The Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) focuses on multidisciplinary social science research that is related to the theme of globalization and social transformation. Since its establishment in 1995, the institute has undertaken several collegial book research projects that have been published. These include Capturing Globalization, edited by J.H. Mittleman and Norani Othman (London: Routledge, 2001); Malaysia Menangani Globalisasi: Peserta atau Mangsa? edited by Norani Othman and Sumit Mandal (Bangi: Penerbit UKM, 2000); Globalization, Culture and Inequalities: In Honour of the Late Ishak Shari, edited by Abdul Rahman Embong (Bangi: Penerbit UKM, 2004); The Emerging East Asian Community: Security and Economic Issues, edited by Lee Poh Ping, Tham Siew Yean and George T. Yu (Bangi: Penerbit UKM, 2006). The latest in the series of IKMAS books are Globalization and National Autonomy: The Experience of Malaysia, edited by Joan M. Nelson, Jacob Meerman and Abdul Rahman Embong (IKMAS and ISEAS: Singapore, 2008); Community in ASEAN: Ideas and Practices, edited by Lee Poh Ping, Tham Siew Yean and Norani Othman (Bangi: Penerbit UKM, 2008); and Malaysia at a Crossroads: Can We Make the Transition? edited by Abdul Rahman Embong and Tham Siew Yean (Bangi: Penerbit UKM, 2011).

This book is also based on a collegial research project that examined challenges faced by the internationalization of higher education in Malaysia. As in all collegial projects, it is multidisciplinary in its composition. The research team consisted of research fellows from IKMAS as well as faculty members from the Faculty of Education and Faculty of Economics and Business, UKM. The project was undertaken to complement an earlier project on higher education, namely the impact of cross-border higher education in Malaysia. IKMAS obtained a Research University Grant in 2008 to follow up on the earlier study by examining the challenges faced by the different stakeholders who are engaged in the internationalization process.

INTRODUCTION

Given the policy emphasis in Malaysia, it is important to gauge the readiness and extent of internationalization in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the country. Pertinent issues to be examined include the current status of internationalization, providers' understanding and perceptions of internationalization, the reasons for internationalizing, its advantages and disadvantages, and providers' strategies for internationalization. It is also equally important to ascertain which aspects of internationalization are expanding rapidly and the key drivers of internationalization. It is generally assumed that private higher education institutions (PrHEIs) are relatively more profitmotivated compared to public higher education institutions (PuHEIs) due to the provision of government funding for the latter. PuHEIs, especially those designated as research universities, are expected to be more comprehensive in their understanding of internationalization due to their background, as explained in Chapter 2. Hence, it is hypothesized that different institutions, either by type or age, may have different understandings and rationales for internationalizing their respective institutions.

However, even if PrHEIs and PuHEIs have the same or similar motivations and priorities, this decision is not without implementation problems. The IAU 2005 Internationalization Survey Report (Knight 2006) listed several obstacles that can impede a successful and sustainable implementation of internationalization in HEIs. These include competing priorities, human resource, finance, administrative difficulties, problems in managing international students as well as problems related to recognizing qualifications from other countries. Thus, another relevant issue to be examined is whether different types of institutions face different obstacles in their internationalization process. In other words, it is hypothesized that different types of HEIs may face different challenges in their endeavour to internationalize. In order to test both hypotheses, a survey instrument was developed based on the IAU 2005 Internationalization Survey of Institutions (IAU 2005) but adapted to suit the local context for the purpose of the field work that was conducted for this book.

The need for original research

Desmond Ball's interest in the challenges of planning for the defence of Australia was triggered by the unusual circumstances of the early 1970s. Australian and American forces were completing their withdrawal from Vietnam, Washington was abandoning its military presence elsewhere in Southeast Asia and the principles of the Guam Doctrine made clear that United States involvement in Southeast Asia was undergoing fundamental change. The long-standing foundations of ‘forward defence’ strategy in Australian defence policy were crumbling and there was a need to develop a well-thought-out new approach that was robust and sustainable.

Des Ball was familiar with the academic writings on Australian defence policy and planning from the previous decade authored by T.B. Millar, Max Teichman, Harry Gelber and others. However he realised that these earlier works did not address the fundamental challenges now confronting Australian defence policy. Des was also broadly aware, largely from ministerial statements and informal discussions with politicians and officials, that the Department of Defence was starting to give serious thought to the demands of focussing more strongly on what might be required for the direct defence of Australia with a higher level of self-reliance. He realised that the core foundations of Australia's future security would be determined during the next few years and that they were deserving of a great deal of deep analytical thought.

