Australia: Establishing an Identity

For the better part of two centuries, Australian elections have turned on such burning questions as the “kangaroo menace” or the cost of wool on the world market. Not so this week. As some 6,000,000 Australians go to the polls in the first federal election since 1963, no less an issue than Australia’s role in Asia is at stake.

A slambang, month-long campaign between Liberal Prime Minister Harold Holt and his opposition challenger, Labor Party Leader Arthur Calwell, has focused the country’s attention on the key question of Australia’s participation in Viet Nam. Holt, 58, has committed Australian draftees to the war and Australian prestige to the containment of Asian Communism. Calwell, 70, demands an end to the draft, a pullback from Viet Nam and the votes of “600,000 Australian mothers whose boys could die or be wounded in the long, cruel, dirty war.”

New Markets. Australia’s awakening to its position in Asia was slow. Most Aussies tended to be more concerned with the Davis Cup than with diplomacy. “Overseas” was that vague, vast stretch of land beyond the Great Barrier Reef, and Britain took care of it.

Then, after World War II when American — not British — naval strength saved Australia from the threat of Japanese invasion, Aussies slowly began to come up from down under. In 1939, Canberra could boast only one “overseas” diplomatic mission; today, it has more than 50 — almost a third of them located in Asia.

Britain’s changing role in world affairs, as much as anything, has been responsible for the Australian awakening. During the Malaya emergency, and later during the Malaysian-Indonesian konfrontasi, when Britain’s “thin red line” was stretched near the breaking point, Australia sent troops to stem Communist guerrilla activity. Britain’s first moves to enter the Common Mar ket also turned Australia toward Asia:

the terms of British membership might have cut off Australia’s biggest export market. Since then, Japan has become a major outlet for Australian wool, and Red China a major purchaser of Australian wheat. Australia was a leader in founding the Asia Development Bank (which will elect its first president and board of directors this week in Tokyo), and has broadly liberalized its immigration laws to permit easier Asian entry into a society that was once nearly 100% British. At present, more than 14,000 Asian students are studying at Australian universities.

Pacific Man. Prime Minister Holt has done much to sensitize Australia to its new-found Asian responsibilities, since he came to power ten months ago. Holt visited Lyndon Johnson in Washington, dropped in on Australia’s 4,500 troops in South Viet Nam, conferred with Saigon’s Premier Nguyen Cao Ky. At the Manila conference last month, Holt was vigorously visible everywhere. Before that, Johnson helped Holt’s election chances mightily with his own brief visit to Sydney.

Harold Holt is a Pacific man. Indeed, his favorite pastime is diving under the Pacific with snorkel and wet suit to spear fish or enjoy the submarine scenery. Often enough, that scenery includes one or another of his sheilas-in-law—the beautiful wives of his three stepsons. The Sydney-born son of a theatrical manager, Holt was a prize essayist and cricketer at Melbourne University, came to the Australian House of Representatives in 1935 and became a faithful supporter of Sir Robert Menzies during World War II. Like most Australians, Holt enlisted at the outbreak of the war—the only Cabinet Minister, he claims, ever to be promoted to private —but was called back after Menzies became Prime Minister in 1939. First as Labor Minister and later as Treasurer, he became Menzies’ most trusted lieutenant—and then his heir apparent.

In a hard-hitting campaign that has taken him all the way from the Snowy Mountains to the pubs of Woolloomooloo, Holt has emphasized Australia’s new role in Asia. “At times,” he says with deep certainty, “we have been told that we are going American, just as once we were told we were clinging to the skirts of Downing Street. In fact, we’re going Australian. We are realizing the importance of being Australian—to play a not-insignificant part in what is happening in this area. It is a welcome opportunity for Australia to establish her own identity.”