Commentary

‘The burden laid upon her’

Item: Australia’s China Odyssey
Author: Hugh White

Australia’s policy gyrations on China

by Hugh White •

August 2022, no. 445

Australia’s China Odyssey: From euphoria to fear by James Curran

NewSouth, $34.99 pb, 334 pp

Commentary

‘The burden laid upon her’

Australia’s policy gyrations on China

by Hugh White •

August 2022, no. 445

Gough Whitlam leaving Beijing at the end of his 1973 visit to China (photograph via National Archives of Australia A8746, KN15/11/73/79)

On 17 November 2011, President Barack Obama quoted Banjo Paterson to an audience of Australian and American military personnel at RAAF Base Darwin. He recited a question that Paterson posed about Australia in a poem he wrote to celebrate Federation in 1901: ‘Hath she the strength for the burden laid upon her, hath she the power to protect and guard her own?’ The question haunts us still. Obama assured his listeners that the answer was ‘yes’, but everything about the circumstances of his speech suggested the opposite.

Hugh White

Hugh White is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at ANU and a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He studies Australian strategic and defence policy, and the regional and global security issues that most directly affect Australia. He has worked on Australian strategic, defence and foreign-policy issues for thirty years in a number of capacities inside and outside government, including the Deputy Secretary for Strategy in the Department of Defence 1995–2000, an adviser to Prime Minister Bob Hawke and to Kim Beazley. He was the principal author of Australia’s 2000 Defence White Paper. His recent publications include How to Defend Australia (2019, Black Inc.) and Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing, published in Quarterly Essay 39 (2010). In the 1970s he studied philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford Universities.