.
Allen, Bush and Backwoods: A
Comparison of the Frontier in Australia
and the United States (1959)
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‘Australia is a maritime nation and
scarcely knows it – James Bird, Seaport
Gateways of Australia (1968)
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Australia is not a maritime nation and its
people do not sustain much of an interest
in Australian maritime strategy – Kim
Beazley, Minister for Defence,
November 1987
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Three Snapshots
 Maritime
dependence and its adverse impact on
evolution of Australian strategy
 Influence of national culture in impeding a
modern maritime ethos
 Prospects for a national maritime renaissance in
the challenging global circumstances of the 21st
century
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1. Maritime Dependence and
Australia’s Defence
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1788-1901: Australia protected by world’s
greatest seaborne empire
Need for a maritime identity unnecessary given
British imperial defence
Australia’s colonists able to settle an islandcontinent as a New Britannia – but cultivated
a paradoxical sense of non-Britannic mare
incognitum
History of maritime thought in Australia ‘is like
the study of snakes in Ireland: There are no
snakes in Ireland’
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Federation Era Defence
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Federation made defence a national
political consideration
Geographical size and small population
meant defence in, and of, empire
‘[Let Australasia] frame its [defence]
schemes and base its estimates on sound
lines, both naval and imperial; naval by
allowing due weight to battle force;
imperial, by contemplating the whole . . .
local safety is not always best found in
local precaution. There is a military sense,
in which he who loses his life shall save it’
– Alfred Thayer Mahan, Retrospect and
Prospect (1902)
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The Meta-Narrative: The Deakenite
‘Australian Settlement’, 1901-85
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Australia was founded on faith in
government authority; belief in
egalitarianism . . . protection of its
industry and its jobs; dependence on a
great power (first Britain, then America),
for its security and finance; and above all
hostility to its [Asian] geographical
location . . . Its bedrock ideology was
protection; its solution a Fortress
Australia, guaranteed as part of an
impregnable Empire spanning the globe
Paul Kelly, The End of Certainty (1992)
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From Sharks to Dingoes:
Strategic Identity since 1915
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Paradox: Dominion navalism was
Federation’s original strategic creed not
ANZAC warfare
Paradox: until 1915, Charles Bean,
architect of ANZAC, was naval advocate
proclaiming Australians as ‘blood of sea
peoples’
Post-1918, Diggers came to define
Australia’s martial ethos
RAN capability fell drastically in 1920s – by
1940s maritime dependence transferred
from Britain to America
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Shattering Defence: Conscription
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Australian maritime outlook further
distorted by division on defence
Conscription disputes (1916-17 and
1942) shattered consensus on defence
Severed political bond between duty of
bearing arms and rights of citizenship
Paradox: Australia developed a
martial history without experience of
self-defence
Legacy: a volunteer military tradition
associated mainly with soldiers
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Australian Strategic Culture
in 21st Century
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Australia’s strategic culture lacks both oceanic
consciousness and consensus on defence
Paradox and discord mark two fundamentals
of defence: who should serve and where?
‘Australia [has] been a pro-war and anti
conscription country – a unique mixture’ – Paul
Kelly, 100 Years: The Australian Story (2001)
‘That defence of the nation is a single project,
and that the State should have the power to
command – [has] not been accepted in
Australia . Defence has been the empty core of
Australian nationhood’ – John Hirst,
Australia’s Democracy: a Short History (2002)
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2. Visual Continentalism: A National
Culture of Maritime Indifference
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Great paradox of seaborne security
fuelling an inward-looking literary
and artistic culture of landscape
Explorers, artists, writers (Leichardt,
Nolan, Lawson and Paterson) created a
cult of landscape
‘Exalt the bush above the spurious and
blue-moulded civilisation of the littoral’
– Joseph Furphy (Tom Collins), Such
is Life
Serle’s seminal study of Australian
culture devoid of a single maritime
reference
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A ‘Withheld Self’ and the Spirit of the
Land
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[The land] has not only been the
background of the nation’s story, but
also the home of its heroes, the
maker of its ideals, and the breeding
ground of its myths. - T. Inglis
Moore, Social Patterns in
Australian Literature (1971)
Inward Australian culture described
by D. H. Lawrence as the spiritual
condition of a ‘withheld self’
Paradox: world’s largest island
possesses a deep inwardness drawn
from landscape
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The Jindyworobaks: Rejecting
the Sea
 Jindyworobak
literary movement
(1930s-1950s) viewed ocean as alien
to Australian identity
 Sea dismissed as representative of
‘the blindness [of] ship-fed seas from
colder waters’ – Ian Mudie,
‘Underground’
 Outback and continental landscape
celebrated as true Australia way ‘like
heart and blood, from heat to mist’
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3. Whither Australia? Prospects for a
Maritime Ethos in 21st Century
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Unknown if future generations will
discover a maritime gene
But Australia of 2015 is different
from Australia of 1915 and future
will be different again
