Luke Hickey: ... Assistant Director General of the Engagement Branch here at the Library. I'd like to begin by acknowledging Australia's First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and the custodians of the land that we're on today here on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. Give my respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Thank you for attending this event today. As I said, we are coming to you from Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, for both those of you who have joined us here in the theatre and also for those of you who are watching online. I'd like to take this opportunity just to remind everyone that now's a really good time to turn your mobile phones off or onto silent to make sure we don't interrupt today's proceedings.

It's great to be able to open this afternoon's presentation, which is Defending Australian Territory by Associate Professor Andrew Carr, an honorary 2025 National Library of Australia Fellow.

And it's great just talking with Andrew about some of his personal connection to the Library as well.Welcome to his parents, Sylvia and Brian, who also worked here at the Library too, so it's great to have that connection. Not a requirement for undertaking a fellowship though should point out.

Our Distinguished Fellowships programme does support researchers to make intensive use of our National Library's rich collections, and we do those through residencies of up to 3 months.

As I said, Andrew is a senior lecturer in the Strategic and Defence Centres study centre at the Australian National University, and his research understandably focuses on that strategy and Australian defence policy.

In his presentation today, Andrew's going to examine the question of how do you defend a country as large and diverse as Australia? Andrew has used his fellowship and his extensive studies prior to that to explore the personal papers of Australian politicians, as well as defence and diplomatic officials of the 1960s and 1980s, in order to understand how they thought about protecting the continent. Please join me in welcoming Andrew Carr.

Andrew Carr: Well, good afternoon and thank you all so much for coming along today. Can I also begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people as the traditional custodians on whose land we meet and paying my respects. Can I also give great thanks to the National Library for the honour of the fellowship and to the Library staff for the extraordinarily generous welcome that they have provided and support over the 6 weeks that I have been here for it.

As Luke mentioned, both my parents working here at the Library many, many years ago, it has felt like something of a homecoming to be back at the National Library. And though my topic is one that you might more normally associate with the Australian War Memorial, as I want to argue before you today, the story of Australian defence is far more than just a story of service and sacrifice overseas in uniform, as essential and honourable and important as that history is that the War Memorial keeps sacrosanct, the story of Australian defence policy is a much wider story. It's a story of Australians, our culture, our literature, our understanding of our country and our ways of life. It's a story that the National Library is so much the custodian of and for that reason it was very important to me to come here and work through their archives so I could understand that broader account of Australian history.

What I wanted to provide to you today is a sneak peek into a new book that I'm writing to be published with Cambridge University Press titled 'Defending Terra Australis', and it's a book that attempts to say how have Australians thought about the defence of their continent, from the British invasion in 1788 all the way through to the current day, and how have we thought about that task relative to the many other things that we might like to use our military and armed forces to be able to achieve?

The motivation for this book was I think summed up in an interview that Arthur Tang gave with Neville Meany. Arthur Tang had been the Secretary of the Department of Defence in the 1970s. Before that the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs. Neville Meany, our great historian of the early federation era. And Tang observes to Meany that quote knowledge of history is vital for developing ideas as to how best protect one's interests in the rest of the world, but it has to be the right history given Australia's limited size role in the world and influence. Tang was someone who worried that too many of the politicians of his generation in the 1970s and the 1960s were focused on British and American history. That they drew on these great powers and their accounts and stories and therefore struggled to understand the distinctiveness of Australia's own experience.

I think Tang is absolutely right, but we can take it one step further because as Tang admits in this same interview with Meany, he himself was not someone who knew a lot of Australian history. In fact, I want to put to you that a lot of us don't know a lot of Australian history. Because as we look around a troubled world, as we try to explain what Australia is doing today, as we try to cast back into our history and explain how we have gotten here, I fear a lot of myths have taken hold.

If you were to ask most Australians how does Australia defend itself, they would probably take a picture like this one as an example. Here you have Minister for Defence, a young Kim Beazley laughing it up with the US Secretary of Defence, Caspar Weinberger in 1988. To most Australians, the story of our security is a story of this kind of mateship, of going overseas in search of our security, of working with our great and powerful friends. And when they ask us to jump, the only question we provide in response is how high.

This is the common account of how we understand our security not only amongst the general public and some of the political leaders, but particularly as well amongst our scholars too. Indeed, it's remarkable as you work through the broader literature on Australian defence policy that the great debate is not what the history is, but whether this is a history of mateship that should be celebrated or condemned.

