The trans-Tasman tie: Colin James comments on the straightforward and paradoxical Australia-New Zealand connection.

• Author: James, Colin

Fifteen years ago I spent four weeks as the first New Zealand fellow at Cheryl Saunders's Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne University. Professor Saunders's price for this privilege was an address. The topic I chose, to the mystification of her captive audience, was apposite to the opening of the New Zealand Australia Research Centre. I said:

I want to suggest it is time for an inclusive or at least a comparative history of the two countries--time for a Manning Clark or Keith Sinclair of Australasia. It is time we knew what separates and binds us in our histories and our history--in which, of course, I include geography, society, culture and economy ... I mean something that goes much further than relations between the two countries and treats each country as, in a sense, part of the other. (1) I suggested that, the better to be accepted in Australia, the history should be written in the larger country by an established though still young historian whose origins were in New Zealand but whose primary loyalties were Australian.

I had a twofold interest in such a history--benefit for myself as a journalist (a sort of contemporary historian) but also better policy, both trans-Tasman and domestic. An example I would now use would be that Australians might have wasted less energy on bluster and indignation over New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance and related defence matters if someone in Canberra had inquired into New Zealand's military and strategic history, as a puzzled, frustrated but ultimately understanding Hugh White eventually did, with the result that now those same energies are applied to working together.

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This difference went far beyond defence. I noted in that 1993 address that Paul Kelly's recent End of Certainty

drew me some comfortable parallels but also ... illustrated some important differences. To read Manning Clark, or Geoffrey Blainey, or Russel Ward, or Richard White, or John Rickard, or John Thornhill, or Hugh Mackay gives me the same sense of recognition and disjunction. Later, in a paper in 2001, I phrased this duality as being simultaneously foreign and family. (2)

The polite incomprehension of my audience made the point. Eight years later Paul Kelly's book of his centenary of federation television series remade the point. He mentioned New Zealand a mere seven times, all in passing, three times in connection with Gallipoli, once in a footnote and once as a snide Paul Keating aside. His entire treatment of ANZUS (the Australia, New Zealand and United States treaty of military alliance) left the 'NZ' silent; CER (the Closer Economic Relations free trade agreement) was not mentioned at all even though New Zealand was, and is, the foremost destination of Australian foreign investment and manufactured exports. Yet Kelly, in an earlier guise as editor-in-chief of the Australian newspaper, had appointed the Australian media's first fulltime New Zealand correspondent. He judged New Zealand irrelevant to 100 years of Australian history.

Unnecessary misunderstandings

Kelly could make that misjudgment because actually for much of that 100 years the two colonies/dominions/countries had much less...