The international outlook of any community, at any stage in its development, is likely to be determined very largely by the interaction of four overlapping factors: geographic position with its strategic requirements; racial composition and resulting prejudices; economic interests, actual and potential, and, by no means least in importance, traditional policies and ideological trends. The relative strength of these several influences varies from period to period. Their individual content may change considerably under pressure of events either inside or outside the community, including the impact of party politics and of powerful personalities. They nevertheless have much to contribute to an understanding of the involved and complicated behaviour patterns of democratic societies in their relations with foreign states and peoples.

These five years fall politically into two clear divisions . Superficially the dividing line might be marked by the death of Harold Holt in December 1967, but more realistically by the departure of Mr Hasluck in February 1969 when Prime Minister Gorton announced Hasluck’s elevation to the Govemor-Generalship. The resignation of Sir Robert Menzies on 20 January 1966, after being continuously in office as Prime Minister since 1949, was in itself a watershed. Harold Holt, the favourite son who had long been forced to wait in the wings, succeeded unchallenged to the prime ministership with William McMahon as deputy leader of the Liberal Party. Mr Holt’s cabinet showed little change with Mr McEwen as deputy Prime Minister, Paul Hasluck as Minister for External Affairs, and Allen Fairhall as Minister for Defence in succession to Senator Paltridge who had died in January 1966.

National foreign policies, however complex the forces which go to their making, live and operate within the context of their time. Those who shape and apply policy must needs display a perceptive awareness of the essential characteristics of the international framework of the day, since those characteristics will not only prescribe the mode of procedure but also determine the limits to possible achievement. Change is of the essence of history, and international relations are no more immune from the process than other forms of human activity. This imposes on those who make decisions, and hopefully upon the communities concerned, a responsibility for detecting not simply the alchemy of change but the nature of the forces which will transmute the features dominant in one period into those dominant in the next.