Continental Drift: Australia's search for a regional identity.

• Author: Templeton, Malcolm
• Position: Book Review

CONTINENTAL DRIFT: Australia's search for a regional identity Author: Rawdon Dalrymple Published by: Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003, 243pp, 45 [pounds sterling].

Rawdon Dalrymple had a distinguished diplomatic career, serving as Australian Ambassador in Indonesia, the United States and Japan and as a Deputy Secretary of Foreign Affairs and Trade in his home department before embarking on a teaching career in the University of Sydney. He is one of several former Australian foreign service officers who have recently ventured into print to engage in critical analysis of aspects of Australia's current foreign policy, and in particular its failure to follow up on earlier efforts at closer engagement with its Asian neighbours.

'Few peoples,' Dalrymple says in Continental Drift, 'have had so much difficulty in defining themselves in regional terms or in reconciling themselves to their location as have the Australians.' This is an observation which prima facie could be taken as applying with equal force to New Zealand as to Australia. But do not look in this book for any discussion of Australia's relationship with New Zealand as a significant regional neighbour, or of their joint efforts to give organisational substance to economic co-operation with Asia, for example in the form of APEC. Even more noticeable is the absence of any discussion of Australia's relations with its Pacific Islands neighbours, not even any mention (if the index is to be trusted) of the largest and most populous of them, Papua New Guinea.

The only substantive reference to New Zealand in the book, only tangentially connected to the general theme, is a simplistic account of the breach that occurred between New Zealand and the United States over visits by nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered naval vessels. The inclusion of this account, somewhat out of place in the overall context, may reflect Dalrymple's own involvement as Australian Ambassador in Washington in the efforts of his government (not admitted to at the time, nor in this book) to ensure that the United States did not soften its stand on ship visits and that the ANZUS alliance, effectively excluding New Zealand, was preserved. Dalrymple acknowledges that 'the sentiments which had led the New Zealand Labour Party to adopt the nuclear ship visits policy were also prominent, vocal and committed in the Australian Labor Party where they had real influence'. Clearly if New Zealand had been seen to get away with its policy...