This essay attempts to identify and briefly discuss certain events and responses to events that have transformed the way in which the Southwest Pacific—Australia, New Zealand, and the islands—is perceived by those who live there as well as by overseas observers. As a commentator in whom the historical sense is strong, I shall not imply, I hope, that there are any shattering discontinuities to be noticed but rather that the present is continuous with the past. The future will certainly contain large elements of both. Although the uncovering of the Southwest Pacific was begun by Spaniards operating from the west coast of South America in the sixteenth century—and though the Dutch operating from Java in the seventeenth century made major discoveries, including Australia (1606) and New Zealand (1643)—it was not until the late eighteenth century that the area can be said to have been perceived with any accuracy by Europeans. The most effective actors in the eighteenth century were French and British explorers, representatives of a deep-seated imperialist rivalry, and the premier actor of all was the British explorer Captain James Cook. Without exhausting all the possibilities, Cook not only defined the area geographically but also made clear its relation to Antarctica to the south and to the North Pacific up to the Arctic. By rediscovering New Zealand and charting its islands with remarkable accuracy and by discovering the east coast of Australia, Cook suggested the places where European colonization was probably feasible. The British acted upon this in 1788, when they established the first European settlement in the area at Sydney in Australia. From that base the British during the nineteenth century established themselves step by step as the paramount power in the Southwest Pacific.
When the situation in the area was tidied up at the end of the nineteenth century in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the British had full sovereignty over, or a protectorate relation with, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Papua (passed by Britain to Australia as a colony in 1906), the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, Tonga, the Cook Islands (passed by Britain to New Zealand and made an integral part of New Zealand in 1901), and Pitcairn Island. The French had the Society Islands (including Tahiti), the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, and New Caledonia, as well as several minor groups; they shared the New Hebrides with the British under a condominium. The Germans had Western Samoa, several groups of Micronesian islands north of the equator up to the Philippines, the northeastern quarter of New Guinea, and associated with it several outlying islands, including some that were geographically in the Solomons. The Americans had Eastern Samoa and Hawaii. The First World War changed this situation: the Germans were expelled from their island possessions. German New Guinea passed to Australia as a mandate from the League of Nations, while Western Samoa became a mandate to New Zealand. Ex-German, phosphate-rich Nauru became a joint mandate of Australia, New Zealand, and Britain, Australia administering.
In general, the Southwest Pacific still stood in a colonial relation to the metropolitan European powers, of which the most prestigious was Britain, both worldwide and within the area. The British position was somehow supported by its position as the paramount European imperialist in Asia. It should be noticed that the British march to power in India, the base of their Asian power, effectively began about the same time as they were establishing themselves in the Southwest Pacific. On this reasoning, the decline of British power in Asia, which appears to have begun early in the twentieth century, would directly affect the world position of Australia and New Zealand. The effect was obvious in the years after the First World War and became determining after the Second.
By the end of the First World War, the British had been established in Australia for 132 years, in New Zealand for 80 (from 1840), in Fiji for 45 (from 1875), in New Guinea for 34, and so on. In sum the British position was largely created (or defined) during the nineteenth century, especially if we accept the historians’ view that the nineteenth century did not really end until 1914. Australia was of continental dimensions; New Zealand was fundamentally two large islands twelve hundred miles across the
Tasman Sea from Australia; and Fiji was a group of ninety five islands, of which the principal one was Viti Levu.
In economic terms the significant British focuses were Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji. All three were primary producers: Australia in 1920 was chiefly perceived as a producer of fine wool, wheat, and minerals (especially lead and zinc); New Zealand, as a producer of pasture-based products like butter, cheese, meat, and wool; and Fiji, as a producer of cane sugar. The export-import trades were in largest measure concentrated on London, as were financial relations. Differently put, the British possessions in the Southwest Pacific were firmly incorporated into the British imperial trading-financial system. In 1920 the British were resolute to preserve the position, to recover the status quo ante bellum, and to make progress along lines established in the nineteenth century. What that meant was summed up by the prime minister of Australia (1923–1929), Stanley Melbourne Bruce, in three words: men, money, and markets; that is, immigrants, investment capital, and remunerative export markets. Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji had historically sought to build up their production beyond the needs of the domestic markets and to sell the surpluses overseas, chiefly in Britain. Thus they were heavily dependent for national income on the export trade, and the health of the export trade was thus a sine qua non of domestic economic health. It was the failure of the British market between the wars to maintain its health—its capacity to absorb ever increasing imports at prices rewarding to the producers—that accounted for the troubles in the colonies and dominions in the period from 1920 to 1939.
