Tun Abdul Razak, the prime minister of Malaysia, has recently announced that his Government cannot consider the claim to the Limbang River made by the Sultan of Brunei. This dispute has its origins in the 1880's when North Borneo and Sarawak were intriguing against each other to gain possession of the remains of the once powerful Sultanate. Since that time the problem of the Limbang has smouldered continually, every now and then breaking into a fitful glow. The problem is a complex one and has not hitherto received detailed scholarly analysis.

p. 53 line 24 “But by early 1909” should read “But by early 1901”

p. 58 line 48 “After the triumph of the Mao” should read “After the triumph of Mao”

p. 59 line 24 “the Russian presence” should read “the Tsarist Russian presence”

New Zealand was one of the first parts of the British Empire to offer Britain help in the building of the Singapore naval base and was the only Dominion to do so. It is true that considerable financial help was given by the Straits Settlements. Hong Kong, the Federated Malay States and the Sultan of Johore. Australia's naval programme was, also, based on the assumption that the base would be built. But the Reform Party Ministry in New Zealand was the only democratically elected government which supported the United Kingdom Government with a vote of funds.

Direct diplomatic relations between New Zealand and Malaya/Singapore are a relatively recent innovation dating back only to 1955, and, significantly, the original decision to station troops in the area in peacetime preceded the establishment of formal diplomatic links. It is true that even before the Second World War there had been a growing consciousness of the strategic significance of the area, but it was seen in terms of Singapore as a link in the chain of Imperial defence, never as a region in its own right. Regions were subsumed in the worldwide defence strategy of the British Empire. Thus New Zealand contributed financially to the construction of the base for the Royal Navy at Singapore, but her military commitments were in helping to guard the Suez ‘lifeline’. New Zealand air-force units were stationed in Singapore in 1940, but despite the national trauma associated with the fall of the base and the apprehended threat to New Zealand’s own security, the ground forces remained in the Middle East. Indeed, New Zealand's formal Commonwealth responsibilities were to remain in the Middle East until 1955 and public interest continued to focus on that area to a surprising degree. The lessons of the Pacific War for New Zealand, therefore, were less concerned with the strategic importance of any particular area than with the indispensability of a United States alliance. As one research group put it, ‘in the immediate post-war years New Zealand showed a greater sense of international awareness, but no sense of particular involvement with the Far East; still less with South-East Asia.

Australasian universities are tied to Southeast Asia in a number of ways. The most obvious is through their teaching. Since the second world war, but more particularly in the past ten or fifteen years, this has paid more attention to Southeast Asia, its peoples, their history and their languages, than at any time since the first university institutions were founded in Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century. There are other, perhaps less obvious, ties. The teaching has been primarily at undergraduate level, but the staff members involved have, of course, been involved in research in the area. Possibly the majority would have been trained overseas, if not themselves of overseas origin; but quite recently, and especially at one or two centres, the number of graduate research students has become significant, at least in Australia. Some of the research has been published in book or monograph form by existing Australasian or overseas publishers, or by the university presses, whose numbers have augmented over the past decade.

Will peace in Vietnam and neutralised Indochina bring stability to Southeast Asia? Or will most of the area fall under a China-North Vietnam condominium? Can the Nixon doctrine, with the U.S. nuclear deterrent in the background, assure the security of a regional association? Or will the Japanese — the flag following trade — gather Southeast Asia into a new co-prosperity sphere?

One would hardly expect New Zealand, whose population has yet to reach three million and which still exports very largely pastoral and forest products, to play a really significant part in Asian trade. Nevertheless surprise, or disappointment, may well be felt at the trifling contribution revealed by Table 1. Most of New Zealand's Asian exports go to Japan but, in 1967, were less than 1 per cent of Japan's total imports, and the remainder going to developing Asian countries were less than 1/3 per cent of their imports. New Zealand, in fact, exports more to Australia than to them, although they have a vastly bigger population and Australia has a range of export industries which compete with those of New Zealand.