Ministers, Mandarins and Diplomats: Australian Foreign Policy Making 1941-1969.

• Author: McGibbon, Ian
• Position: Facing North: A Century of Australian Engagement with Asia, Volume 2: 1970s to 2000 - Book Review

MINISTERS, MANDARINS AND DIPLOMATS Australian Foreign Policy Making 1941-1969

Authors: Joan Beaumont, Christopher Waters, David Lowe, with Garry Woodard

Published by: Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2003, 223pp, A$39.95.

FACING NORTH A Century of Australian Engagement with Asia, Volume 2: 1970s to 2000

Editors: Peter Edwards and David Goldsworthy

Published by: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade/Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 467pp, A$59.95 (hb).

Two major changes have characterised Australian foreign policy in the last sixty years. The first was a move away from the British orbit and the second, engagement with Australia's position ms a Pacific country, especially the perceived need to define its relationship with Asia. This latter has involved the additional problem of defining Asia.

As Australia expanded its contacts with the rest of the world during and after the Second World War, the development of machinery for the conduct of foreign policy became an urgent task. New posts had to be established, staff found for them and the means of supporting them provided in Canberra. These were no easy tasks for a small country starting from a low base. The process whereby the various obstacles were overcome is the subject of Ministers, Mandarins and Diplomats, which traces the evolution of Australian foreign policy machinery in the formative period from 1941 to 1969. A joint effort by Joan Beaumont, who wrote four of the eight chapters, and three others, this useful book outlines how the Department of External Affairs grew from a 'small amateur organisation to a significant bureaucratic player'. Of particular interest is the means used to staff the Department, especially the cadet scheme introduced in 1942. This deliberate effort to recruit 'the brightest and the best' of tertiary trained people, including women, remained in place until 1956, when the department began direct recruitment at third secretary level and in house training. As their careers progressed, the former cadets played an increasingly important role in the department, highlighted when one of them, in 1974, reached the pinnacle of appointment as its Secretary.

The book includes chapters on the five ministers who held the External Affairs portfolio for almost the whole of the period. Their style varied considerably. The first, H.V. Evatt, de scribed as 'in many ways the most dramatic minister', enjoyed a turbulent relationship with officials. Sir Percy Spender...