Distant Voices (70 page)

The truth is that Australians are one of the most profoundly colonised peoples on earth. Governments in Canberra may claim a voice of their own and that Australia is an independent and vigorous member of the world community. But this is not so. And when it has been so, the moment has been brief.

Most young Australians know of the Whitlam years
(1972–75), when an Australian government in 100 days laid the ground for the civilised, democratic society Australia was meant to be. Few will know of Ben Chifley's and Herbert Vere Evatt's ‘New World' (1945–49), in which Australia was to be non-aligned, prosperous and absent from other people's wars. Evatt, the foreign minister, was one of those who framed the UN Charter and, as first president of the UN, announced the Declaration of Human Rights. In 1948 Washington declared his government a ‘security risk' and began to undermine it: a prototype for a process later known as ‘destabilisation'.
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Today, Australia's place in the world is defined by the interests of its Western ‘protectors': the United States having long replaced Britain in this role. Australia at the United Nations has voted predominantly with what is known as the ‘Western European and Other Group'. Australia is part of the ‘other': an appendage. This has helped to refine an official obsequiousness, the ‘cringe' of which Keating spoke. Until a few years ago, what ought to have been Australia's proud national day was hardly recognised. On New Year's Day, 1901, when the states federated and became the ‘Commonwealth of Australia', the first governor-general, the Earl of Hopetoun, stood with his plumes limp in the rain in Centennial Park, Sydney, and listened not to rousing declarations of independence but to pleas from the local elite that the Royal Navy not leave its kith and kin to the mercy of the ‘yellow hordes' – those who might fall down upon them as if by the force of gravity. ‘The whole performance', wrote the historian Manning Clark, ‘stank in the nostrils. Australians had once again grovelled before the English.'
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In place of this national stillbirth, we have had April 25, ‘Anzac Day', an often drunken commemoration of hopeless hours in 1915 when Australians achieved ‘glory' in the charnel house at Gallipoli: one of Churchill's earlier ‘triumphs'. The Anzac ‘heritage' not only led us into other wars, it wedded us to a wrong view of history and ourselves.

This was the British connection to which Keating referred. It gave us King and Country and a viceroy empowered to
get rid of an elected government; and who did. Australian politics has never recovered from the coup against Whitlam, the circumstances of which remain part of a national pact of silence. As Whitlam himself has pointed out, the governor-general today ‘can sack the government, can appoint and sack ministers, can dissolve the House of Representatives'.
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The man who sacked Whitlam, Sir John Kerr, had close links with both British and American intelligence. On the day Whitlam was summoned by Kerr to be told he was out, he was threatening to expose the CIA network in Australia and, so the Americans believed, to tear up the treaty that gave the CIA control of one of the most important spy bases in the world: at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs.

Under the UKUSA Treaty, Australia allowed Britain and America to run electronic surveillance bases which are so secret they have ‘extra-terrestrial status'. Pine Gap is supplied direct by the US Air Force. It has its own water and power supplies. There is a seven-mile ‘buffer-zone' in the bush, and planes cannot fly within a four-kilometre radius of the base. The Australian Parliament and people know little of its function.

From Pine Gap and the base at Nurrungar, the Americans planned much of their nuclear war fighting strategy. This placed Australia on the front line of a potential nuclear war in Europe – without Australians' knowledge or approval. Today, under the same colonial treaty, another satellite base is being built at Geraldton in Western Australia, in keeping with American policy to intercept economic information. It will spy on Australia's neighbours in Asia, whose commercial secrets are likely to end up in London and Washington.
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The nuclear desert at Maralinga in South Australia is an enduring example of the colonial state. In 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee sent his Australian counterpart, Sir Robert Menzies, a top-secret cable asking for permission to test British nuclear weapons in Australia. James McClelland, the Australian judge who presided over the Royal Commission of Enquiry into the effects of the tests, told me, ‘Attlee asked Menzies if he could lend him his country for the atomic
tests. Menzies didn't even consult anybody in his cabinet. He just said yes. With anything that came from the British it was ask and you shall receive, as if they were God's anointed.'
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Once again, the Australian people knew nothing. Eighteen months later they were told in a one-paragraph announcement that ‘an atomic weapon' would be tested in Australia ‘in conditions that will ensure that there will be no danger to the health of people or animals'.
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This, of course, excluded the Aborigines who, unlike sheep, were not counted in the census.