Much of the economic story of the Southwest Pacific between the wars is unquestionably related to a failure to understand how deeply wounded Britain had been by the First World War. The colonial story is replete with improvisations to evade the point that “normalcy” was irrecoverable. Only belatedly was it recognized that the whole business needed rethinking, though both thinking and action of a creative kind were more or less unconsciously produced along the way. In Australia the Great Depression underlined the necessity of rethinking without actually causing it. In New Zealand the situation was different. There, in regard to both thought and action, the improvisations to escape the inadequacies of the British market chiefly involved tinkering with the “market” in one way or another. They involved the “syndication” of the producers and the engineering of one price for domestic
consumers and the “world price” for surpluses—the two averaged to give remunerative returns to the producers. There was no disposition to adopt the policy of a “little less” to accommodate to constricted markets by reducing supplies, since in both Australia and New Zealand the overall emphasis was on development. When the depression came along and further constricted markets, the task became to defend the special colonial position in the British market, for which the quid pro quo to Britain was “preference” for British commodities in the colonial markets. The upshot of this was the great shift in British trade policy known as “Ottawa” (1932), which had the effect of tying Australia and New Zealand more tightly than ever into the imperial trading system. Both countries were quite complacent about this, New Zealand more so than Australia. The first obvious line of escape was diversification of trade outlets, an escape not really feasible in a depressed world but which came into its own in both countries after the Second World War. The second line of escape was to effect a structural change in the domestic economy by elaborating and intensifying factory industry. In Australia this course was pursued by private enterprise during the 1920s and 1930s and, by the time of the Second World War, it was the favored policy for growth among all political parties. It was much less feasible for New Zealand, and it was only feasible for island economies like Fiji’s insofar as a limited range of light industries might be set up.
Australia and New Zealand had controlled their domestic affairs under the forms of “responsible government” from the 1850s, and for practical purposes both had had the status of “dominion” since 1907. They were both firmly involved, however, in the imperial financial system. The accumulated balance of funds in London was the measure of their financial health. The capital they required beyond local accumulations came from London on both public and private account. Non-British investment was marginal. They had local currencies in pounds, shillings, and pence, and the maintenance of their par value with sterling was a sacred dogma. The illusion was that they were on the gold standard; the reality was that they were on a sterling standard. Failure to maintain par with sterling during the depression was a traumatic experience, especially in New Zealand. Banking was in the hands of private banks—Australian, New Zealand, and British. Australia did not have a reserve bank formally until after the Second World War, but New Zealand established one in the 1930s. One of New Zealand’s
purposes was to gain knowledge and better control of its London balance, for the private banks mixed New Zealand’s funds with Australia’s funds in London to the confusion of New Zealand’s understanding of its true position. But, whatever the particulars of the situation, the gist of the matter was that the British possessions (and mandates) in the Southwest Pacific were securely entangled in the British imperial financial system, the French islands in the French, the American in the American. In finance as in trade, the task after the Second World War was to temper, or escape from, this overinvolvement, particularly for Australia and New Zealand.
Domestically, Australian politics was conducted within a federal system, initiated in 1901, New Zealand politics within a unitary system tempered to some extent by a persistent regionalism. In Australia the fundamental political division was between a social democratic party (Labor) on the one hand and the conservatives on the other. The Australian Labor party had existed continuously since federation, but the majority conservatives had a history of recurring instability. Moreover, the conservatives had been a divided force since the end of the First World War—and to the present day. The majority conservatives were urban-based with some country support, procapitalist, and strongly imperial-minded; while the minority conservatives, gathered into a stable grouping called the Country party, were of course rural-oriented—appealing to moderately well-to-do farmers and graziers and apt to be critical of urban capitalists and their aspirations and doings—but thoroughly proimperial in outlook. On balance, the Country party conservatives were more conservative than the urban-oriented grouping, which normally had a “liberal” wing. Both conservative groups were held together by a strong anti-Labor bias. Between the wars, neither could hope to hold power alone, so the political solution was to form coalition governments, thus compounding the fissiparous character of the conservatives generally.
The Labor party, which had split over the issue of conscription for overseas service in 1916, did not return to office until 1929, and then only briefly. Labor was seen as the party of innovation, while the conservatives were the party of resistance (especially to Labor). The conservative coalition ruled throughout the interwar period except for the years from 1929 to 1931, so for that whole period innovation got short shrift, except when the conservatives could see it as shoring up the status quo—for example, in tinkering
with the market. By the end of the 1930s, it looked as though resistance had decisively triumphed over innovation, but in 1941 Labor gained office once again and held it for eight years.
The position in New Zealand was different. There the anti-Labour parties ruled from 1912 up to 1935, when Labour achieved office and power for the first time in history. It retained both until 1949. For legitimization it harked back to the Liberal regime of Richard Seddon, 1839–1906, thus attaching itself to a powerfully appealing New Zealand tradition. New Zealand Labour had arrived at what may be characterized as its left-liberal position after a warm devotion to a doctrinaire socialism for over a dozen years after its founding in 1916. During the depression there had been a fierce struggle within the ruling conservative party between those who recognized the need to innovate to meet the unprecedented conditions and those who proposed to meet them in a stolidly orthodox fashion.