When Des Ball was appointed as a research fellow in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) in 1974, he found himself working alongside a kindred and energetic spirit in the Head of the Centre, Robert O'Neill. Unlike Ball, O'Neill brought a broader background to the defence of Australia agenda. He was a former Army officer who had served with distinction in Vietnam and who retained strong links into the Defence Force and the Defence Department. O'Neill also recognised the need for serious research into Australia's future defence and broader security options and so together they started to conduct research in the field, stimulate discussion on relevant topics and build a small team that could work on key issues in a sustained manner.

The emergence of a strong and energetic research team at the ANU working on many of the key issues then facing the senior leadership of the Defence Organisation received a mixed reception initially. Some senior officials were suspicious about academics researching the principles and options for defence policy.

In truth, Des Ball does not look much like one of the world's leading strategic thinkers. In a world dominated by sharply pressed creases (military planners) and the precision that comes with scientific equations — think overpressure, single shot kill capability, circular error probability, and other detailed calculations — Des is, well, “rumpled”. And apparently, he has always been somewhat “rumpled”. In his interview for the Australian National University's (ANU) Mentors series, he tells of showing up at a dinner party at the house of his mentor, the distinguished Australian strategist Hedley Bull, “probably not wearing shoes, because I rarely wore shoes in those days.” Before leaving for the United States in 1970, Bull slipped Des some additional pocket money “to buy a pair of shoes and to buy a suit, and insisted that when I was seeing his colleagues … that at least I wore those shoes.”

As Des tells it, he sort of fell into his career, graduating from digging trenches and laying building foundations to working on Asia-Pacific economic cooperation (after a chance meeting with Sir John Crawford at the ANU, who noticed his sunburnt neck) and then being nudged into Bull's orbit by Crawford. Bull took the youngster under his wing and opened doors for him in the United States where he did research on his Ph.D. thesis on the strategic force levels of the United States.

That launched an extraordinary career that took Des to every high church in the nuclear priesthood. He clocked time at Harvard's Center for International Affairs, Columbia's Institute of War and Peace Studies, the ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), think-tanks like the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in London and the RAND Corporation, and even enjoyed stints at the Pentagon and the underground Command and Control Centre in Cheyenne Mountain. He explored the particulars of strategic thinking with luminaries such as Bull, Robert O'Neill and Robert McNamara. It has been a rich and rewarding (and sometimes infuriating) journey — for Des and his audience, a group that includes policymakers and analysts, students and the countless Australians who have enjoyed (sometimes without knowing) the benefits of his insights and fierce nationalism.

This chapter attempts to tease out key themes that animate Des’ writing on strategic issues.

Maritime security, writ large, is a broad canvas enmeshing everything from high-intensity naval warfare and territorial disputes to low-end criminal acts and matters of navigational safety. Non-state and transnational issues, such as piracy, maritime terrorism and trafficking at sea, have featured prominently in the definition for much of the post-Cold War period. In recent years, however, there has been a noticeable tilt towards a more inter-state agenda, defined by such concerns as creeping jurisdiction, competition over offshore resources and a region-wide naval arms build-up. Through his Track 2 work, Des Ball has maintained a lengthy association with the full spectrum of maritime activity in the region. But it is in the context of this tilt back towards the inter-state dimensions of security that Des’ earlier body of work on navies and arms control is regaining new relevance.

The maritime domain, by the same token, is also a useful thematic window on to Des’ cosmopolitan interests in regional security: strategic, comprehensive, cooperative and technical. His major contributions fall within four inter-connecting themes: nuclear strategy at sea, naval arms racing, confidence building and technical intelligence gathering.

Nuclear strategy at sea

Des’ interest in naval affairs and the maritime domain can be traced to his doctoral research on nuclear strategy during the presidency of John F. Kennedy (1961–1963). During this still-raw phase of the Cold War — Des’ intellectual point of departure for a career-spanning interest in strategic arms control — the submarine arm was first established as the most survivable prong of the nuclear triad, an attribute it maintains to this day. This did not wholly obviate the traditional concern of navies with manoeuvre and projection. But the stark mission requirement of the ballistic missile submarine (SSBN), to reliably deliver Armageddon, cast a long and strange shadow over the Cold War at sea.

