Australia: American FOB, American mimic

My modest contribution to Australia's historical narrative

Total American dominance over Australia’s socio-political landscape is the massive, redacted centre of Australia’s story over the last century.

Over the last few years I’ve been reading Australian history. Historians, essayists, memoirs, novels to try and understand who we are, how we got here, the nature of the issues we face.

I’ve been astounded by the richness of our history and the prose of our historians.

Over summer I read Neville Meaney, a great historian on Australian security concerns and identity and more. And I’ve shared his provocations in a loose series over recent weeks (here, here, and here).

The White Australia policy arched over a 60 — 70 year period when our colonies were forged into a nation in Federation and two World Wars. We were thoroughly British — literal British subjects, the idea of a separate Australian citizenship utterly alien — and then we weren’t. We tiptoed from being a consciously white British nation with a near exclusive British immigration policy to one with a more open migration policy. And that trickle became a flood until today, where we have one of the highest rates of foreign born populations in the developed world, twice the rate of the US.

And we act today as if this always was. That this is the word of God and that all sorts of people from far away lands must fall upon this earth like rain.

We have no cultural memory of White Australia. Before then may as well be before the Flood. We do not recall White Australia other than in distant admonition. It’s our antebellum sin.

And as explored in this series, the truth is more sensible, less scurrilous, and more ennobling of the men who made this nation.

Our change in posture mid-century was abrupt. Historians have tended to glide over this change, either in a Whig gesture to the winds of progress, or they have offered up reasons that aren’t that compelling upon closer examination.

Was it merely some inevitable economic or cultural entanglement with Asia? Economic and cultural engagement happens all the time without being coupled with migration.

Was it a return to liberal roots? Too essentialist. We contain multitudes.

It’s been difficult to pin down, yet the reason has been staring us in the face.

Over the last century, the defining force of Australian political and cultural has been American hegemony. When the US hopped, we jumped. Our sails have blown with the American hurricane.

Partly, this is no secret at all — it’s very much an explicit part of our nation’s narrative. We made an explicit security decision to fall under America’s security umbrella. This is well trodden stuff. We also feel the flood of American cultural dominance every day in the music we listen to and the TV we watch. But we don’t quite appreciate how total the socio-political dominance has been. Observing American dominance to the extent I will here is, I believe, a unique contribution. (If it’s not unique, I’m sure someone will yell at me for it.)

Total American dominance is the massive, redacted centre of Australia’s story over the last century.

The extent of this dominance is missing in explicit readings of our history because it flatters no one in this country. Not our so-called intelligentsia, provincial yet proud. Not our politicians, pretenders to agency. Not our historians, who centre Australian interests and actors. Not leftists, who are inflamed by the example of local activists and the moral arc of history, nor rightists who explain our actions in terms of our own traditions or character or philosophies (are you a Gladstonian or Disraeli conservative?).

We want to believe that our moral actions as a country have been a function of local courage and conviction, of great moral actors and awakenings in this land. Not merely functions of imperial mimicry. Yet our moral heroes tend to be grafted awkwardly in retrospect, and when they were sailing in the right direction it was on the currents on American empire.

We are not alone. Much of Europe — and other peoples — could probably tell a similar story. But Australia’s political mimicry has arguably been particularly intense. And this is a story about Australia by an Australian, one almost entirely elided by Australian historians, as much as I love them.

This is the story of Australia over the last century: American FOB, American mimic.

***

“Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.”

— Prime Minister John Curtin, Melbourne Herald, 27 December 1941

This statement, made three weeks after Pearl Harbor, is often treated as Australia’s geopolitical coming-of-age — its declaration of independence from Britain and pivot to the United States. But the pivot had already begun thirty-three years earlier.

On 20 August 1908, sixteen American battleships steamed into Sydney Harbour, their hulls painted white to denote peace. One quarter of Australia’s entire population — over one million people — turned out to see the Great White Fleet during its three-week visit to Sydney, Melbourne, and Albany. A public holiday was declared. A week of parades, balls, concerts, and sporting events followed. Buildings were illuminated at night. The crowds were rapturous.