The attitude shared by the British Government and its supplicants in Canberra was similar to that of the first colonisers of Australia in the late eighteenth century. To them, the Aborigines did not exist as human beings; Australia was ‘
terra nullius
': empty land. Today, an area almost the size of south Wales is contaminated with plutonium, scattered like talcum powder across the lands of Aboriginal people. In 1984 the McClelland commission went to London and sought information from British officials. They were, as McClelland recalled, ‘often treated contemptuously'. The commission recommended that the British be pressed to clean up their lethal mess. This has not happened and is unlikely to happen.

Nor are Australians likely to know the degree of long-term danger. Both Britain and America routinely censor Australian archives. As the historian Greg Pemberton recently wrote, ‘even federal cabinet records, the most precious of all government documents recording the collective decisions of our elected ministerial leaders, are being censored at the insistence of our allies . . . formerly open archival records which show Australia's links with the CIA are now being censored. All references to Britain's spy agencies MI5 and MI6 have long been expunged.'
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It was a pity that Keating failed to identify the current source of Australia's ‘cringe'. Since the US Navy ‘saved Australia' at the Battle of the Coral Sea, following the British rout at Singapore, Australia has provided Washington with unlimited favours: so much so that, according to a former US ambassador to Canberra, President Johnson ‘thought that
Australia was the next large rectangular state beyond El Paso and treated it accordingly'.
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Like his decision to hand Maralinga over to the British, Menzies kept from Australians his intentions to involve them in the American war in Vietnam. Menzies' emissaries pleaded with Washington to allow him to send troops. In 1962 Australians went as ‘advisers'. It was not until 1964 that it was revealed that many of them were members of ‘black teams' – death squads. They took orders from the CIA and their reports were kept from the Australian Army and the Australian Government. When the Menzies Government complained to Washington that the British were better informed on the progress of the war than America's Australian comrades-in-arms, the reply was succinct. ‘We have to inform the British to keep them on our side,' said George Bundy, the assistant secretary of state. ‘You are with us, come what may.'
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During the years of the Hawke Labor Government – of which Keating was a member from the outset – Australia's obedience was never in doubt. An electoral pledge to ‘without hesitation re-establish aid programmes to Vietnam' was abandoned following a phone call from George Schultz, the US secretary of state, to his ‘mate', Bob Hawke.
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In 1991 the foreign affairs minister, Gareth Evans, announced that Australia had at last achieved an independent foreign policy.
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This metamorphosis apparently had taken place since Evans took charge. Such self-congratulation is not unknown in a politician, especially one who used to be known as the ‘minister for mates': neither is it insignificant. For Evans and Hawke succeeded in covering Australia's continuing imperial ‘cringe' with a specious gloss – a peculiarly Australian deference that Paul Keating failed to acknowledge in his outspokenness.

