This chapter traces the ways familiar depictions of Ireland are interrupted when we consider some of the rare co-imaginings of Irish and Pacific islands. When watched alone, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) presents the non-modern in modern Ireland. But when watched alongside Moana (1926, Robert and Frances Flaherty), Man of Aran reveals the traveling nature of non-modern tropes, as the Pacific non-modern and the Irish non-modern coalesce. The transoceanic movement of the “novel savage” is emphasized, and the quintessentially Irish becomes recognizably interislander. By tracing the connections between Ireland and the Cook Islands in Kenneth Sheils Reddin’s Another Shore (1945), as well as Charles Crichton’s 1948 adaptation, we see that Reddin draws on the seeming incontrovertibility of the Pacific’s arcadia to establish, first, Dublin’s modernity, then Dublin’s non-modernity, then the erroneous, nebulous nature of such categories. By tracing the transnational movement of tropes and stereotypes across Ireland and the Pacific, area studies divisions collapse and we recognize Ireland as part of a global archipelago of islands of discounted, nascent, imbricated modernity.

Between 2016 and 2020 Australia’s foreign and strategic policy became more tightly focused on South-East Asia and the Pacific, which it identified as its ‘immediate region’. This reflected the government’s concern about the strategic consequences of emerging great-power competition, and particularly the assumption that China’s presence in these subregions equated to greater influence. While this assumption influenced Australia’s strategic and foreign policy choices, it was largely untested. Australia responded by increasing its engagement in both subregions to solidify its relationships, bolster its influence, and reassure its regional partners of its continued commitment. But Australia had different geostrategic perceptions and interests than South-East Asia and the Pacific. Its failure to acknowledge the agency of these neighbours sometimes led to counterproductive strategic and foreign policy decisions.

In the previous volume it was argued that a wide area of disagreement divided the Australian from the Indian approach to problems of international affairs: Australia was aligned irrevocably with the western power bloc and looked for her military security to the United States with whose methods of attaining her international ends India fundamentally disagreed. The area of difference had been emphasized by Mr. Menzies’ policy during the Suez crisis, a policy which aligned Australia in Asian eyes with an outworn nineteenth century gunboat British imperialism.

Australian policy towards Japan has changed a great deal since Japan’s surrender. It has passed through three main phases. The first was the period of the early Occupation, from September 1945 to mid-1947. At this time Australian policy was mainly shaped by the emotional aftermath of the war years, by fear and bitterness. The overriding aim was security; to ensure that Japan would not again be able to return to the paths of aggression. This was linked with a demand for retribution, and a desire to make Japan into a democracy, since it was believed that a democracy by its nature seeks a peaceful and co-operative foreign policy. The transition to the second phase in 1947 was a reflection of the outbreak of the Cold War. The old fears of Japan were finding it harder to compete with the quickly growing fears of the Soviet Union and world Communism. From 1947 until 1951, when the Peace Treaty brought the Occupation to an end, Australian policy was ambivalent, or perhaps just inconsistent. How could Japan be made strong enough to be a bulwark against Communism, but not strong enough to be a possible danger again to Australia?

In formulating its foreign policy any country tends to distinguish between areas of central and of peripheral importance, between those areas where it can exert considerable influence and those where it can exert little influence. This is the choice facing small and middling countries like Australia. The great powers have to make similar choices to conserve their resources – political, economic and diplomatic – but are still able to exert considerable or even overwhelming power from time to time in areas which are normally peripheral but which may, because of shifts in the power balance, become less peripheral and more central from the point of view of global policies.

The Indian Ocean area does not constitute an obvious natural region, and the states around it cannot be said to form an international subsystem, although the sea’s function as a line of communication has led to connections between countries which might not otherwise have known much of each other. The east coast of Africa, for example, has had a substantial Indian population throughout this century because of the ease of access from Indian ports and the protection which was available to Indians under British rule. Colombo was an obvious stopping-place for liners from Australia to Britain. But, in the main, the ocean is too broad to have encouraged close connections between the countries around its rim. The area exists as an entity only on the map. Strategists can draw lines on it, and plot the sites of possible bases which depend for their utility upon a supposed community of interests between the countries which border the ocean, but in fact the only unity which the area has possessed historically has been in the relatively brief period when Britain was the dominant power in Egypt, East Africa, South Africa, India, Burma, the Malay peninsula and Australia. That period is now over.