The visit was not on Theodore Roosevelt’s original itinerary. Prime Minister Alfred Deakin had invited them directly, bypassing London — an extraordinary breach of imperial protocol for a dominion that still considered itself thoroughly British. Deakin told Roosevelt that “no other Federation in the world possesses so many features [in common with] the United States as does the Commonwealth of Australia.”

What was Deakin playing at? The same thing the Australian founding fathers had been anxious about since Federation: Japan’s rising naval power and Britain’s indifference to it. Japan had defeated Russia in 1905, a European Great Power humiliated by an Asian nation for the first time in modern history. The British, focused on Europe, brushed off Australian concerns about the Pacific. Japan was, after all, a British ally — they had fought together in the Great War. The British maintained a small squadron in Sydney — one that could be recalled at any time — and considered that adequate.

Deakin disagreed. The Great White Fleet’s visit was his way of making a point: that Australia needed to think about its own defence, and that there was another great power in the Pacific who might be interested in helping. The visit gave Deakin the political capital to establish an Australian navy. It also heralded a wholesale strategic shift toward American shores.

The Australian founding fathers turned out to be exactly right about Japan. The British dismissal of the Pacific theatre led directly to the catastrophe of Singapore’s fall in 1942. More than 15,000 Australian soldiers were captured; over 7,000 would die as prisoners of war. The defensive strategy Australia had invested in for fifteen years was in ruins.

It was in this context that Curtin published his famous statement. Churchill was furious. Roosevelt was “astonished” — and privately displeased.

But Curtin was ahead of both of them. He defied Churchill’s direct orders to divert Australian troops to Burma, insisting they return home to defend Australia. When American General Douglas MacArthur arrived and told Curtin bluntly that America had “no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia” and viewed it merely as “a base from which to attack and defeat the Japanese,” Curtin didn’t flinch. He knew Australia needed America more than America needed Australia. That asymmetry would define the relationship ever after.

The ANZUS treaty was signed in 1951. Australia would back its big ally in war. Australian troops served in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But not only did Australia support America in its wars. Australia introduced conscription for the Vietnam War, something Billy Hughes lost two referenda over during WWI. And we were so supportive and early in George W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ that we got our own special class of US visa. Australia did everything it could at every stage to demonstrate Australian fealty.

But the relationship went deeper than just security. Australia didn’t just align with American military power.

Australian political and cultural commentators tend to tell the story of Australian social evolution with reference to internal factors: Australian history, Australian actors, Australian preferences.

But the reality is we quickly followed American socio-political trends. This is the defining feature of Australian political evolution for the last century.

Consider the legislative timeline:

• The US passes its Civil Rights Act in 1964. Australia holds its referendum on Aboriginal race powers in 1967 and passes a Racial Discrimination Act in 1975.

• The US passes the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, ending racial quotas. Australia dismantles White Australia from 1966–1973.

• The US passes Title VII (1964) and Title IX (1972) on sex discrimination. Australia passes its Sex Discrimination Act in 1984.

• The US passes the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Australia passes the Disability Discrimination Act in 1992.

• Obergefell v. Hodges legalises same-sex marriage in the US in 2015. Australia legalises it in 2017.

Even our great Snowy Hydro scheme, which began construction in 1949, was modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the decade before.

I knew a couple at university who got married in Australia only after Obergefell and read from Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion at the wedding. The tentacles of empire run deep in this land.

The 1967 referendum may be the centre-piece of Australia's civil rights mythology — our Selma, our March on Washington. In popular mythology it’s confused for having granted Aboriginal people the vote or citizenship (they had both already). The referendum was an amendment to the Commonwealth's race power, granting the federal government authority to make laws on the basis of race. In a cosmic irony, it was a move away from colour-blindness. The referendum gave Canberra the constitutional machinery for racial discrimination. This too is in line with the American cultural revolution at the time. As writers like Christopher Caldwell and Richard Hanania have pointed out, the Civil Rights Act became the legal foundation for affirmative action, disparate impact doctrine, and a vast apparatus of mandated racial consciousness. The Australian version didn't even bother with the facade. We wrote the race power directly into the constitution. The mimicry was faithful, in both the divergent mythologies of racial equality and realities of racial preference they created.