The ‘Evans Plan' for Cambodia is often put forward as an important example. Adopted by the Permanent Five at the United Nations, it reflected American hostility towards Vietnam, rather than any proper assessment of the dangers of the Khmer Rouge. Had Evans gone to the General Assembly
with a plan that called not for an accommodation with the Khmer Rouge, but for their prosecution under the Genocide Convention, his claim of a truly independent foreign policy might have been justified. His initiative might have galvanised other governments uneasy about ‘toeing the American line on Cambodia', as one diplomat disclosed, and produced a result in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge truly isolated, instead of biding their time, as they are.
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In the build-up to the Gulf War Prime Minister Hawke, like Menzies before him, lobbied Washington for permission to send Australian troops. In one speech he used the ‘commanding moral authority of the UN' thirty-three times, concluding, ‘So now we must fight!'
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Driving home the point, he declared, ‘Big countries cannot invade small countries and get away with it.'
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Contrast that with Hawke's reaction to the Santa Cruz cemetery massacre in East Timor in 1991. Hawke
asked
Indonesia for ‘genuine contrition, a dinkum enquiry . . .'
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When the Indonesian Army attempted to cover up the massacres by announcing that it had found six officers guilty of ‘errors and negligence', Gareth Evans was among the first to ‘welcome' the ‘appropriate recognition that the military's behaviour was excessive . . .' and ordered federal police to remove East Timorese and Australian protesters from outside the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra. In 1989 Australia signed the Timor Gap Treaty with Indonesia, allowing Australian companies to exploit the petroleum resources in East Timor's waters. At the time Evans said, ‘There is no binding legal obligation not to recognise acquisition of territory that was acquired by force.'
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Evans has described Australia's sub-imperial role in Asia by using Secretary of State James Baker's metaphor of American power as ‘a balancing wheel'. The ‘central support' was the United States-Japan alliance; the southern spoke extended to Australia, ‘an important, staunch, economic, political and security partner'.
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When George Bush arrived in Australia in 1991 – the first visit by an American president for a quarter of a century – he was on his way to the ‘central support' of
the ‘balancing wheel'. The stop-over in Australia was, as the Washington press corps travelling with him knew, of little significance other than as a place to acclimatise to the eastern hemisphere. Australia, they were told, was ‘on the team'. He would play golf with his ‘old mate', Bob Hawke, and he would say a few words.

Every member of both houses of the Australian Parliament was flown back to Canberra, at the government's expense, to hear Bush speak. ‘We won't let you down,' he reassured them, ‘and we will stay involved right up to the very end of eternity because we know it's fundamentally in our interests and hope like hell it's in yours!'
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The Earl of Hopetoun, in presiding over Australia's ‘independence day' in 1901, delivered a similar assurance from Queen Victoria.

Paul Keating's political hero is Jack Lang, the ‘Big Fella', who was premier of New South Wales during the Great Depression. In 1930, the British banks, to which Australia was deeply in debt, sent an imperial bailiff, Sir Otto Niemeyer, to all but foreclose on the state's economy. Sir Otto demanded interest payments of £10 million a year. With a third of the workforce unemployed, he said Australians were ‘living luxuriously' and that wages and the dole would have to be cut. Lang promised, ‘No cuts in wages, no cuts in public services' and, if necessary, the debt would be repudiated.
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The ‘Big Fella' was sacked by Sir Philip Game, the governor of New South Wales, a British viceroy acting in the name of the King of England. Forty years later, uppity Gough Whitlam was got rid of in similar circumstances.

It is ironic that Keating looks back to Lang; for no Treasurer surrendered as much of Australia's economic independence and security as Keating. Throughout the 1980s, Keating and his ‘economic rationalists' paid court to the New York financial world, which could withhold credit ratings and turn its collective thumbs down on the Australian economy as effectively as Sir Otto Niemeyer had done half a century before.

With the rise of Alan Bond and the other ‘mates', the cult of the ‘markets' became an obsession of the Hawke–Keating
partnership; and sovereignty was exchanged for debt. Australia is the most foreign-owned developed country in the world, next to Canada. How can Keating speak of Australia ‘breaking free', having just announced legislation that will allow Japanese loggers to exploit almost 90 per cent of Australia's remaining tropical and temperate forests – in the cause of ‘investment'?
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I am of Keating's generation. We glued cotton wool to our Christmas cards, sang imperial hymns and memorised a catalogue of regal, violent events on the other side of the world; this was known as ‘history'. Some – like my mother's family – denied those of our forebears transported to ‘penal servitude' for ‘uttering unlawful oaths', rather than disclose ‘bad stock': the words Churchill used during the Second World War.
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