In summary, what Labour set out to do was (I) take into government hands the responsibility for economic and social policy, while interfering as little as possible with the capitalist foundations of the rural-biased economy; (2) redistribute the fruits of the capitalist economy through mechanisms clearly in the control of the government; and (3) insulate the country from the effects of economic fluctuations overseas by taking the control of foreign trade and finance into the hands of government. The effect was to turn New Zealand into a tightly controlled country, well beyond anything hitherto experienced. It was not socialism, since the capitalist base was preserved, but it was a capitalism socialized to a marked degree. It was also an adaptation to the world of the depression that might not survive in a differently constituted world. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, the depression dissolved into the Second World War. Now war itself was a great “socializer,” as had been made clear by the First World War, and New Zealand seemed to be on the wave of the future. Thus, as the Second World War approached, Australia was firmly in the hands of its cautious conservatives, while New Zealand was undergoing an innovative reordering even more startling than that of the 1890s.
Both regarded themselves as integral parts of the British Empire, New Zealand even more decisively than Australia. Neither was concerned to act upon the innovations afforded by the Statute of Westminster, 1931. In fact, Australia did not formally accept all the provisions of the statute until 1942, New Zealand not until 1947—both finally acting at the behest of Labor governments. The
concern of both was to have a voice as of right in decision making on the imperial foreign policy. Once decided, the policy would be common to all the empire, which would, so to say, speak with a single voice, disregarding local reservations. That was what the Australians and New Zealanders believed was required by “the diplomatic
unity of the Empire,” founded in the dogma (already somewhat eroded) of the “indivisibility of the Crown” (or of sovereignty). In the later 1930s the Australian conservatives consistently supported British policy as it unfolded, including Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. New Zealand Labour took an independent tack. It took a strong stand against European dictators and Japan, invoking “collective security” and proclaiming a resolute opposition to disturbers of the peace by violence, both in imperial councils and at the League of Nations. Both countries, however, arrived eventually at the same destination—war. But, as they did so, New Zealand reasserted loyalty to the old formulation, “when Britain is at war, the Empire is at war.”
Both nations, however, came to that cataclysmic decision on war with unresolved doubts, both about the probable nature of the war in Europe and about the probable effect of the European war on the situation in the Pacific and Asia—in short, on Japan. There was no question about the compelling imperial logic of supporting Britain in Europe. But what about the position of Australia and New Zealand if Japan, encouraged by the war in Europe, should turn southward and therefore toward them? In defense terms, what should they prepare to defend themselves against? How strongly could they rely upon their traditional defender, Britain, to take care of them in the extreme situation of a Japanese attack? Could they depend upon Singapore, the symbol of British power east of Suez, to keep the Japanese at a safe distance—well north of the equator? And could any useful help be obtained from America, which between the wars was little known and held in low esteem? Australia and New Zealand went into the Second World War with these doubts unresolved, and the actual course of the war intensified them. In 1940 the Australians—with a nice impartiality—established diplomatic relations with the United States, Japan, and China, protesting the while that they were not violating the diplomatic unity of the British Empire. By contrast New Zealand’s first minister arrived in Washington only after Pearl Harbor. It was the war with Japan in the western Pacific that propelled Australia and New Zealand into the international arena in their own distinctive national personalities. The imperatives of that new
situation led to the gradual transformation of the traditional outlook of both countries on world affairs. The Second World War is thus a decisive turning point in the history of the Southwest Pacific.
There were, however, important continuities, not least the demographic and cultural. Australia, though situated geographically close to the “colored” peoples of Asia and the Pacific islands, perceived itself—self-consciously and even stridently—as a “white” country. The Australian “whites” were predominantly of British stock (“98 percent British,” the politicians said), including a considerable proportion of Irish. The non-British “white” peoples within the resident population—some of them long-established—included Germans, French, Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, and Scandinavians—all few in number. These “whites” of Australia—British and Europeans alike—seemed to be oddly distributed on a continent replete with empty spaces. In each state there was a single great city, a few small provincial towns, and a scatter of population inland. Although Canberra became the national capital in 1927, it grew to substantial size only after the Second World War. The concentration of population was in the southeastern part of the country—Sydney and Melbourne being the two largest cities.
In New Zealand the concentration of population was in the North Island, which contained the two principal, though small, cities of Auckland and Wellington; the South Island also had two major cities, Christchurch and Dunedin. Taking the towns and cities together, New Zealand was only slightly less urbanized than Australia, although New Zealand as a whole had more provincial towns. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia had a population of about 7.5 million, New Zealand about 1.5 million.
In the islands, the indigenous populations everywhere predominated (except in Fiji, where the Indians were overtaking the native Fijians), and in each group the Europeans, while a small minority, were predominant politically and economically. As it happened, the largest single European community in the islands was not in British territory but in French New Caledonia.
Australia’s sense of “whiteness” was fortified by its exclusionary immigration policy, by its insistence on a historical “Britishness,” by the character of its political culture, by the dominance of the British factor in cultural affairs, and by the proempire—more precisely, pro-Britain—orientation of the establishment in its political and other manifestations. The sustaining word was “loyalty,” the ultimate disparaging epithet was “disloyal.” (To
what? Why, to the Empire!) New Zealand was even more “British” and “loyal” than Australia, both in actuality and in the self-conception of its people. Perhaps the New Zealanders were also reacting to Australian nationalism, which though latent after the war began to revive around 1930.