The follower kinship school of a more conservative and establishment orientation argue that Australia's service overseas is a reflection of our values, of our contribution to the great western liberal projects, of institutions and the rule of law, of humanitarian assistance wherever it is needed around the world.

While the follower dependent school in our cultural and literary establishments argue by contrast that this is a shameful history. That this is an example of a country that does not understand its own interests, that fails to push back against its larger imperial powers and has followed in their wake.

And yet I have chosen this picture deliberately because as Kim Beazley and Caspar Weinberger are laughing it up at this moment in 1988, they were attempting to restore a relationship. Just two years earlier they had been in a meeting in San Francisco screaming at each other, screaming at each other so loudly that the Marines stationed outside the door had to come in and check that these two powerful men were not at each other's throats.

The cause of their dispute was Australian defence policy. And indeed much of the Reagan administration's engagement with Australia over the 1980s was a difficult period of engagement. The Fraser government had repeatedly told Reagan and his party that they were not to ask Australia to send forces to the Middle East that we were to focus on our own independent operations. Fraser had lectured the Americans on how they should be operating within the Indian Ocean and their engagements with the Soviets there. The Hawke government on coming to office in 1983 had set out to review the alliance had proposed a much more independent and distinctive Australian foreign policy and their lurking in the background of all of these negotiations was the example of New Zealand, those useful consonants in ANZUS who had been suspended in the mid 1980s over their refusal to allow American nuclear armed or nuclear powered ships to come into their waters.

So if the 1980s does not fit that follower model that is so commonly proposed for Australia, you might be thinking, well, certainly if we go back in history, we find Australians who just loyally follow where the British or Americans might take us.

You might point to a man such as Sir Robert Menzies. And it is certainly true that on the 3rd of September, 1939, he spoke before the Australian people and announced that it was his melancholy duty to say that because Great Britain was at war, Australia was also at war. And then he waited for 3 long months. Menzies waited for 3 long months, Menzies refused to send Australian forces to Europe for 3 long months. The British begged and pleaded for Australia to contribute only for Menzies to cable back that quote, it was useless even to discuss sending an expeditionary force and that on his reading of the Australian people, any suggestion at present of sending troops out of Australia would be widely condemned. Menzies was worried about Nazi Germany, but more so he was worried about Imperial Japan and until he had a reassurance from the British that they would provide the necessary security for this continent that he believed viable, he would not send our forces overseas.

We rightly celebrate, as the Prime Minister Albanese recently did, John Curtin's efforts to bring the ninth division back to Australian shores, and yet by that point the vast majority of Australian forces, save some pilots, were largely based back here in Australia by the time of the Japanese attacks.

Now much of this history when we heard and moved towards the purely military is understood, but when we seek to broaden our aperture beyond just these stories of military actions, when we move particularly to defence policies in time of peace and some of the diplomatic wranglings, it is often obscured because our common story of Australia as a follower is based on an account of history that is predominantly military history rather than defence history. It is a story that jumps from the Boer War and our contributions there through the first and second World War through Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.

And these are important, honourable, significant parts of our history, but if I am to use an analogy, it is attempting to tell Australian history only through such records is a little bit like trying to understand if someone is a good driver by only looking at police official records of their car accidents. Yes, those records are important. Yes, they will tell you a lot. Yes, they signify sound and fury and blinding lights, but that's not the complete story. There's so much more that occurs. The everyday passages, the careful actions, the deliberate choices that avoid conflict, that avoid harm, these can be obscured when we only turn our head towards the sirens.

If you look beyond the significant archives of the Australian War Memorial and take a broader view of Australian defence history, I believe a different and more richer story of Australian defence policy can be told. One that for many years has not been available because it was classified or simply not well understood. There is a long history I want to show before you today of thinking about how to defend a continent like ours.

A history particularly that has been very successful at avoiding conflicts. And a history that now if we start to look at our strategic guidance papers, if we start to look at the force structures and the types of forces that Australians have purchased and particularly at the budgets that they have dedicated to those tasks, we can now start to see a broader story that is often obscured.

And in telling this story, I want to start with a point that is in some ways so obvious that it has been taken for granted in our accounts of Australia and yet I do not believe we can understand Australian history without locating it at the front and centre.

