Australia to the 1990s and beyond…

I am in Adelaide. Lucky me, lucky Adelaide.

Have read two rather good essays, about Australia’s Place In the World. There are two quotes that speak to the same period, which covers me growing up (or taller, anyway) and then the mid-1990s pivot.

From Hugh White’s Quarterly Essay “Hard New World – our post-American future.”

“Our second big task is to rethink our relationship with America. In the decades before the mid-1990s, there was an assumption that – in a Whig-view-of-history way Australia was gradually but ineluctably emerging from dependence to independence as we left our colonial and imperial past behind and embraced our Asian future. That died away around the time John Howard became prime minister in 1996, when it seemed to many people that the future was America’s , and that Australia’s future was to become ever more tightly entwined with it, strategically, economically and culturally.”

(White, 2025:69)

And from Curran, J. 2025. “Continental gift: Trump and Australia’s place in the world” in Australian Foreign Affairs, no 23

“Culturally, the Howard period was also deeply significant. From the 1970s Australia had searched in vain for a post-imperial successor myth, a way of defining the country that was  as powerful as British race patriotism had been from the late 19th century down to the 1960s. The bush legend, the Eureka Stockade, Gallipoli, even the “Bodyline” cricket series: all were given a go. And all failed to muster much popular enthusiasm or give Australia a self-sufficient nationalism. Nevertheless, from the election of Whitlam to the end of the Keating government, there was broad agreement that Australia was pursuing engagement with Asia, that its formal constitutional links with Britain were declining and that it was seeking to come to terms with its poor record on the treatment of the nation’s Indigenous peoples.

“Howard rejected the idea of national “navel gazing” and defined Australia through the prism of the Anzac legend. Around it was also wrapped a rhetoric – and Howard again was the first to do this – that divined an Australian military tradition stretching all the way from Baghdad in 2003 to the colonial contingents that served with General Gordon in the Sudan in 1885. Further, over the next two decades, the commemorative culture of Anzac became indistinguishable from ennobling the US alliance in Australian history.”

(Curran, 2025: 22-3)

Yeah And here we are.