Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands 2003–2017

By Michael Wesley

In 2003 Australia conceived, financed and led a Pacific-wide intervention into Solomon Islands to prevent the collapse of that state. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) was to remain there for fourteen years, costing over $2 billion and involving thousands of soldiers, police and public servants from Australia and across the Pacific. It was remarkably successful in an age of disastrous interventions. And yet, by the time it was withdrawn, RAMSI had largely vanished from the Australian public’s mind.

Helpem Fren is the first comprehensive history of Australia and the RAMSI intervention. Drawing on still-classified official documents and over thirty interviews, it records the preconditions, motivations and dynamics of RAMSI between 2003 and 2017. Providing an intimate look at the challenges of interventions and development assistance generally, Helpem Fren is also a portrait of the personalities involved and the complex interactions between two systems that couldn’t be more different in culture, wealth, size and capacity.

As Australia confronts the most challenging environment in the Pacific for seventy years, Helpem Fren offers readers a deeper understanding of the recent history of Australia’s involvement with Solomon Islands and the Pacific.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780522879063

Book preview

HELPEM

FREN

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2023

Text © Michael Wesley, 2023

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2023

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Phil Campbell

Cover image Solomon Islands, July 2003. Image © Dean Lewins, AAP Images.

Designed and typeset by J&M Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522879056 (paperback)

9780522879063 (ebook)

Contents

Preface

1Lineages

2Descent

3Resolve

4Dawn

5Justice

6Nemesis

7Viability

8Governance

9Drawdown

Notes

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

References

Index

Preface

The idea of writing a history of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) occurred to me on my first visit to Solomon Islands, in August 2015. I had accompanied colleagues from the Australian National University—Nicole Haley, James Batley, Julien Barbara, Siobhan McDonnell and Joe Foukuna— who were launching a report on land reform in Solomon Islands. The report, and the conference at which it was launched, raised crucial issues not only about Solomon Islands society and governance, but also about the ongoing Australian-led RAMSI intervention, which by design had left these issues unaddressed.

It was not the first time RAMSI had fascinated me. My first months as assistant director-general at the Office of National Assessments (ONA) in early 2003 saw the agency give increasing attention to the situation in Solomon Islands. Despite my own attention being drawn to the problems of global terrorism and the impending war in Iraq, I found time for fascinating conversations with ONA’s Pacific specialists, Peter McDonald and Tim McNaught. Through them and the reports they wrote, I watched RAMSI’s conception, birth and launch from within the Australian intelligence community. I followed the mission with interest, recalling my own PhD thesis on UN interventions into civil wars. I returned to the subject of RAMSI after leaving ONA, when invited to write an essay on actions and consequences for the Griffith Review in 2006;¹ and then again, when Allan Gyngell and I added it as a case study to the second edition of Making Australian Foreign Policy in 2007.²

Soon after returning from Solomon Islands, Joanne Wallis and I wrote an article examining Australia’s policy towards Melanesia after the end of RAMSI. We chronicled the extraordinary lack of attention to and interest in RAMSI among government, opposition and media since the troubles of 2006–07, dubbing the mission ‘the drawdown nobody noticed’.³ John Howard, the prime minister who made the decision to intervene in Solomon Islands, devotes just two of the 800 pages of his memoirs to the mission.⁴ I found it remarkable that Australia had quietly forgotten about one of its most audacious and complex foreign policy undertakings.

That thought led to a conversation with Peter Varghese, secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). Peter had been the international adviser to prime minister John Howard at the time of RAMSI’s conception and launch, and needed little convincing that a history of the mission needed to be written. Without his generosity in agreeing to allow me access to DFAT’s RAMSI files and cables, this book could not have existed. I am also deeply grateful to his successor as DFAT secretary, Frances Adamson, for agreeing to my continued access until my research was complete.

Peter’s and Frances’ enthusiasm and generosity were also exhibited by their current and past colleagues. In the six years I worked on the project, I never encountered anything but openness, help and support from those I approached who were in government or had an association with the mission. Special mention must be given to Graham Fletcher, Ric Wells, James Batley, Julien Barbara and John Frewen for their generosity, encouragement and support. Graham Fletcher, James Batley, Julien Barbara, Nicholas Coppel and the DFAT reviewers took the time to read draft chapters, and provide detailed comments and suggestions.