For most of Australia's history, we have been among, if not the most secure nation in the world. We are the only nation to claim an entire continent from ourselves and thanks to the luck of geography, we are far from many of the other centres of conflict. For this reason, Australians have had the luxury of choosing whether to contribute to global conflicts, choosing how they might engage and work with great and powerful friends rather than having to face difficult trade-offs about protecting their own sovereign borders against local adversaries.

But at times such threats have emerged. In the 1880s, in the early 1940s, in the early 1960s and again potentially today and in those periods a very different pattern of Australian defence policy emerges. A pattern where Australians pull back our focus, concentrate on our territorial defence and open our wallets to spend much more on our armed forces.

When our country is secure, as we have been from so much of our history, we have been happy to contribute overseas, but when we are insecure, we pull right back.
So this is the broad argument of the book that I'm currently providing writing 'Defending Terra Australis'. Australia, I would argue before you is there's not a country that goes overseas in search of its security, but a country that goes overseas when it is secure.

This is an argument that I try to trace in the book across the broad five eras of Australian defence policy from Imperial Defence from 1788 in the first invasion, all the way through to the present day. And I don't claim it as an explanation that explains every single action or choice or attitude or idea of Australians. We're too multifaceted a democracy, there's too much individual variation for that. Nor am I claiming there is some distinctive secret document that I've pulled from the archives that reveals such hidden plans. Instead, I put this argument before you as a superior way of understanding our country as opposed to the dominant follower kinship or follower dependence explanations.

Today in the time I have left, I want to touch on just two periods, two periods that I've been able to pull some records from here at the National Library. The Forward Defence eras of the 1950s and 60s, which is particularly seen as a period where Australia was dependent and following its great and powerful friends and the Defence of Australia period of the 1970s and the 1980s, which I believe is quite poorly understood.

It would however be remiss of me not to touch on the frontier wars. Thanks to a generation of recent military historians and First Nations scholars, we are getting a better sense of Australia's frontier wars and the fight for this continent. And what they are revealing is a story that is not some predetermined passage or march of empire based on technology or racial superiority, but rather a conflict of genuine warfare, of strategy and tactics of ingenuity on both sides and particularly the agency of our First Nations people. And I think one of the great contributions of trying to tell a broader story of Australian defence, that is not just about our overseas military contributions, is that we can bring in the story of the First Nations people because the first people to defend this continent were our First Nations people. And there is still much from their story and their legacy that we can learn from and that we are seeing the ramifications of through to this day.

So this is a story that I recount in the book and I won't go into it any further today, but I do just want to highlight the significance of it and to try and connect the story I'm telling here all the way through back and recognise that history as well.

Instead, I want to jump forward to the period of Forward Defence following the end of the Second World War. When Robert Menzies was elected in December of 1949, the central question for Australia, as historians have clearly recounted, was how we would respond to the outbreak of the third world war. It was seen as imminent, it was expected at any moment against the communist monolith. And the debate of our military leaders, as has been widely recounted, was whether we sent forces to the Middle East in order to alleviate the British there so that they could concentrate on Europe or whether we sent forces to the Malay Peninsula in order to make a desperate last stand against another communist horde moving south.

And yet thanks to records declassified in 2009, we can now see that our military chiefs advised that actually these two options were kind of supplemented by the first and core priority, because back in 1948 the Chifley government had authorised negotiations with the British and with the Kiwis and the outcome of those negotiations was that dominions would first and foremost focus on their home territory defence. Our sea power and our air power was to be kept close to home. The question was whether surplus forces, particularly the army could be sent overseas to the Middle East or to Malaya. Debate raged for a few years, but very soon after in 1952 we decided to concentrate on Malaya because it was that much more important to Australia's core security.

The history of this era's defined in particular by conflicts such as Korea breaking out in June of 1950, seen initially as a spur towards a third world war and yet the government was hesitant. Menzies at first refused to deploy Australian forces from our continent, sending only those who were already stationed in Japan. And ultimately it was Arthur Fadden, the acting prime minister who made the announcement that Australia would deploy forces beyond that. Because Korea in many ways is the exception to the story commonly told about the era of Forward Defence.