Australian nationalism had first found expression most potently among writers and painters in the 1880s and was vigorous up to 1914, while at the political level it had been given expression by the Labor party. The First World War dealt a heavy blow to cultural and political nationalism alike. While both revived in the 1930s, they noticeably gained strength during the Second World War, when Labor was in power. After the war the position of Australia and the condition of the world required a nationalistic response from whoever was in office. Between the wars Australian patriotism was normally double-barreled: one barrel was for Australia and one for the empire. Which barrel was fired depended upon the issue. It was rare to find anybody carrying a single-barreled gun of either kind. In both Australia and New Zealand, the cultural influence, historically and contemporaneously, was overwhelmingly British; the influences coming from Europe, North America, and Asia were of minimal importance. In a sense that was the “thesis.” The second most important factor was the Australian response, figuring as the “antithesis.” On this reasoning an Australian culture was bound to emerge as a synthesis. But, in the prevailing circumstances, its emergence was necessarily slow, and its exponents frequently found themselves in an uncomfortable adversary position vis-à-vis the predominantly British tone of the local establishments.
At the governmental level (and in education up to the university level) conservatives were little interested in nationalism in either country. In the 1930s in both countries, there was cultural ferment—in literature, painting, and education—at all levels and on practically all questions. The genesis of this ferment can be found in the 1920s, but its surfacing belongs to the 1930s. It came at a time when Australia was dominated by the conservatives and New Zealand by Labour. In both countries this burgeoning cultural nationalism survived the stresses of war. Thus the origins of the cultural change that came in both countries after the Second World War must be sought in the ferment of the Great Depression.
In the postwar world as in the 1930s, the restrictive immigration policies of both Australia and New Zealand were aimed at Asians. Those immigration policies had always symbolized a sense
of psychocultural distance from Asia. Australia and New Zealand perceived themselves as European outposts under the overhang of Asia, and Asia was a menace to them. Their economic relations with Asia were minimal beside the tie to Britain, and their political relations to Asia were via Britain, not direct. It was the tie to Britain that allowed these countries to sustain their distance from Asia since Britain, the paramount power in Asia, was able to prevent any serious challenge by Asians to the Australia-New Zealand position. In regard to the colored peoples of the islands, the position was different. There was no sense of menace or fear of the islanders. Indeed, the situation there was reversed, for in the late nineteenth century the “trade” in kanakas was a scandal in which Australia, through its employment of them on plantations in Queensland, was deeply involved. By the First World War that was a thing of the past. Between the wars it was an unexamined assumption in both countries that the islanders were firmly under the control of their metropolitan masters. Little thought was given to the Asian communities in the islands, of which the most conspicuous was the Indian community in Fiji. There was remarkably little Australian interest in New Guinea between the wars, but the New Zealanders took considerable notice of Western Samoa because of persistent unrest among the Samoans, the most ardent politicians of all island peoples. In general, the new ideas about the proper relations between metropolitan and dependent peoples received little attention in the Southwest Pacific in these years. Only when the whole question of relations with dependent peoples came up for debate in the Second World War did Australia and New Zealand undertake a thorough reappraisal of their attitudes toward the islanders.
In the 1930s the old idea that the islands were a “protective shield” was revived. Australia was assumed to have a special responsibility in this respect in the New Guinea-Solomon Islands area, New Zealand in Fiji and vicinity. In New Zealand the domestic concern was with the indigenous Maoris, a perennial problem since the earliest days. The Polynesian Maoris were a sizable and growing minority, predominantly rural by residence but beginning to move into the towns. By contrast, the Aborigines of Australia were an almost invisible minority of blacks in a “white country,” mostly out of sight in the outback and effectively out of mind. In the late 1930s the “abo” problem began to assume a more central position in the repertory of Australian concerns, and after the Second World War it emerged as a social problem of real exigency.
From 1939 to 1941 the Australian preoccupation with the islands was strategic. At that time the British and French dominions and colonies in the Southwest Pacific were at war in Europe. Since the central point of British imperial strategy was “Europe First”—on the argument that, if the center (i.e., Britain) holds, all will hold—Australia and New Zealand had committed their war-making capacities to the British effort in Europe and North Africa. However, the nagging uncertainties about the probable or possible course of Japan in the western Pacific continued. Neither dominion had the resources to deal adequately with war on two fronts; hence the western Pacific was being slighted. Then in 1940 the staggering shift of forces in Europe produced a crisis. Australia and New Zealand were told by the British that, for the time being at least, Britain could not be counted on to reinforce Singapore if Japan turned southward. The Australians questioned whether Singapore was the only key, speculating that Japan might strike them from their mandated islands and proceed via New Guinea down the east coast of the continent to the Australian heartland. Nevertheless, they redeployed their inadequate reserves—chiefly to Singapore and secondarily into the island shield.
