Building Mac's team: Ian McGibbon reflects on the early years of the Department of External Affairs.

• Author: McGibbon, Ian

It has become something of a tradition to refer to the Department of External Affairs' evolution in biological terms. Shortly before his death, Sir Alister McIntosh suggested that the department had taken 'almost as long as it does a human being to come of age', which he believed occurred in the 1960s. George Laking, his successor as head of the department, has described External Affairs as 'an exotic bloom in the harsh environment' of the wartime Prime Minister's Department and as a 'somewhat strange creature'. The implication that the Department of External Affairs was an evolving entity is entirely apposite; and in this article I will, following Sir Alister's formulation, focus on the department's first five years, the crucial formative period in any person's life, during which his or her basic character is often established.

The imagery begs the question: why a child at all? We may take the point of conception as the appointment of Carl Berendsen as the Imperial Affairs Officer in 1926. This was certainly a deliberate action, which followed an application in which he described his attributes as 'intelligence, industry, integrity and interest in the position', but it occurred without planning. Berendsen later recalled arriving at the department on his first day and being shown into a room by departmental head ED. Thomson, who pointed to a heap of papers on a table and said 'There they are, Berry: they're all yours,' and left him to it 'without another word'. Berendsen, as we know, carved out a role for himself, and became a trusted adviser to successive prime ministers. In the process, he acquired a number of additional responsibilities, including heading, from 1928, the Department of External Affairs, which had been formed in 1919 and which focussed almost exclusively on the administration of New Zealand's mandate territory, the former German colony in Samoa.

Berendsen's appointment was an important milestone along the path to a New Zealand foreign policy--and it reflected New Zealand's developing stares as a dominion in an evolving British Commonwealth within the British Empire. The need to formulate positions within the counsels of the Empire had no doubt been a major reason for Prime Minister Gordon Coates's decision to add an officer to his staff charged with reading and analysing the documentation that was flowing into Wellington on a range of international issues. Although New Zealand governments remained reluctant to accept formal changes in their country's status, they were pushed inexorably in the direction of exercising the responsibilities of independent statehood, partly through membership of the League of Nations. The Labour ministry which took office in late 1935 did not hesitate to exercise the rights of dominion status in practice, most notably in declaring war on Germany in September 1939.

Unfamiliar territory

The war greatly expanded New Zealand's dealings with other countries, and forced New Zealand into unfamiliar diplomatic territory. The revelation in 1940 that the Singapore strategy, hitherto the basis of New Zealand's defence policy, was of doubtful utility induced New Zealand to turn its attention to Washington. A New Zealand diplomatic post, its first in a foreign country, was established when Walter Nash presented his credentials in Washington in early 1942. Subsequently New Zealand also established a mission in Ottawa, albeit as a means of placating Frank Langstone, who had aspired to the Washington post. New Zealand was acquiring the machinery of diplomacy, however rudimentary and ad hoc in development, without the means of properly staffing or supporting the overseas posts or developing New Zealand's position on the many issues of wartime strategy and, increasingly, post-war adjustment.

The need for the development of some form of institutional backing for New Zealand's overseas efforts was evident to some within the Prime Minister's Department, but change was precipitated not by a planned development programme but rather by the accident of Berendsen's removal from the scene. Early in 1943 the government decided, at short notice, to send him to Canberra to establish a high commission there. The motivation for this step remains a matter of conjecture. Berendsen later referred to the need to improve relations with Australia, damaged by New Zealand's refusal to follow suit when Australia removed its last remaining division in the Middle East after the Allied victory at El Alamein in late 1942. But McIntosh, who had been assisting Berendsen since being transferred to the Prime Minister's Department in 1935, believed that the step was taken because relations between Prime Minister Peter Fraser and Berendsen had deteriorated to breaking point and Berendsen's health demanded a change of scene. The state of the latter was no doubt partly Berendsen's own fault, his failure to seek more staff--he later confessed to having 'funked these staffing problems'--leaving him struggling to stay on top of the increasing range of issues that confronted...