Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War.

• Author: Hensley, Gerald
• Position: Book review

Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War

Author: James Curran

Published by: Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2015, 232pp, A$39.99.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Who knew that ten years before New Zealand Australia quarrelled with the United States over the meaning and value of ANZUS to the point where both sides occasionally wondered if the treaty was worth preserving? And furthermore, that where the Australian prime minister, Gough Whitlam, was the focus of President Nixons fury, the New Zealand prime minister, Norman Kirk, found himself upheld in Washington as a model of calm sense.

The row, to be sure, was more verbal than active. Like a dog-fight there was much angry snarling and 'unholy fury' but some care was taken to avoid sinking the teeth in. But there was a change. As with New Zealand, Australia had come to see ANZUS as not so much a treaty as 'a template for the relationship as a whole'. When the row subsided, ANZUS was still important but not the measure of the whole relationship. Washington understood Australian nationalism better and Canberra took more care not to tread on American toes where its regional interests were concerned.

In 1972 a 'beamingly confident' government under the ebullient Gough Whitlam came to power in Australia at a time when the Vietnam War was ending, Australia was feeling a 'new nationalism' and America was uncertain of its future role in East Asia. Handling such a bubbling mixture meant that frictions would inevitably arise and tempers shorten. This well-researched and even-tempered book chronicles their course.

Whitlam, an able lawyer, was witty and outspoken, sometimes like David Lange saying rather more than he wished. Though on the left, he was not anti-American and frequently stressed the importance of the relationship. But he grasped that the Cold War regimentation was over and that a new Asia was forming to which Australian foreign policy had to respond. Nixon had made the same perception the centre of his radical changes in American foreign policy. Given that both shared the same understanding about Asia, it was ironical that this became the focus of their quarrel; there were no serious differences on other global issues. So the anger was not, as with New Zealand, over policy; it was a clash of personalities at the top and when Nixon and Whitlam departed so did the ill-will.

From his early days in Parliament Whitlam argued that instead of 'huddling together' for security, Australia needed a wider...