The advent of the SSBN as a major focus of the superpowers’ strategic competition also played to Des’ abiding and somewhat double-edged fascination with nuclear strategy and military secrecy. As a young scholar exposed to the foment of the Vietnam protest movement in Australia and the United States, Des nonetheless acquired an appreciation of this esoteric subset of naval warfare, as well as the risks of escalation that he would later go on, with forceful logic, to argue were significantly under-managed.

Australia's success has and will continue to depend at least in part on the strength of its intellectual and academic life. That may be fairly obvious in the fields of science and medicine but less so in political science. Yet political scientists play a central role in not just teaching but in generating debate based on evidence based research.

In the nearly twelve years I served as the foreign minister of Australia, I looked to our universities for creative ideas. The public service is efficient in the administration of public policy. The major departments of state such as the Treasury and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) employ able and dedicated people. They show a patient determination to implement government policy efficiently and within budgets. They are also dedicated to meeting the objective once articulated by a former DFAT Secretary, Nick Parkinson; making their Ministers look good. Nothing is forgotten, submissions are pored over by earnest desk officers and their superiors; Ministerial correspondence is carefully checked and rechecked and neatly presented.

There are two types of Ministers; those who need to be restrained by a cautious public service and those who need a good hard push. The public service is by its nature an institution that errs on the side of caution. Ministerial enthusiasm for thought bubbles found in the columns of an ideologically sympathetic weekly magazine will be pricked. But the slothful Minister will be reminded of the heavy workload, which has to be completed.

That is what the public service does. But what it does not do needs to be contemplated. The public service is seldom a nerve centre of ideas. Yet good government needs a steady flow of positive ideas and a steady diet of criticism of what it is doing.

Professor Des Ball is one of those who has made an immense contribution to political thought and debate over several decades. He has inspired controversy, anger and not a little anxiety within the corridors of government. There has been many an occasion in recent years when I have disagreed with him. That is not the point. The point is: he has helped to generate ideas, to build the national conversation on foreign policy and security issues and to ensure decision-makers in government reflect on the decisions they are making, sorting out their arguments and at times questioning their own decisions.

I first met Des Ball in 1975, at the Australian National University in Canberra. We have been comfortable friends ever since. Our careers diverged and we lost contact several times, sometimes for years, but it was the sort of friendship that never had to be restarted, it was always there. In 1975, I was into my fifth year with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and, in lieu of “home leave”, had been allowed to attend a conference on nuclear disarmament in Fiji. En route to Fiji, I dropped into the Australian National University's (ANU) Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) and, in addition to Des, met the then head, Robert O'Neill, and a bunch of other current and prospective doyens of the Australian strategic community including David Horner, Ross Babbage, Hedley Bull, Tom B. Millar, J. D. B Miller and Geoffrey Jukes. This could have turned the head of a young migrant economist from an (at the time) unfashionable extremity of the Commonwealth, and it did. When, a year later, O'Neill asked me to join SDSC as a visiting fellow for a year, I jumped at the chance. Later still, I had the good fortune to have O'Neill and Des as supervisors for my Ph.D. After more than two decades with the United Nations and the Australian Public Service (intersecting occasionally with SDSC and the newer ANU Peace Research Centre), I re-joined SDSC (with Des still at the heart of it) in 2001 until I retired in 2012. In short, Des has been something of a constant in my professional life (although he is still evasive when I ask whether he ever read any draft chapters of my thesis, let alone the final product). He also lured me into my one and only (scouts honour) experiment with a “prohibited substance”, but that's another story.

It is not easy to attach a familiar label to Des Ball. He is not an ideologue of any kind and labels like hawk, realist, constructivist and so on seem quite out of place. Des is what I would call a forensic analyst with a work ethic of Dickensian proportions. Indeed, I know of no other student of security affairs that comes close to matching Des’ consistent and absolute faith in the capacity of diligent scholarship to unlock all doors, especially those guarded by official secrecy.