Since the Second World War important changes have taken place in the region of the South Pacific. One former territory, Western Samoa, has attained independent nationhood and in several others political development and future status have become subjects of lively interest among the indigenous peoples as well as populations of external origin. More and more the international technical organisations are interesting themselves in the current problems and future prospects of the Pacific Islands. There has been a rapid and extensive development of air communications, both inter-continental through the region and inter-island within it. With these have come more business and tourism and the former characteristic isolation of South Pacific territories has been greatly modified. Sea communications and telecommunications have also developed. Literacy has spread. The cinema has brought to almost all island peoples notions of metropolitan ways of life and of the character, manners and interests of the larger populations of the world and these in turn have suggested comparisons, favourable and otherwise, with their own ways of living. Television has made its appearance in three territories.

Australian policy dealing with the People’s Republic of China between 1961 and 1965 moved in traditional channels. The coalition Liberal and Country Party Federal Government was in power throughout these years and maintained formal external relationships with little innovation. This aspect of policy was stressed in 1962 by the new Minister for External Affairs, Sir Garfield Barwick, when, discussing Australian foreign policy, he referred to ’the continuity of our major lines of policy’, adding that ’If our policies have been wisely conceived and steadfastly pursued, this continuing change [in international life] will not often call for more than slight corrections of the basic policy course.’ Mr Hasluck, in his first speech to Parliament as Minister for External Affairs on 23 March 1965, stressed in turn that ’I am not introducing any change in the foreign policy of the Government. The foreign policy is that of the Government, not of a person.’

The capitulation of Japan in September 1945 marked the end of war in which more Australians had been directly involved than on any previous occasion. The Army had fought in the Middle East and South-East Asia against Germans, Italians, Vichy French and Japanese. The Air Force had contributed also to the defence of Britain and the war in Europe. The Navy had been engaged in the North Sea and the Atlantic, the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Some 15 per cent of the population had enlisted in the defence forces, and many more were engaged in munitions production and other civilian war work. For the first time in its history, the continent had suffered aerial bombardment and naval shelling, while nearly six thousand Australians had died in the defence of the Australian Territory of Papua, the Mandated Territory of New Guinea, and adjacent islands. In addition, Australia was host to refugees from South-East Asia, to substantial Dutch forces, and to many hundreds of thousands of American servicemen.

Following the establishment of the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition in 1947 the Australian Government was committed definitely to an expansive policy in the Antarctic. Australia had formally accepted territorial responsibility over an area of 2,472,000 square miles, about half the Polar continent, by the Australian Antarctic Territory Acceptance Act of 13 June 1933. This area, together with territory under the governance of the Falkland Islands Dependencies, had previously been claimed by Britain. British claims, and consequently Australian claims, besides the claims of the other metropolitan powers interested in the region, have never been recognized by either the United States or the Soviet Union, and hence Australian policy-makers have had to carefully consider the official attitudes of both these world powers.

If it is true that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then it would seem that a vast heavenly bureaucracy was employed in the creation of the Indian Ocean as a geographic region. That any government should have a policy towards the Indian Ocean area is as unlikely as the region itself. It would be a bold analyst who would set out to give an account of Greenland’s relations with the Atlantic area, the latter defined as those territories – from Iceland to the Cape of Good Hope, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego – the shores of which are washed by that ocean. My task here is no less daunting.