There is one striking counterexample to the mimicry. The High Court’s Mabo decision of 1992 — which overturned terra nullius and recognised native title — may be considered a distinctly Australian development.

But even then, look closer and the imperial scaffolding reappears. Justice Brennan’s lead judgment explicitly invoked international law as the lever for change, writing that it was contrary to “international standards” and “fundamental values” to maintain a discriminatory rule denying indigenous people rights to their land. The key legal precedent was not Australian but Canadian — Calder v British Columbia (1973), in which the Supreme Court of Canada first recognised that aboriginal title predated colonisation. Ron Castan QC, lead counsel for the Mabo plaintiffs, was frank about this: asked how much he’d drawn on Australian legal experience, he replied that he’d essentially just laid Calder before the High Court and told them it was all there. And the case itself only survived because of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 — the very legislation that sits in our timeline as a downstream product of the American Civil Rights Act. When Queensland tried to legislatively extinguish Meriam native title mid-case, the High Court struck the legislation down as inconsistent with the RDA. Without the American civil rights movement, there is no RDA; without the RDA, there is no Mabo. The chain of imperial transmission holds.

Australia’s land acknowledgements are a genuine cultural export. Canadians didn’t adopt land acknowledgments widely until after 2015, and in America they’re still a punchline. This is a local liturgy, born of local identity anxieties, that have escalated in strange ways over the last decade or so.

American socio-political dominance is not a conscious decision. It’s the water we swim in. Race has been the defining cultural rubric for the United States since its 1960s cultural revolution. It did well for Australia to go along with that. The new imperial zeitgeist demanded racial enlightenment, and Australia provided it.

In June 2020, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of Australians took to the streets in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. They chanted I can’t breathe. They held moments of silence for George Floyd. They demanded an end to Aboriginal deaths in custody, grafting American rhetoric to local conditions.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison warned against importing “things happening in other countries.” He was ignored. The protests proceeded. The signs read Black Lives Matter.

The Sydney protest was organised jointly by the Indigenous Social Justice Association and the Anticolonial Asian Alliance — a name that could only have emerged from American academic discourse. Each new iteration of the gay flag and acronym is quickly downloaded from American HQ.

Or consider Obama. In 2008, 64% of Australians wanted Obama to win, against 14% for McCain. By 2012, 80% wanted Obama re-elected, against 9% for Romney. When Obama finally visited Australia in 2011 the reception was ecstatic. Obamamania, the press called it. One journalist noted that “in Australia, an Obama speech still packs the kind of punch it did in the United States in 2008. It’s as if he were still seen in the haze of can-do hype that has worn off in the cities of America.”

Australia was more excited about Obama than America was.

I suspect most Australians believed we are protected by a First Amendment. (We aren’t.)

Australia changed after the 1950s because America changed. Australia took its cues from the imperial centre. This has been true since the Great White Fleet steamed into Sydney Harbour in 1908, and it remains true today.

Australian security anxiety runs deep. A sense of British flakiness led to Federation. Following Federation, Australia asked the US to extend its Monroe Doctrine to the Pacific, which it declined. Australia has never felt the requisite institutional confidence to take an independent security posture, much to the frustration of Australian security analysts like Hugh White and Sam Roggeveen, who deftly chart what such a course might look like. Our current defense posture is total subsumption into the American military machine, and Australian political and media actors struggle to explain it. Because it makes no sense unless one understands Australia’s defence posture as an American forward operating base.

Our geopolitical anxiety is so acute we feel not only must we be supportive of our sponsor’s military exploits, but also that we quickly follow its cultural transitions. We must not be culturally illegible to our sponsor.

Australia is an outpost of American empire, as it was once an outpost of British empire. We are a sub-imperial power. A forward operating base. A FOB. And as a result, Australians absorbed American preoccupations, American vocabulary, American culture wars, and American moral frameworks. Our most iconic developments in governance and culture have been American mimicry.