Sometimes in the broader public debates you'll see people talk about forward defence as a synonym for expeditionary operations as simply about sending forces overseas wherever our great and powerful ask us to do so. But this, as the great official historian Peter Edwards has conclusively shown, is a mistake. Forward defence other than the example of Korea from 1950 to 1953 was a tightly concentrated policy focused on Southeast Asia in particular. The goal of forward defence was not mere insurance buying was not about simply demonstrating our [unclear] to our great and powerful friends. It was about getting our great and powerful friends to pay for our security.

Southeast Asia was not a priority theatre for London or for Washington and our government set out in the 1950s to persuade them that this was an area where they needed to contribute forces because Australia did not want to spend vast amounts on our defence, not given the horrors and the harm of the Second World War. We wanted to rebuild at home. And so we turned to London and to Washington and tried to persuade them that this was a theatre where they should spend their resources on behalf of our security.

Robert Menzies, the man standing in the middle, there was a master at what I described in the book as a two level game. On one level he would profess, as many prime ministers have, loyalty and support to allies and partners around the world. Yet privately when we look at his policy and budgetary decisions, he pursued distinctive Australian strategic interests trying to keep our defence spending as low as possible and recognising the significant value of our territorial defence.

In order to do that, in order to get London and Washington to buy in, he knew that he had to make statements that engaged them and reverberated with them. And so in one of the fantastic collections here at the Library stored through Trove, we find this statement of April 1955 and I want to provide it to you because I think it is quite a remarkable statement for any national leader to provide and it stands as an outlier. No other example have I found in the Australian archives as provided by an Australian prime minister that suggests a comment of such lines. Menzies declared that quote, it would be a sorry day for the security of Australia if we were driven to defend ourselves on our own soil. Hence, if Malaya is vital to our defence, more vital, properly understood than some point on the Australian coast, then we must make Malayan defence, in a real sense, our business.

Menzies argument was based on the logic that it was incredibly unlikely that the Russians or the Chinese would seek to directly attack Australia, but by moving forward and focusing on Southeast Asia, we could provide that bulwark against the potential attack. And his focus through these initiatives and many others was about getting London and Washington to buy in and support a last stand effort on a particular point of geography in Southeast Asia.

That appealed to the British to a degree, although they by this point were already starting to look east of Suez. It did not appeal to the Americans whose focus was much more on having mobility and the growing use of nuclear weapons to provide for their basic security.

Yet as for much of what Menzies did, his rhetoric and his policy choices were not aligned and quite deliberately so. Seven years later in 1962, Menzies was put to the test of whether he actually saw the defence of some point in Malaya as more important than the Australian continent. And here a remarkably different approach comes out to that which he had proposed. In 1962, the Indonesians had successfully seen the Dutch off and they had left their colony of West New Guinea. Now, Australia found itself in a world where we had a land border with Indonesia thanks to our colonial hold of East New Guinea. And the Indonesians began to now turn their attention to challenging the British presence in Malaya and challenging the creation of an independent federation of Malaysia. In particular, the Indonesian government under President Sukarno was looking to claim the entire island of Borneo. To that end, they launched cross border raids, they would launch raids into the Malaysian peninsula. They would support a coup attempt in Brune.

This period from 1963 to 1966, Konfrontasi as the Indonesians described, it was the height of the Cold War for Australia as important as the Cuban Missile Crisis or before that the Berlin Crisis or any number of European or North Atlantic crises were in Australian policy circles. It is Konfrontasi in particular that defined our Cold War. This was a moment when we feared that we were getting into a conflict with a communist backed neighbour, one who could take the fight not only into our own territory in East New Guinea, which we said under Menzies we would defend like our own, but potentially seeing attacks onto the Australian continent as well.

Konfrontasi was a conflict that involved the entire Australian armed forces. Our naval warships sailed through Malacco and around the island of Borneo seeking to interdict Indonesian efforts to move and island hop and thereby conduct their insurgency campaign. Our air forces operated in Darwin and in Butterworth in Malaysia, not only providing air defence to our country, but seeking to provide the option of retaliatory strikes should the war escalate. And our army, as this picture helps to indicate, was involved in this extensive series of border patrols through Borneo and East New Guinea, seeking to not only repel Indonesian raids across the border into Indonesian land or Australian territory, but as well to engage the Indonesians on their own side of the border. To recapture the initiative and prevent the harm that they might try to undertake.