When the Australians sent their minister to Washington in 1940, they were not only advertising their own perilous predicament but also attempting to persuade the Americans to support the imperial position in the western Pacific. Even though the United States had assumed greater control of relations with Japan, there had been almost no joint military planning. When the Japanese turned south, the Americans and British had to improvise a resistance. It was strikingly unsuccessful, fundamentally because of a shared underappreciation of Japan’s capacity to wage a war to the south. The assault on Pearl Harbor, the fall of Singapore, the collapse of the Philippines, the takeover of the Netherland East Indies, and the arrival of the Japanese in New Guinea—these were great symbolic events as well as military disasters. As the Australian military had anticipated, these defeats left the Australian continent as the sole viable base in the western Pacific from which to mount a campaign against the Japanese. That was also the assessment of the Americans; so, when it became clear that the Pacific war would be primarily an American responsibility, an Australian-New Zealand-American collaboration became inevitable. The collaboration arose out of strategic necessity—not from a diplomatic triumph or any vague sense of kinship. In the fight against the Japanese, not only were Australian and New Zealand
bases of fundamental importance, but such islands as Western Samoa, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, the Solomons, and New Guinea were involved either as secondary bases or as scenes of fighting. The waters environing the islands were also of primary importance in the war because the Japanese were stopped in the islands, and that naval victory preserved American access to Australia and New Zealand.
Labor was newly in office in Australia when the Japanese struck. In New Zealand Labour had been in office and power for six years. In both countries these governments continued in office throughout the war and beyond, both being displaced by conservatives in 1949. From then on, though there has been some alternation in office, the conservatives have predominated. (For conservative read “anti-Labor.”) From 1972 to 1975 both countries were again under Labor governments, but in 1975 both passed once again into conservative hands. Indeed, from the end of the First World War to 1978, Australia has been governed by conservative coalitions for forty-eight of fifty-eight years. This way of putting it sharply understates the influence of Labo(u)r, particularly on general social policy. Rather frequently, the political balance in both countries has been so nearly even as to leave the conservatives only precariously on top. Continuously in both countries, the Labor parties have been, and still are, the recognized official political opposition as well as the established ideological, social, and cultural opposition to the conservatives.
Australian Labor’s first duty after the outbreak of war was to guarantee the survival of the country. In the circumstances, that meant swinging the country toward the United States. The great question was whether this was a permanent political reorientation or an accommodation to the circumstances that the U.S. was a surrogate for Britain in this war. It took a long time to answer that question. But it soon became clear that whatever the final answer was to be—and it is not final even yet—the effect of the Second World War, particularly the Pacific war, was to intensify sharply the nationalistic responses of Australia to the challenges confronted. That response was quite consistent with Australian Labor’s traditional stance and also with the personal views of Dr. H. V. Evatt, Labor’s foreign policy spokesman over the eight years it was in office. On the other hand, the Labor prime ministers during those years—John Curtin and Ben Chifley—were rather more inclined to preserve the traditional political and defense ties with the British Empire Commonwealth. It is not unfair to say
that whereas Evatt believed in devolution, up to and including total autonomy, his prime ministers did not. Evatt thought that the war would further diminish imperial power east of Suez and that Australia must of necessity defend its own position in the new situation because while Britain could withdraw, Australia had to remain. Apart from careful accommodation to the new circumstances, Evatt foresaw that the British withdrawal would probably be slow. Since in his view Australia was rising, he thought Australia should assume primary responsibility for British interests east of Suez, with Britain backing Australia as hitherto Australia had backed Britain.
Evatt, however, was no better a prophet than anybody else. Not only did he fail to foresee the shape of the postwar world, he overestimated Australia’s power to determine its own international positions. As a marginal power Australia could only realize its own policies by accommodating them to the politics of the great powers. In the final analysis Evatt vaguely understood this. He rejected power politics and embraced the idea of the sovereign equality of all nations. He sought to realize Australia’s objectives through a United Nations so organized as to curb the great powers’ disposition to power politics and tip the weight in decision making more toward the numerous small powers.
Evatt also had some specific concerns. He was friendly to colonial aspirations to freedom, as can be illustrated by his policy in Indonesia. He was fearful of a militaristic-imperialistic revival in Japan and adamantly opposed the Japanese peace treaty negotiated by the U.S. He promoted a development and welfare policy in the islands, but he did not foresee early independence for any group. He sought to promote the advancement of his own Labor party’s position by promoting full employment at the international level. Evatt failed to achieve what he really wanted, namely, a firm American guarantee of Australia’s security. To go with that, he also wanted a regional collective security agreement among Australia, New Zealand, and the emerging nations of South and Southeast Asia. He hoped the U.S. would provide an endorsement of that pact and the necessary military strength, but he was reluctant to permit direct American participation in it.
In 1949 Evatt lost his position as foreign minister, but from 1950 to 1960 he was leader of the Labor opposition in the federal Parliament. His general position then was to criticize conservative foreign policy by stressing the United Nations, not least during the Suez crisis of 1954. That criticism was quite consistent
with his own policy while in office, but it is also fair to say that his policies represented more an aspiration than a realistic appraisal of world politics. Evatt failed, not because his ideals were ignoble, but because he concerned himself too little with the reality of foreign relations and became obsessed with the ideal as he conceived it.