In the preceding volume in this series Professor Macmahon Ball has described how in the period 1952 to 1960 the following factors operated to reconcile Australians to Japan: (1) with the realisation that Japan could again become a threat to Australia only if allied to her powerful Communist neighbours came the realisation that Japan must be assured of friendship, prosperity and international respect by the members of the Western camp; (2) the desire to fall in with Washington’s policies; (3) increasing dependence on Japan as a market. He also noted that, beyond the level of policy, good relations were being strengthened at the popular level as more and more Australians visited Japan as tourists and traders. He predicted that political relations between the two countries would become closer and indicated points at which, he hoped, Australia would take advantage of Japan’s special interests or capacities

“Australia’s policy on West New Guinea is almost a unique test of the wisdom, maturity and far-sightedness of our diplomacy. Almost every other foreign policy issue since 1945 has been in some way obscured or compromised by our relations with our powerful friends. But our stand on West New Guinea is our own.” The extent to which purely domestic considerations of sentiment and strategy have influenced Australia’s relations with her Asian neighbour is nowhere illustrated more baldly than in the case of her policy towards Indonesia, and in particular her stand on the Indonesian- Dutch dispute over West New Guinea. Except on a few rare occasions great-power politics have little influence on Australian policy in this area. Under both the Chifley and Menzies Governments we have frequently been out of step with our powerful friends. And in no other field of Australian foreign relations have our policies traversed so wide an arc.

As a small middle power in the Pacific, Australia’s major foreign policy problem is the problem of creating a framework of security within the general context of the United Nations and the specific geographical context of South-East Asia or the South-West Pacific. The traditional security afforded by the British navy disappeared after 1939 as effective British power contracted towards Europe and the United States became a major Pacific power. Attempting to pursue an independent policy, Australia has found that the global strength of the United States has set limits within which diplomatic manoeuvring is possible, and consequently that one of the major tasks of Australian diplomacy has been to collaborate with the United States and to influence, perhaps attempt to orientate, American policy in an area that is often of peripheral interest to Washington. London and Paris, Ottawa and Berlin, Moscow, Peking and New Delhi are all points of greater focal importance than Canberra to the United States.

Facilis descensus Averno. This old Latin tag is often in the minds and sometimes in the mouths of those who discuss colonial affairs. For one thing, once the path to independence or self-government becomes even faintly discernible, it appears to many people as a slippery descent, down which one slides all too easily. For another, the after-effects of independence or self-government often seem to Western observers to resemble the chaos of hell; the name ’Congo’ echoes in the background. But these are Western, European, observations. Former colonial people, especially their leaders like ex-President Nkrumah, frankly say that they prefer an independent hell to a well administered paradise, if hell and heaven are defined in terms of the absence or the presence of measurable economic benefits and the operation of Western democratic institutions.

Australia’s interests in its external territories can conceivably have an influence on Australia’s international relations, depending on what amount of truth there is in the assertion that nowadays foreign policy and colonial policy are interconnected and interacting. These connections and reactions, however, are usually very difficult to trace and to document since they exist only in the highest national councils and behind closed doors. So far as New Guinea and Nauru in the period under review are concerned, the repercussions of Australian policy in these territories on Australian foreign policy do not seem to have been very significant. There are two main fields in which such repercussions might be felt: in Australia’s relations with the United Nations and in regard to specific international issues such as the West New Guinea question; these fields are covered more directly in other chapters in this book, and here attention is confined to an examination of those aspects of Australian “colonial” policy in New Guinea and Nauru which may have had a bearing on international relations.

Studies of women in leadership in the Pacific tend to focus on the under-representation of women in the political branches of government. The number and role of women in the judicial branch has received less attention. Male judges outnumber women judges across the region, but the reasons for this, and its implications, have not been the subject of detailed study. Pacific judiciaries share many features with judiciaries in Asia and beyond. However, the context of small, island, developing states shapes the experiences of Pacific women and Pacific judges in distinctive ways. This chapter provides a history and comparative analysis of the appointment of women judges in the Pacific, focusing on the nine independent Commonwealth states of Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. It presents empirical data on the composition of the superior courts in these states, including judges’ gender and professional background. It examines how the criteria and processes for judicial appointment – including the distinctive use of foreign judges – affect the appointment of women to the judiciary. Finally, the chapter explores how judging in the Pacific might be gendered by examining high profile cases in which women judges have presided.