Konfrontasi is not a story that is very well known and yet it is a story that occupied the daily concentration of the Menzies government. Donald Horn in his famous book, 'The Lucky Country' in 1964 does not even mention the nature of this conflict, and yet it occupied Barwick the foreign minister and Menzies regularly and consistently, because Australia's policy was to try and avoid conflict with Indonesia to try and avoid the escalation through to war. So we maintained our diplomatic relationship with the Indonesians. We sought to calm tensions there even as our forces were engaged in border spats in Borneo and East New Guinea. And we worked with the British providing that second strike potential if it would necessarily come. But at the same time, seeking to restrain the aggressive intent that London sometimes provided in this conflict. This was the most extreme and significant crisis of the Cold War for Australia.

And in late 1964, after a series of Indonesian raids onto the Malay Peninsula by boat and by air, Robert Menzie spoke before the Australian parliament and he announced an overhaul of the nature of Australia's armed forces. Our defence budget, which had jumped initially following career and the fear of that third world war had steadily declined across the 50s. Now it would jump back up to 16% of the government's annual budget and commonwealth outlays.

We were already purchasing the Oberon submarines. Now we would buy some more. We would buy 3 guided missile destroyers in order to better protect our waterways and we will buy the dash out mirage fighters and surveillance planes to understand the waters to our north. And perhaps most importantly, Menzie said we would now buy 24 of the American F1 11 strike fighter planes. Why? In an interview that he gave near at this time but has only been released in the last few years, he said the guidance from his military advisors was clear. Quote, we needed something that could go to Jakarta and back and we made clear to the Indonesians what we were buying and why we were buying it as well.

These were not forces designed to work with our coalition partners. These were not forces designed to be sent overseas. These were forces designed for the defence of Australian territory. And while it did not occupy a lot of attention at the time, perhaps most significantly, Robert Menzies also introduced what he described as selective compulsory service. He needed a vast expansion of the army and the infamous draught of Vietnam did not come about because of the Vietnam War. It came about because of Konfrontasi and the need and fear that we had to defend the Australian continent.

In 1965, the conflict and potential conflicts with Konfrontasi started to stalemate. The Indonesians came to see that they could not push the British out as they had done the Dutch. Australian diplomacy was working. And so we were able to start to turn our attention more towards the potential in Vietnam.

In August of 1965, there was a coup in Indonesia or an attempted coup, and very soon a young military general named [unclear] would take power. The threat had started to pass and so Australian attention could shift towards Vietnam.

By 1966, we had two battalions and a third in 1968. But this was not a conflict that is popularly understood, we were asked or required to attend. This was not other people's war. This was something that we saw as valuable for our own security. And yet when you look at the records, it is distinctive how little the Australian cabinet paid attention to the potential conflict and the current conflict in Vietnam that compared to what they did with Konfrontasi, a conflict that focused on and threatened the Australian continent.

Defence spending across the late 1960s would then start to drop from its highs of 16% of the government's annual outlays down to around 12%. If I switched to using gross domestic products or beloveds in our current debates, the percent of GDP where the Americans were spending 10% of their GDP per year on defence, Australia was spending at 4% during the height of Konfrontasi and down to 2.1% by the end of the Vietnam War or our participation in it.

Australia, during this period, though we were working and desperate to get the support and attention of our great and powerful friends was clearly operating by an underlying hierarchy, protect the continent first and then go overseas. When we were secure. On the 26th of January, 1966, Robert Menzies retired and it was left to his coalition successors to try to understand how these policies might play out because by the late 1960s it was clear that both the British and the Americans were starting to step back from Southeast Asia. They did not see it as a priority theatre as Australia had so long worked for. And the Australians started to agree, the threat was clearly starting to dissipate.

And yet this was a great age of confusion. We were uncertain about the timing and choices of our allies, even though the direction of their policy stepping back from the region east of Suez under the British and Nixon's Guam doctrine for the Americans was clear on the broader trend lines. The region was changing. We were starting to understand what was occurring as much more nationalist movements rather than communist ones. And Australia itself was changing too, moving away from that white Australia tradition that Menzies had upheld.

But John Gorton pictured here on screen smoking was not a prime minister who, as much as he could see some of these trends, had the political support to be able to speak to the public clearly about them, nor would his successors.

