cold war
Peter Edwards
David Lowe
Menzies and the 'Great World Struggle':
Australia's Cold War
UNSW Press $35.00pb, 256pp
0 86840 553 1
A WIDELY HELD VIEW of the early years of the Cold War, and of
Robert Menzies' role in shaping Australia's involvement, went
something like this. After the fall of Singapore in 1942,
Australia turned its allegiance from Britain to the United States
and allied itself uncritically to American foreign policy. The
centre of Australia's strategic attention changed sharply from
the Middle East, where Australians had been sent in the two world
wars, to Asia and especially Southeast Asia. To support American
policies and alliances, Australians sent forces to Korea, Malaya,
Borneo and Vietnam. These commitments were based primarily not
on a perception of a genuine threat, but on domestic politics.
Menzies, as Prime Minister from December 1949, did not really
believe that international communism posed a serious threat to
Australia, but he recognised a political weapon with which to
beat his opponents in the Labor Party. When he said in 1951 that Australia might have only three years in which to prepare for a third world war, he was just scare-mongering. He made few serious preparations for war, but adopted McCarthyist tactics at home, unsuccessfully attempting to outlaw the Communist party and using the newly created Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to persecute leftists, especially writers and academics. The Petrov affair was a 'put-up job', contrived by Menzies and ASIO in order to win the 1954 election. Allegations that members of the Department of External Affairs were feeding secret documents to the Soviet Union were groundless, as shown by the fact that there were no subsequent charges.
David Lowe's book, hard on the heels of Breaking the Codes by Desmond Ball and David Horner (reviewed ABR July 1999), is a reminder of how outdated this interpretation has become. Lowe writes that his confidence in some of the traditional views was shaken when he read, in Robert O'Neill's official history of Australia in the Korean War, that in 1951 Australia had agreed that the defence of the Middle East would be its first priority in war. Prompted by this, he decided to look anew at the period from 1948 to 1954.
This is a work of both original research and synthesis. Lowe has done the hard grind through the archives in Australia, Britain and the United States, but this is not a mere recitation of one document after another. Lowe has set out to bridge what he sees as the gulf between, on the one side, the historians who write about foreign affairs, military events and international politics and, on the other, those who write about political culture and national identity. In his view, these two groups have seldom engaged with each other, but we must fuse both approaches, both concepts of historical evidence, if we are to understand Australia's involvement in the Cold War.