The war provided the Labor government with both the occasion and the necessity for a fairly comprehensive control by the central government of production, distribution, and exchange—to which it was predisposed by its own ideology. Since the First World War, centralization of power had been the Labor ideal, but it remained unrealized because of constitutional restrictions even more than electoral failures. Labor did not seek control at the center for its own sake but to promote a social democratic polity. In Labor’s imagination the central issue was control of finance, with which Labor had become more and more obsessed since 1911. As it happened, the shift of financial predominance to the central government had begun during the First World War, had not been reversed between the wars, and had been resoundingly confirmed during the Second World War. Labor had advanced the cause when in office during both wars, but anti-Labor—ostensibly opposed to federal dominance in finance by conviction and policy—not only had failed to reverse the trend but actually came to accept it and freely exercised that power after 1949. Labor espoused a “mixed” economy but had a built-in bias in favor of the public sector. Threaded through Labor opinion was a highly critical view of capitalism and private enterprise.
The postwar Labor reconstruction program embraced a variety of objectives: centralized decision making, membership in international institutions, economic growth with an emphasis on the public sector, encouragement of white immigration, full employment, expanded welfare policies and educational opportunities, support for the arts and welfare and development policies in New Guinea and the islands. After 1945 Labor set about implementing this program in a somewhat chaotic national and international environment, one characterized by the dollar shortage (Australia was traditionally a dollar-short country), the fear of the return of general depression, the distressing position of the United Kingdom (still to Australia a primary point of reference), and uncertainty about communism at home and overseas. Labor lost office at the end of 1949, ostensibly because of the success of the conservative parties in exploiting the notion that Labor was soft on communism
at home, but more perhaps because the anti-Labor forces had decried as “socialism” Labor’s effort to nationalize banking. The conservative campaign was seemingly supported by the court decision that nationalization was unconstitutional. Perhaps Australia was feeling the “swing to the right” which had already affected New Zealand and would soon affect Britain and the United States. At any rate the conservatives were back, but nobody, including themselves, had any prevision of how long they would stay in power. To an astonishing extent, Labor had defined an agenda of concerns to which the conservatives would have to provide the answers.
New Zealand Labour at the time of its defeat in 1949 was disheveled and exhausted. Up to the outbreak of the war, it had been fully occupied with installing its system of social management for which the annus mirabilis was 1938. The Labour government had assumed the burden of rearmament but was uncertain what to do and unclear as to its purposes. Unlike the conservatives, Labour had never supported the completion of the Singapore base while in opposition and did so only after gaining office. When in 1940 Britain said it could no longer reinforce Singapore if worse came to worst in the Far East, New Zealand’s Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser was outraged, alleging that the foundation of New Zealand’s defense had been destroyed. But New Zealand nevertheless continued the war effort, concentrating on Europe. At the end of 1941, when Australia withdrew troops from North Africa and brought them home to be deployed against Japan, New Zealand gave in to Winston Churchill and allowed its troops to remain in North Africa. When in 1944 Australia and New Zealand formally concerted their foreign policy ideas and aspirations in a famous agreement, it was the New Zealanders who insisted that both were British countries and that the language of the agreement should reflect that fact.
When the Americans entered the Southwest Pacific, the New Zealanders fervently hoped the U.S. was merely standing in for the British and held onto that hope much longer than the Australians. New Zealand found the adjustment to new and changing circumstances far harder to make than did the Australians. To the extensive efforts at social reconstruction begun before the war, New Zealand Labour added the exhausting efforts of the wartime struggle. And they labored hard at the San Francisco conference to realize their ideals of international organization, especially in the arrangements about dependent peoples.
The controlled and directed society they had constructed to realize their peacetime ideals had proved, somewhat tightened up and redirected, very serviceable for war. But now the system had to be readjusted to peace while it was under attack from the right by its conservative political opponents and from the left by communists in the labor unions. The Labour leadership began to scold and also to give ground. The syndicates were returned to the producers for operation, as though to say that Labour was no longer sure that the government could carry the entire burden of the economy. The regime appeared no longer sure of its ideology. The conservatives—sensing Labour’s tiredness, uncertainty, and willingness to give a little but recognizing too its stubborn disposition to defend essentials—stepped up their attacks and argued for a return to private enterprise. Whether because the voters accepted this proposal or because they felt an exhausted Labour party deserved a rest, they voted Labour out in 1949.
The conservatives did not recreate a free-enterprise economy in New Zealand. They found themselves inextricably involved in a directed economy. They might ease the constrictions here and shift the emphasis there, but they could not systematically dismantle the structure built by Labour. Though they wished to do so for ideological reasons, they were faced by both internal and external economic imperatives that compelled them to retain or restore controls. Consequently, New Zealand since the war has been a classic example of a managed economy, though directed mainly by conservative politicians who felt obligated to protect the welfare of the citizen. This policy was made necessary by the character of New Zealand’s export-import trade, on which it had been historically heavily dependent. The British market, still of primary importance, was insecure and uncertain after the war and was increasingly threatened by Britain’s movement toward entry into the European Common Market.