William McMahon who takes over in 1971, was a man who in many ways is the father of the defence of Australia policy. But he lacked the political courage to be clear to the Australian public that this is what was occurring. As you can see here is a picture of the 1972 Australian Defence Review that sets out the purpose of our defence forces is for the protection of the Australian continent. We did not know how this was to be achieved, but this was the focus. It was, the minister had asked for, intended to be a white paper, but at the last moment, McMahon lost his political courage and had the department release it under their own name as simply a statement of the departmental views rather than as a government white paper. So here in March of 1972, we see the defence of Australia policy clearly taking shape.

It was under Whitlam given that formal explicit priority. He reformed our defence structures. He helped to create the Australian Defence Force beginning in 1976. This was the first time we had had a defence force singular that included all of the services. And the name itself I think is telling, if so easily overlooked: the Australian Defence Force. We needed it as a cohesive force because of the scale of the challenge of trying to defend a continent such as ours.

What is distinctive if you look through the defence records of this era is that so much of it is designed around the challenge of not having a threat in order to work against. Operating in the absence of a threat is a problem but is a good problem. But it is still a problem itself. And so much of the language of the 1970s and the 1980s around defence, language that comes through to us today: self-reliance, core force, expansion, base warning time. These concepts that seem omnipresent in our defence debates are themselves a product of an environment that is so secure that Australians had to turn to hypotheticals and to grander concepts in order to create a adherence and a logic for our own defence forces.

Our aim, particularly through ideas, such as the expansion base and the core force, was to keep our defence spending low. We would if the alarms went off, expand the A DF like a bubble, but we would not spend a dollar more than we needed to given the absence of particular threats.

Such policies would continue receiving their third bipartisan sign of agreement under Malcolm Fraser. Under Fraser, there was not a lot of significant progress on many of these key themes. The department fell into great bickering and Fraser and his Minister for Defence Killen was unable to provide the security and guidance that was often supported and required.

But they insisted on one key principle. Australian forces would be designed first for the use and protection of the continent and then could be deployed further overseas but not the other way around. We would not acquire forces to work with coalition partners and hope they could help back at home.

And I want to provide this photo as quite significant, not only with the Malcolm Fraser there, but Sir Arthur Tang who continues through the 1970s supporting these ideas, but also the director here of the National Library, George Chandler, the man on the left there.

And so as we now turn towards the story of people such as Kim Beazley and Paul Dibb in the 1980s, what they were about with their famous defence of Australia White paper was not so much a shift in Australian defence policy, but rather a turn to the question of how it might be undertaken. That was what Paul Dibb and his team in the Dibb Report provided that analysis of how you might think about defending a continent as large as ours. And yet given the broader tensions of this period, it was still a difficult question given the myths and stories so oftenly told about Australia, the misconceptions held by our allies. Emphasising that we were doing this and would look to support our allies rather than being either or was still a difficult challenge.

And indeed this story would carry on through to the 2000s. John Howard spent about 8 months working through the 2000 defence white paper, and though he was a man who wanted to focus much more on working with our allies, who was shaped by our experience in East Timor in 1999, it is very clear when you read the white paper that it was the centred around ensuring first and foremost the defence of Australia framework. Those concentric circles starting with the continent and then moving out is at the heart of the 2000 defence white paper. And across the 2003, 2005 and 2007 defence updates.

Though the war on terror raged, the Howard government did not move away from that fundamental framework. Australian forces were still designed primarily for the defence of our continent and then would contribute where and as useful. And this was a period of utmost security. So even when the Minister for Defence, Robert Hill went on 7:30 and tried to promote the idea of an alternate approach, the Howard government retained that essential framework.

So today I have provided only a few short snippets in what I hope to tell through my book. 'Defending Terra Australis' is a broader story of Australian history. It is not a story that tries to downplay or ignore the contribution and service and sacrifice of those who have worked overseas on behalf of the country, but rather a story that also seeks to include and give equal weight to our actions in peace time, to our choices around the design of our forces, to our defence budgets and to the strategic guidance papers that are starting to be declassified and revealed.

So there is that common story of Australia as a follower, and I admit it has some intuitive appeal. We do see this long consistent record and our political leaders like to play up that history, that centenary of mateship. But I'd argue when we look at the broader history of this nation, a different story emerges. One where time and again, Australian officials have recognised their distinctive interests.

Therefore, rather than being a follower, I would argue that Australian defence history is best understood as a hierarchy of interests. The security of our continent comes first and for most of our history we have had the good blessing of being secure, a remarkable security in a world so often in turmoil.