1985-2010: overthrow of Deakenite
‘Settlement Australia’ in favour of
socio-economic reform involving
embrace of globalisation and free
markets
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1985-2010: Australia’s
Economic Transformation
– 1985-2010: economy tripled in size; per capita GDP
grew by 182%
– G20 member: twelfth largest economy and the
seventh most developed in the world
– 2008: dollar became the sixth most traded currency
– 2010-12: changing demography – Chinese overtook
British as main source of permanent residents
– Australia’s economic transformation underpinned by
freedom of maritime commons
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Strategic Transformation:
Implications of Rising Asia
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Economic power shift from West to
East will make Australia a strategic
anchor adjacent to the Indo-Pacific arc
Eight of world’s 10 busiest container
ports in Asia-Pacific;
30% of world trade transits South China
Sea; 66% of oil through Indo-Pacific
Global seaborne trade will double by
2035; energy increase by over 50 per cent
We must be alliance-focused, globallysensitive and regionally-oriented and
craft a maritime strategy that meets an
Asian economic future
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Boom or Bust? Australia’s Asian
Challenge
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Australian prosperity fuelled by Asian
economies but 2012 Asia White Paper
has little maritime focus
But contains a striking phrase
‘As the global centre of gravity shifts to
our region, the tyranny of distance is
being replaced by the prospects of
proximity’ – Australia in the Asian
Century White Paper (Oct 2012)
Historically, ‘prospects of proximity’
with Asia have always outweighed by
‘perils of proximity’ (most notably in
defence policy)
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Australia in 2015: Poised
Between Past and Future
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Unclear if ‘prospects of proximity’ will be
seized
2010-15: crisis of political leadership
and faltering economic competitiveness
Country must overcome debt; decline of
responsive government and trivial public
policy
Choice of futures: a forward, maritimefocused ‘greater Australia’, or a
repackaged ‘Australian Settlement’
seeking past comforts
Challenge is to re-imagine the country
for the new century
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Re-imagining Australia in the 21st
Century
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Australia must be re-conceptualised as an
‘archipelago of population islands’
‘While Australia does a great impression
of being a continental nation, it is in fact
an efficiently organised and arable
archipelago’ – Asher Judah, The
Australian Century (2014)
Five primary population islands (Sydney,
Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide)
Represent an archipelagic ‘urban aorta’
generating 65 per cent of economic
activity
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‘Looking Outward’: Future Engines of
Prosperity require Vision
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Australia must exploit economic rise of
cosmopolitan global middle class
(especially in Asia)
By 2030 global middle class will number
4.9b (tripling from 1.8b in 2015)
Demand will be fuelled by Asian
urbanisation, energy and education
Must invest in political vision: expert
educational sector; larger skilled
immigration; tax reform and competitive
labour market attuned to exports to global
middle class
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Looking Outward: Developing a
Supporting Maritime Narrative
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Narrative must explain surrounding seas as
highways to prosperous future not as moat
defences of vanished ages
The most important outstanding task is for a
narrative to be developed that explains the
importance to the safety and security of
Australia’s maritime domains to the nation’s
broader national security and economic wellbeing. These matters have not been wellarticulated to the broader public’ – Brett
Biddington, Understanding Australia’s Maritime Domain
in a Networked World (Kokoda, November 2014)
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New Generation Components of a
Maritime Narrative
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‘Conversation with the Country’: on how
future is outward and maritime (strategic
communications and educational strategy)
A well-funded National Institute for
Maritime Affairs: to focus on geopolitical
nexus between economic power, national
security and maritime awareness
ADF Doctrine, Concepts and Development
Centre: for strategic appreciation of sea
power (beyond single service issues)
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The Logic of Maritime Consciousness
 The
Willie Sutton logic :
why do you rob banks? –
because that’s where the
money is
 Why does Australia need a
national maritime
consciousness? – because
that’s where the prosperity
is
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Conclusion
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Conceptual Recap
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Lack of a maritime consciousness has
been most striking paradox of
Australian history
Refocusing Australia’s national culture
to enhance oceanic-awareness is a key
to future maturity
Will not be easy; it is a generational
task requiring leadership and vision
But to ensure future prosperity and
security, a 21st century Australian
maritime narrative must be developed
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Sea-Seekers: Overcoming the Legacy
of the Fatal Shore
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Australia is at the dawn, not the noon, of its
destiny
The future awaits but it is a rendezvous that
must be seized
We must overcome A. D. Hope’s image of
Australians as ‘second hand Europeans
[who] pullulate timidly on the edge of alien
shores’
We must become the bold visionaries of
Roderic Quinn’s maritime poem , ‘The SeaSeekers’ – who on encountering the ocean –
rejoiced and ‘shouted to the Morning Seas’
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Questions
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