Sir Arthur Tange was a figure inspiring terror at the Department of Defence in his time as its secretary. As he set about incorporating three separate service ministries and sundry defence supply agencies into Defence, the leaks and outraged newspaper articles by newly retired military brass came in a steady stream. Tange's eye for backsliders and subverters of his authority roamed ceaseless over Russell Hill and its outposts. A group of bureaucrats who took their sandwiches out onto the central lawn, under the central memorial to American help in the Second World War, were stunned when a window flew up, and Tange leaned out to order them off.

At the same time, Tange was the chief keeper of secrets. Having been head of the External Affairs department as well, he knew them all. Through the Whitlam years he'd fought hard to persuade his Labor political masters not to blow the United States alliance before they fully understood all its ramifications.

But who to trust with that information? Parliament House, lit up like an ocean liner across Lake Burley Griffin, was a ship springing leaks. The raid by Attorney-General Lionel Murphy and his Commonwealth Police on the Australian Strategic Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) headquarters in Melbourne, the leak about the Australian Secret Intelligence Service

(ASIS) help for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its subversion of Allende's left-wing government in Chile, the weaving of the Pine Gap joint intelligence base into the 1975 dismissal narrative — all had contributed to a sharp polarisation between believers and sceptics, between defenders and investigators.

In its brief life, from the beginning of the 1970s to the end of the 1980s, the weekly newspaper, The National Times, was a leader of the sceptics and investigators. Its journalists and contributors including Brian Toohey, Evan Whitton, Paul Kelly, Marian Wilkinson, Andrew Clark, Bill Pinwill and Deborah Snow set out to challenge conventional wisdoms in many fields. The secret workings of defence and intelligence were natural subjects.

Introduction

With the end of the Cold War — a period during which he had established himself as a preeminent and prolific scholar of international reputation on the primary security concerns of that era (strategic nuclear weapons, signals intelligence, missile defence) as well as on Australia's military defence — Desmond Ball's attention shifted towards the Asia-Pacific, where it has largely remained to the present. Ball was quick to realise the importance of establishing regional institutions that could promote security cooperation in the Asian region. Over the course of the last two-plus decades, Ball's efforts as a scholar, policy analyst, advisor to governments and Track 2 diplomat, have had significant impact on the shaping of the institutional architecture of the Asia-Pacific. Indeed, with his abilities to operate simultaneously across academic and policy, and official (Track 1) and unofficial (Track 2) dimensions, Ball has occupied, and continues to occupy, a near unique role in the Australian and broader regional contexts.

This chapter focuses on one aspect of Ball's efforts to advance towards a stable and peaceful Asia-Pacific security environment: that is, his work to initiate and sustain Track 2 regional, multilateral security dialogue mechanisms and institutions to facilitate security cooperation among the states of the region. Particular attention is focused on Ball's central role in the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP), which since its establishment in 1994 has been the only inclusive, region-wide Track 2 security institution with a broad agenda, productive working groups, and a relationship with its official counterpart the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF).

We organise our reflections on Ball's contributions and achievements regarding CSCAP and its association with regional institutions across three dimensions: institution-builder on national, Track 1, and Track 2 levels; chronicler of regional institutionalisation; and innovator and critic of institutional achievement. Before addressing these dimensions, it is important first to take note of the key premises from which Ball's Asia- Pacific agenda has proceeded, in effect revealing the continuity of thought and principles that have guided his institution building and security architecture agenda.

When I became president of the United States I inherited the awesome threat of a nuclear holocaust during the later years of the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other with arsenals of an indescribable power. I knew the entire time I was president, that twenty-six minutes after we detected the launching of an intercontinental ballistic missile, that the missile would strike Washington D.C. or New York or any other target that the Soviets had chosen. Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and I knew that we had an equally strong retaliatory capability centred primarily in the intercontinental ballistic missile submarines. They were almost invulnerable to any kind of surprise attack. Just the nuclear warheads from one of those ships could have destroyed every city in the Soviet Union with a population of 100,000 or more.

This nuclear threat strengthened our commitment to peace. After I left the White House and formed the Carter Center, President Gerald Ford joined me in chairing our first major international conference, which included the foremost experts and political leaders from the Soviet Union and the United States. Our goal was to analyse the existing nuclear threat and the opportunities to reduce these remaining dangers to human existence on the face of the earth.