This security has given us the luxury and the opportunity to send forces overseas without putting at risk our core security. But we have recognised the demands of our continent and at times where we have felt our continent was potentially at risk, we have pulled back and we have focused and we have taken those choices that are most important, how much we spend on our fence and what kind of forces we acquire and how we organise them primarily around the needs of defending our continent.
So to start to bring this presentation to a conclusion there is I would want to show to you today a long rich history of thinking about defending our continent and defending Terra Australis is no easy problem indeed. We are both an island and a continent. We are most of us living here in the comfortable southeast boomerang belt and yet most of the threat are likely to emerge from the north and northwest that is sparsely populated. And we are a country that is at once somewhat anxious about changes in our region and yet extraordinarily frugal when it comes to spending money on our defence forces.

And so you might be wondering, well, where does Australia fit in today? Well, if we are to map our recent strategic guidance papers, we see a story of Australia starting to be concerned about our territorial defence. The 2013 creation of the Indo-Pacific still covers a vast area of landmass, and yet it says that please don't ask us back to the Middle East. We've started to then pull in and focus, across the 2016 white paper, the 2020 defence strategic update under the Morrison government, which insists that our focus will have a tight emphasis on our immediate region, and then the 2023 DSR and 2024 National Defence Strategy.

Unfortunately, no prime Minister has stood before the Australian people and said that this is the pattern, and yet when you mark it on the map, the distinctive and clear trajectory can be seen.

I think understanding this history and understanding our present moment kind of requires us to look at the broader story of Australia. While we see that pattern of returning and focusing on the Australian continent, it is not a radical shift or a radical change away from our history of followership. What we are seeing in choices such as AUKUS and our engagement with the Americans is not some fey followership that is confused about our relationship, but it is rather an example of our quiet but enduring strategic tradition.

Telling the story of Australian defence is more than just a story of our military choices. It is the story of all of us of our changing culture, our demographics, migration, our economy and key individuals like Arthur Tang, as well as our politics. And it is a story that is told just as much here at the National Library of Australia as it is at any of our other institutions.

And so can I end by thanking again the National Library for the honour of a and the opportunity to help to tell that story. Thank you very much.

Luke Hickey: Thank you Andrew. We do have some time for questions now from the audience. As we are recording the presentation ask if you do have a question to put your hand up. We have a microphone that will come to you for your questions for Andrew. So questions from the audience. Back here.

Audience member 1: Hi Andrew, that was fascinating. Thank you very much for an excellent presentation. I was just wondering if you looked at any of the diplomats personal papers we have in the collection and if you could share some of your thoughts on those.

Andrew Carr: So I started to look through some, although given the nature of my work, I haven't gone to a lot of their primary sources. It's fantastic to see we're starting to see a lot more of their memoirs being published and their accounts and records because I think while it's very easy to talk about war and conflict, so much of Australian security is tied to the achievements of our diplomats. And they've been remarkably successful in so many ways in preventing us from falling into conflict. And so I'd really love to do another project that worked on say the work of Barwick and others around Konfrontasi because I think it's just poorly understood and yet it's such a remarkably rich story for in Australian history. Thank you.

Audience member 2: As an interstate visitor, I thank you for a very lucid and informative account of Australia's defence policy. But I have a question to ask, behind the policy is also the necessary equipment and technology. Can you give me some insight as a rather provocative recent decision about AUKUS, which you just recently mentioned of how that actually came about when Australia seemed destined to buy a number of Japanese, I think Japanese, if my memory serves me correct, submarines and then foisted, well perhaps that's not quite the correct word, but out of nowhere came this decision, the AUKUS decision to go ahead. And that seems to me to have a very profound effect upon our defence policy. Although you may quite rightly argue that it sits perfectly well within that spectrum. Thank you.

Andrew Carr: Thank you. Look, it is a really important issue to discuss and in making my argument that Australian leaders have had a clear hierarchy of interest I'm not saying they get every decision right. I'm not saying they always understand all of the issues involved. I'm not saying that they have always had that clear sense, but I think can tell a very distinctive story. If we look particularly at nuclear submarines, Australia has looked and debated the value of these submarines since the 1950s when they were first potentially available because in part of our unique geography. Australia has a very shallow continental shelf to the north and very few good ports. So if we are to protect our submarines, we need to get them out into deep water as quickly as possible. And the only good ports for that are down in places such as Sydney and Fremantle on the east and west coast.

