Australia and the World

Australia and the World celebrates the pioneering role of Neville Meaney in the formation and development of foreign relations history in Australia and his profound influence on its study, teaching and application.

The contributors to the volume – historians, practitioners of foreign relations and political commentators, many of whom were taught by Meaney at the University of Sydney over the years – focus especially on the interaction between geopolitics, culture and ideology in shaping Australian and American approaches to the world.

Individual chapters examine a number of major themes informing Neville Meaney's work, including the sources and nature of Australia's British identity; the hapless, if dedicated, efforts of Australian politicians, public servants and intellectuals to reconcile this intense cultural identity with Australia's strategic anxieties in the Asia-Pacific region; and the sense of trauma created when the myth of ‘Britishness’ collapsed under the weight of new historical circumstances in the 1960s. They survey relations between Australia and the United States in the years after World War Two. Finally, they assess the US perceptions of itself as an ‘exceptional’ nation with a mission to spread democracy and liberty to the wider world and the way in which this self-perception has influenced its behaviour in international affairs.

Dennis Richardson is the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Joan Beaumont is a professor of history in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.

Matthew Jordan works as a historian in the Historical Publications and Information section of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Acknowledgements
Foreword
Dennis Richardson

Australia and the world: Neville Meaney and the making of foreign relations history in Australia
1. Not the Cinderella it once seemed: the historiography of Australian foreign policy
 Joan Beaumont
2. Australia and Japan in focus: from image to comparative history
 Hugh Clarke
3. Pondering Australia’s world: Neville Meaney on the role of culture, ideology and geopolitics in American and Australian foreign policy history
 Matthew Jordan

Race, nationalism and White Australia
4. The Chinese immigration crisis of 1888 and the coming of White Australia
 Matthew Jordan
5. ‘He no doubt felt insulted’: the White Australia Policy and Australia’s relations with India, 1944–1964
 Eric Meadows

Sentiment and self-interest in Australian public and intellectual life
6. A military mission for Greater Britain: Edward Hutton’s ‘A Co-operative System for Defence of the Empire’
 Richard Lehane
7. Robert Randolph Garran and the creation of the Australian Commonwealth
 Colin Milner
8. A.C.V. Melbourne in Australian international thought: nationalism and appeasement between the World Wars
 James Cotton

The British world compared
9. The political cultures of Australia and Britain: how alike were they?
 Ross McKibbin
10. The ‘new nationalism’ in Australia, Canada and New Zealand: civic culture in the wake of the British world
 Stuart Ward

Dependent ally? Australian–American relations
11. Cold War ‘love feast’: the first US presidential visit to Australia, October 1966
 James Curran
12. Too much memory: writing the history of Australian–American relations during the Howard years
 David McLean

The making and unmaking of American nationalism
13. Becoming Wilsonian: Woodrow Wilson’s conversion to the American national myth
 David T. Rowlands
14. Recovering the roots of Reinhold Neibuhr’s critique of American nationalism
 Michael G. Thompson
15. An ideological odyssey: Nixon, China and the decline of American nationalism
 Tom Switzer

Select list of publications by Neville Meaney
Contributors
Index

Format: paperback
Size: 250 × 176 mm
350 pages
Copyright: © 2013
ISBN: 9781743320006
Publication: 20 May 2013