New Zealand has, therefore, been required to search for alternative markets for its limited range of traditional exportable commodities, and it has proved hard to make any economically weighty additions to that list. New Zealand’s exports today find their way to about 150 different markets, but in most cases the quantities are small. The greatest success has been in Australia, the U.S., and Japan, but no new market has been found that would really replace Britain. The search has required constant efforts to adjust domestic production to the possibilities of external sales—for example, by the reordering and diversification of the still important
pasture-based industries, such as dairying. No great new industry has appeared to give New Zealand a major lift, though the exploitation of the forests for pulp, paper, and chips has had useful consequences. The development of the abundant hydroelectric resources for the treatment of Australian raw materials may also be profitable economically, even if costly environmentally. Any wholly satisfactory shift into manufacturing is very unlikely, although factory industry would seem to be well worth cultivating. Nor is there any solution in free trade with Australia—first, because New Zealand’s pasture products are competitive with Australian products and, second, because the New Zealand demand for Australian manufactures quickly outruns the Australian demand for New Zealand’s remaining exportable commodities, which causes acute balance-of-payment problems. In short, what New Zealand requires is an overseas market comparable under the new circumstances to the British market in the past, and it has yet to be found.
The change in the pattern of production in New Zealand has been accompanied by a considerable shift in the distribution of the population. There has been a continuing movement from the rural areas to the towns, from the South Island to the North, and from the south of the North Island to the north of the North Island—all this along with a slow rise of total population and a gradual diversification by nationality and racial origin. The total “European” population now approaches 3,000,000. About 70 percent of the 200,000 Maoris are concentrated in the North Island and are undergoing constant urbanization. They are still an economically depressed group in the New Zealand community and are undereducated in European terms. There is a powerful disposition to try to preserve the Maori cultural heritage, and the influence of the Maoris on the British culture of New Zealand is greater and more visible than, say, that of the Hawaiian culture on Americanized Hawaii. Nevertheless, the British culture clearly sets the tone of the country.
Since the war the tone of New Zealand nationalism has increased in resonance at the expense of the traditional British influence. The change is visible in literature and painting and also in education, particulary in the reorganized and expanded university system. The cultural influences flowing into New Zealand are today far more cosmopolitan than they used to be, and New Zealand is far more hospitable to them than it used to be—though the New Zealanders are rather less receptive to foreign cultural
influences than the Australians. The New Zealanders seem to be determined to establish and defend their own cultural identity against Britain, Australia, or whomever. It is upon this determination that they take their national stand, although the often projected closer orientation toward Australia has changed their economic and foreign policies.
Perhaps one might say that New Zealand has an Australian problem—one that arises as much out of the contrast in size of the two countries as out of definable differences of outlook. Australia tends to assume, consciously or unconsciously, a posture of bigness vis-à-vis the smallness of New Zealand to the exasperation of the New Zealanders. Moreover, Australia tends to its relation to New Zealand rather fitfully. The intimacy of relations proposed in the Australia-New Zealand Agreement of 1944, a sharp deviation from the indifference of the interwar years, has never quite come off in the shape suggested, especially when major issues are under consideration. Australia decides, and New Zealand’s agreement is assumed rather than achieved by prior joint discussion of the question. Occasional reiterations of the 1944 concord have not been followed up in practice as conscientiously as is required to keep relations harmonious. The New Zealanders grumble in private but make no scenes in public. The result is that not all observers are aware that there is any tension at all between the two countries.
The difference between their views of foreign policy questions is unquestionably subtle and easily overlooked abroad. From long association the British gained an exceptional sensitivity to this difference, and it is still occasionally useful to New Zealand, as when Britain finally joined the European Common Market. Just as New Zealand’s loyalty to Britain was adjudged more intense than that of any other dominion between the wars, so New Zealand’s nostalgia about its historical loyalty has been more visibly operative in the postwar years. More obviously even than Australia, New Zealand has sought to preserve the British connection, even while Britain was unquestionably declining in strength. It has done so while accommodating itself to the new reality, ordinarily in association with Australia, but with a visible lack of enthusiasm. The ANZUS treaty of 1951 is a good example. It was undoubtedly realistic of New Zealand to accept the treaty. It was also realistic for it to accept logical concomitants like the wars in Korea and Vietnam, SEATO, and so on, just as it was “realistic” to join the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
These policies were no doubt realistic, but a realism that tramples on a cherished tradition cannot be expected to generate enthusiasm. It was a matter of intelligent accommodation—an accommodation made more feasible by the continuing decline of Britain, the real object of New Zealand’s affections. Thus New Zealand in its way was forced by history to act more or less nationalistically—to adjust reluctantly to a world it never made and did not much like. Accommodation was the ruling necessity over the crucial twenty years from 1951 to 1971. While alternatives like nonalignment were explored, the ruling conservatives doggedly stuck to a policy of accommodation to the new power alignments.