Desmond Ball was one of those experts we invited to that Consultation on International Security and Arms Control in April 1985: we already knew that his stature and the recognition accorded to his positions would add significantly to the strength of the enterprise. That was a particularly dangerous period in United States-Soviet Union relations, a time when the prospect of nuclear war was no distant fantasy. Ball's ideas were very valuable and contributed to the success of the project, and I was grateful for his participation.

In the following two or three years I met with Ball on a number of occasions, both privately and in relation to a project by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on nuclear war and crisis stability. I was asked on a number of occasions to bring a presidential input into that work, to give a sense of what would have been in my mind in certain situations.

In 1986 when I was Defence Minister, I wrote to the Australian National University and said, “To appoint Dr. Ball to this position as a Special Professor at the Australian National University would do the nation a substantial service.” At that point of time, Des Ball's research output would have constituted a lifetime's work for most academicians. My recommendation was not about volume. Nor was it about quality, substantial though that was. I wrote because the work that Des did from the academy was a critical part of the foundation of core elements of Australian national security policy. To see him leave Canberra for Harvard or elsewhere would have diminished our capacity to ground and round out some important directions in planning for the defence of Australia.

At that point, when Des, then head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) at the Australian National University (ANU), was appointed to a personal chair, the government was about to launch a seminal white paper on the defence of Australia, and about to complete a substantial renegotiation of the agreements controlling the major joint facilities Australia hosted for the United States. The new agreements were to see a major incorporation of Australians in the workforce of the facilities and a cementing of the government's purpose to secure “full knowledge and consent” with regard to their operations.

Much of the change reflected the product of an intellectual interaction between the political leadership of the then government and the academy of almost two decades’ standing and during a period of considerable fluidity in Australian strategic thinking. Des Ball was not alone in this creative interchange. One thinks of figures such as Robert O'Neill, Hedley Bull, Coral Bell, J. D. B. Miller, T. B. Millar, Geoffrey Jukes, Paul Dibb (when out of government), Ross Babbage, Jim Richardson and a few others. However it was only about a cricket team's worth and in that context Des as often as not opened the batting.

Across the globe, in the nations of the Western Alliance, the academy played a significant role in framing the debate not simply about national security but civilisation's survival. The development of nuclear weapons changed the whole character of defence debate, dragging it out of the bowels of the bureaucracy into the broader political environment.

I first met Des Ball in 1986 when I was on the Directing Staff of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Staff College and he delivered several lectures on strategic and defence topics. That relationship continued for a couple of years but was substantially reinforced in 1990 when I became the RAAF's first visiting fellow to the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), where I was privileged to work closely with Des. He already had a substantial list of publications to his name, including a major air power contribution from 1988 in which he outlined global developments and Australian perspectives on air power, and he was also Head of SDSC at the time I joined the Centre.

So, one can imagine my excitement at having someone like Des around to provide the direction, mentoring, and other support as I settled down to research and write on air power. There was also a sense of trepidation as he was the Head of the Centre and my respect for authority had been ingrained in me through some two decades of military service. I was to learn a lot during my 18 months with Des — and not just about how to put together a compelling argument in a book.

The contrast between us was striking. Here was Des Ball — something of a radical — renowned for climbing on a statue of George V1 to demonstrate against the Vietnam War and well known for his many exploits in exposing signals intelligence; and here was I, the very first RAAF officer — by definition not a radical — entrusted to his care. And from there, a lifelong friendship and professional relationship grew. While I was at SDSC, the Gulf War broke out in 1991 and Des encouraged me to focus on how the air war played out, which led to a book published in 1992 that analysed Australian air power doctrine in the context of how allied air power contributed to the liberation of Kuwait, while Des concentrated on the intelligence war in the Gulf that resulted in his monograph in 1991.2 I learnt from Des that when the opportunity presents itself to write, you need to get on with it and write. So, my time with Des was very productive and he guided me through getting three books published. I could not have done that without him.

One of the many reasons why Des loved his mother Dot was that she had a knack for capturing complexity in a few sharp words and, even when it was unpopular or controversial, speaking her mind. Certainly the local lads in the dressing room of the Timboon football club could verify the latter, especially if they were losing the game to another country town. Des either inherited or learnt Dot's knack because he applies it to his academic world of strategic studies. The title of his famous Adelphi Paper, Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?, captured a complicated and controversial question of the nuclear age. Likewise the title for his book A Suitable Piece of Real Estate made ordinary Australians aware that they had a dilemma in their security relationship with the United States: to support the joint United States-Australian intelligence and communications facilities in their country and risk being a target in a nuclear exchange; or play a potentially important role in deterring nuclear war by communicating early-warning information to the guardians of the United States arsenal. Getting to the essence of an issue and embracing the old adage of “speaking truth to power” seemed to be in the bones of the Ball family.