And so compared to say the Japanese or the British or the Scandinavians, Australia has to have much larger submarines and they have to spend many days transiting north wherever they might like to go in order to just be useful to us. So our geography drives us towards particular technological choices. For a long time we've looked and preferred to have conventionally powered submarines, but nuclear has always made sense given our geography. I think AUKUS to me is a great example of the power of some of those concepts in the 70s and the 80s living on and perhaps an unfortunately so and not so well understood.

I think it's a great example of Australia trying to have a capability edge against what's going on in our region. That as a country that was incredibly secure and in country that for most of the second half of the 20th century was incredibly rich compared to our region, we could afford our security by just buying some of the latest and best military equipment as a way of ensuring we would always be overmatched against a potential adversary, let's say Indonesia.

And I think that logic is sometimes flowing through and traced to AUKUS, but I don't think it quite makes sense against an adversary as large potentially as China. So I have no inside information about how that decision was made or what was involved in it, but I think just looking at our geography and our history helps to better explain and perhaps to justify it, even if we might have a whole range of other questions about the nature of the purchase, its timing, cost, and other things as well.

Audience member 2: Thank you for what appears to be a very sensible answer.

Luke Hickey: Any other questions? Yep.

Audience member 3: Just if I may. Thanks for a very informative presentation, Professor Carr. I did have one quick question. Did you find anything in your studies about what the thinking was in defence policy for Australia's external territories in the 50s, 60s and 70s, particularly Papua New Guinea before Independence and Christmas Island and that sort of thing? Did they have a forward place in the thinking at all?

Andrew Carr: Yeah, thank you. Look, it's fascinating to see the debates going on around our engagement with PNG at the moment and potentially signing a treaty there. There's a great book by Hunt called 'Australia's Northern Shield', and he shows this long history of Australians really concentrating on those islands to the north and recognising that if they were held and secure that it would then be almost impossible for anyone to be able to invade the Australian continent.

Australia is such a big continent as its own distinctive island. You need to be able to have a base somewhere nearby if you are to meaningfully harm Australia, otherwise you can do what best what the Japanese did and lob a few shells into Sydney and Newcastle or bombing Darwin. And so those have always been a vital part. And early on after the First World War, Australia claimed colonial possession of East New Guinea as that northern shield.

Only when we got to Konfrontasi in the 1950s, in the 1960s, we suddenly realised that actually brought us into contact with the potential adversary through now having that land border. And so you start to see Australians turn their attitudes and change their shifts away from it.

There's also quite an interesting history with both Christmas and the [unclear] Islands that the sovereignty is not as distinctive and clear. And while they seem pretty settled today, I think there is potentially more chance and opportunity for those to be unsettled and the military challenges of those is remarkable. Back in the 1980s, Malcolm Fraser actually had to publicly state against the advice of 2 former chiefs of the Air Force, McNamara and then David Evans, that yes we would seek to retain that territory of attacks because these military chiefs had said, look, it is so difficult to do so.

And so I think some of those questions they play up into our defence debates but aren't always properly understood. But they are questions that occur time and again through our Parliamentary and Defence Department debates. And I think that's an important part of the story that doesn't always get out into the public, but is important to understand.

Luke Hickey: Any other questions? Looks like we've reached the end of the questions there off the hook, Andrew. Thanks Andrew, and thanks to our audience for coming today.

As we do draw to a a few quick plugs before we leave. Ido hope that you can join us for our next fellowship lecture, which is on the 28th of October, which is 30 years, the 30 years making of Communist and Nationalist Youth, the CCPs propaganda targeting the Chinese youth during the Maoist era. This will be delivered by our 2025 National Library fellow Dr Sanjiao Tang, and that will be at one o'clock on Tuesday the 28th.

Our website is the place that you can find recordings of recent talks and performances from our fellows and from our other events that we have here at the Library. And these are also available on the National Library of Australia's YouTube channel.

Thank you to everyone for attending today. Thank you, Andrew for taking us on that journey of Australia's relationships across many of the conflicts that we faced and avoided as well. Good luck with your book as well and your ongoing research on this important topic.

Can you please join me in thanking Andrew for his presentation?