As for the Pacific islands, both Australia and New Zealand were keenly interested in the reform of the relations between the metropolitan powers and their dependent peoples. They argued for economic and social policies along the lines of Britain’s Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of 1929, 1940, and 1945. They espoused the cause of accountability for stewardship to an international body, and they contributed greatly to the success of the principal organization for which they were responsible, the South Pacific Commission, most particularly in public health measures. Neither country foresaw the rapid decolonization that began in the late 1940s. Western Samoa set the pace in the islands in demanding freedom. This it achieved in 1962, leaving New Zealand with a heavy, continuing financial obligation, an intimate advisory position with regard to foreign relations, and a responsibility as principal source of technical assistance.
The Australian relation to New Guinea (the colony of Papua now combined administratively with the trust territory of New Guinea) developed differently. New Guinea was much larger. With regard to population, development, consciousness of national identity (as opposed to tribal loyalty), and acculturation to western values, New Guinea was far more complex than Western Samoa. The sheer magnitude of the task of bringing New Guinea to the point where independence could be contemplated was staggering—even taking into account the strong external pressures from the United Nations to get to that point. Nor was the task facilitated by the assumptions of the Australian government or the attitudes of either the resident whites or the public servants posted to the country. Given the standards of the time, it was quite understandable that the Australians were pessimistic about the prospects of independence—let alone about what might happen after independence. Nevertheless, after an intermediate step of self-government,
independence was achieved by the end of 1975. The Australian government was left with an onerous, continuing financial obligation and an ambiguous responsibility for defense, internal order, and technical assistance of various sorts.
The British problems in Fiji were rather different from those faced by New Zealand and Australia. When the wind of decolonization really began to blow, there was no delight in it for the Fijians. They had had a special status in their country since Britain acquired sovereignty in 1874; a special protection was conferred upon them by a governmental system somewhat analogous to the “indirect rule” devised by Lord Lugard in Africa. The Fijians wished to preserve that status all the more intensely as the Indian population moved inexorably to numerical dominance. Anxious to protect their position, the Fijians regarded independence with concern because, if it brought one-man one-vote democracy, they would, in the absence of their protectors, fall under the dominance of the Indians. Even so, after a series of careful negotiations lasting up to 1971, the problem was finally solved to the ostensible satisfaction of both groups.
The only remaining problems for the British were Tonga, the Solomons, and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Tonga, a protectorate, resumed independence in 1971. The Solomons achieved a precarious independence in July 1978. Self-government in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, now separated into the Gilbert Islands and Tuvalu, will be coming soon. That will leave almost all the Australian, New Zealand, and British colonies either in full independence or in something so near it as to make little difference. Whether it is a good thing that the Southwest Pacific has been decolonized is difficult to say. Clearly it was the inevitable consequence of a great shift in the sense of propriety in the world’s view of relations between governments and subject peoples that began early in this century and gained force during the Second World War. The change was encouraged, too, by the patronage of the very differently motivated anticolonial powers, America and the Soviet Union, and it rather quickly became a universal imperative after 1945. Along the way, freedom became hypostatized at the expense of any concern for political and economic viability. None of the Southwest Pacific island countries can be said to be economically viable, and few give unequivocal promise of political stability. They are what they are today because of the influence of Europe since the end of the eighteenth century, when the “fatal
impact” was first felt and the destabilization of their indigenous cultures began. None has ever been as completely transformed as Hawaii—a cautionary paradigm of the ultimate island fate—and none is likely to become so. But, today in the islands, there is a pervasive anxiety about economic viability and cultural integrity—the former closely related to European conceptions and norms and the latter related to the continuing concern for a solid, unique identity. Material aid can be expected, or at least solicited, from international agencies and from Australia and New Zealand, joint but not coequal leaders of the area. But the islands are a long way from real economic or political self-sufficiency.
To summarize the main themes of this book. It should be apparent that on the turntable of the Second World War the three segments of the Southwest Pacific—Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific islands—have been reoriented from positions of close involvement in the trade, financial, cultural, defense, and foreign policy systems of Great Britain toward positions of autonomy or independence. That is very clearly true of Australia and New Zealand, but it is true as well of those island groups that were formerly within a British Empire that had been the predominant power in the area since the end of the eighteenth century.
The rise and consolidation of British imperial power in Asia had for long years allowed Australians, New Zealanders, and British subjects in the Southwest Pacific to remain effectively isolated from Asia. Although the world position of the Southwest Pacific began to shift after the First World War, there was only an incomplete recognition between the wars of that transformation. Indeed, only after the Second World War has it become entirely apparent—as far as the Southwest Pacific is concerned—that the decline of the British Empire, particularly east of Suez, has been as important as ever was the rise of the empire in the earlier days.
This great change—with the Second World War as the turning point—has thrust the Southwest Pacific squarely into a world from which it had earlier felt apart and has forced it to redefine its relation to Europe, to Britain, to America, to Japan, and to Asia in general. But thus far the world has largely failed to redefine, either in fact or in imagination, the new place of the Southwest Pacific in the world of nations. It will soon have to do so. No longer merely ancillary to British power in the western Pacific and Asia, the three segments—Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific islands—are today evolving new identities of growing significance
and autonomy in the Southwest Pacific. They are motivated by their own imperatives, conscious of their own distinctive character, and governed by a new sense of independence and responsibility for their own destiny.