For Des, the essence of security in the Asia-Pacific region is still to be found in Dot's view on the matter: that “good neighbours have strong fences”. Shifting the maxim across to the theoretical language of international relations, a move Des colourfully rejects when it came to esoteric abstractions of theory, he nonetheless understands himself as a “realist”, a believer in strong (de)fences. But he is, by his own admission, “a realist with a difference”. It is this depiction of Des’ thinking, activism and policy advice that I believe explains his significant contribution to the study of Asia-Pacific security and architecture over the last two or more decades.

Denis Healey, the former British Labour MP and one of the founding fathers of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), observed in his memoirs that “from the middle fifties Australia has contributed far more to international understanding of defence problems than any country of similar size”.Healey was almost certainly referring here to the likes of Coral Bell, Hedley Bull, Paul Dibb and Robert O'Neill — all of whom Professor Desmond Ball has worked closely with at various times during the course of his illustrious career. Yet it would be difficult to contest the proposition that Des was actually foremost in Healey's mind as he made this observation, writing as he was in the late 1980s. As the Cold War began its unexpected retreat into the shadows of history, Des Ball stood as the leading Australian Strategic Studies scholar of his generation. Or as Brad Glosserman and Ralph Cossa more eloquently put it in their contribution to this volume, Des had by this time earned the respect of “every high church in the nuclear priesthood”.

Those who know Des most intimately will readily anticipate how he would respond to such acclaim. On the one hand, he is a scholar who is quietly proud of his momentous achievements, and justifiably so. At the same time, one can imagine the manner in which the man who colleagues affectionately refer to as a “gentle giant” would bashfully wince at such flattery. This is just one of the many contradictions to Des Ball, more of which are drawn out in this volume. Some of the contributors write, for example, of a scholar possessing a remarkable grasp of the ‘big picture’ who at the same time is almost obsessively preoccupied with the devil in the detail. Others characterise him as a realist and slightly hawkish scholar with strong idealistic, dovish proclivities. Some policy elites have routinely detested his work, while others describe him as an “academic gem” and have forged longstanding friendships with this “insurgent intellectual”. Amidst these apparent contradictions, one constant in Des’ career has been his longstanding association with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) at the Australian National University. As O'Neill details in the next chapter of this volume, Des was appointed at the SDSC in the early 1970s and became its first tenured academic in 1980.

“You might want to think about the guy who wrote that”, said Hedley Bull as we sat together in his office just after my return from ten months study leave in the United Kingdom, in December 1973. Hedley was, of course, referring to Des Ball's doctoral thesis. And the need to think about Des had arisen because in my absence the Defence Minister of the day, Lance Barnard, had awarded the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) two non-tenured posts. We now needed to think hard about candidates for them, at Research Fellow and Senior Research Fellow level.

I did not know Des very well at all in 1973. In 1970, when I first came to the ANU, and he was finishing his Ph.D., we were on very different tracks. He was a young, free, radically inclined man who had been prominent in opposing Australia's part in the Vietnam War. I was a decade older with thirteen years of service in the Australian Army behind me, including a year in Vietnam as an infantry officer, 1966–67.

When Hedley asked me early in 1970 if I would take on the Headship of the Centre, my initial reaction was to refuse. By entering academia I was expressing a desire to be free and, if need be, to be critical of national foreign and defence policies. But in taking on responsibility for the Centre, which inevitably had some dealings with the Defence Department and the armed services, I would have to tread very carefully in order to sustain the Centre's existing relations without becoming too circumscribed by them. After talking Hedley's offer over with my wife, Sally, that evening in early 1970, I changed my mind. It was probably going to cause some serious disappointment if I was to refuse to take the Centre on, and perhaps I could do the necessary balancing act and make a success of the responsibility. So I told Hedley next morning that I would accept the post. The die was cast — and it was an excellent outcome for me too in the longer term.

But my first years as Centre head were a somewhat lonely experience. The air of student and collegial disapproval of the Centre's existence was palpable on the ANU campus.