Here I should note that my account of the history of Australia’s conception and leadership of RAMSI reflects the materials I was able to access—namely DFAT and Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) files and cables—and the recollections of those involved whom I interviewed. I have little doubt that other perspectives on and analyses of the mission exist, but I was not able to access these. Readers interested in a perspective relying on Defence documents will be rewarded by reading the relevant chapters of Bob Breen’s excellent The Good Neighbour.⁵ I hope that as cabinet documents, as well as official documents, are released in due course, someone will return to the history of the RAMSI mission. I look forward to reading that account.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Derek Futai’asi for his help with research and logistics, and for advice on my field trips to Solomon Islands. I soon learned that Derek’s extended family were involved with this in many small ways, and I am particularly grateful to his uncle John for taking us in his car to multiple locations around Guadalcanal that were important in understanding the tensions. My thanks also to Wanda Oram-Miles and her staff in DFAT’s access examination and coordination section for hosting me over many weeks, and ensuring I had access to the files and cables I needed. I am grateful also to Kath Grant in DFAT’s public diplomacy branch for shepherding the manuscript through the department’s review process.

Many people in Australia, Solomon Islands and the Pacific were happy to talk to me about their recollections and observations of RAMSI. Several of them preferred to remain anonymous and are not referenced, quoted or listed in the references. While I have referenced and quoted other interviewees, all of them contributed to the background understanding that knits the narrative together.

Although trained as a political scientist, in this case I wanted to document RAMSI by way of a history. One reviewer asked why, given my previous work on intervention and statebuilding, I did not treat RAMSI as a case study in statebuilding interventions. There are two reasons. First, RAMSI has already been widely treated as a case study in statebuilding, and I felt there was not a great deal to be gained by adding to this corpus at this stage. Second, I did not want an analytical framework to privilege some information and occlude other details. Given I had been granted unique access to official documents, I wanted to provide as comprehensive an account as I can of the history of RAMSI and Australia’s involvement. That said, I have never attempted to write a history before. The task of digesting and integrating a large volume of diverse sources was one I had underestimated. I benefited greatly from the advice and encouragement of two great Australian historians and good friends, Joan Beaumont and James Curran.

This book is a history of RAMSI from an Australian perspective. While Australia conceived and led RAMSI, and overwhelmingly funded and staffed the mission, I hope this book is not read as an attempt to paint the mission as an Australian-only operation. I therefore also hope it is clear from the following pages that RAMSI would not have been possible without extraordinary contributions from other Pacific countries and talented people from across the region, not least Solomon Islands. Ultimately, my decision to write this history from an Australian perspective reflects my own expertise as a scholar of Australian foreign policy, and the prosaic reason of keeping the project to a manageable scale. But I would caution any reader against finishing the book and thinking that there are not many different perspectives on RAMSI—there are. I hope one day to be able to read a Solomon Islands perspective on the history of the mission.

Last but not least, my thanks go to Sheridan, Oskar and Felix, who lived through my annual absences to conduct fieldwork, and who tolerated the piles of documents that invaded many surfaces of our home, and my constant angst that I would never finish this book.

I dedicate it to Athalie Wesley, who died halfway through my work on Helpem Fren. I know she would have read it closely once published, and asked me lots of critical questions.

Michael Wesley

Melbourne

May 2022

Chapter 1

Lineages

On 3 April 1883, a Queensland police magistrate named Henry Chester sailed on the cutter Pearl from Thursday Island in the Torres Strait to Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea.¹ The next morning, having raised the Union Jack, he read a declaration to about two hundred assembled local tribesmen, claiming in the name of Queen Victoria possession of all the island of New Guinea not already claimed by the Dutch. The announcement was saluted by the Pearl’s two cannon, and Chester presented the tribesmen with 50 pounds’ worth of trade goods.² The next day, he ordered the Pearl’s cannon to shell a warlike party of tribesmen who he thought looked threatening to the settlement. The Reverend William Lawes of the London Missionary Society, whom Chester asked to help explain the annexation ceremony to the local people, wrote shortly after:

we explained as best we could the nature of the proceedings. We cannot understand them ourselves … that an Australian colony should be allowed to take this step is to us most surprising. Here is the largest island in the world … annexed by a Police Magistrate who comes in a little tub of a cutter! There must be some mistake somewhere. We would rather not be annexed by anybody, but if there was any probability of a foreign power taking possession of New Guinea, then let us have British rule: but as a Crown Colony, not as an appendage of Queensland. Nowhere in the world have aborigines been so basely and cruelly treated as in Queensland.³

One hundred and twenty years later, thousands of armed Australian soldiers arrived on the neighbouring island of Guadalcanal, 1200 kilometres to the east of Port Moresby. They were there to help retrieve from failure a state, a form of political organisation unknown in the South Pacific at the time of Chester’s expedition. But it was Henry Chester’s act of annexation that set in motion a train of tensions, recriminations and events that were to bring the state to this part of the world. Eighteen years later, the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed, its Constitution expressly providing its parliament with authority to determine the relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific. It was the Australian colonies’ agitation on the road to federation that led to the British annexation of Solomon Islands in 1893. Independence would not come to Solomon Islands until 1978, three years after Papua New Guinea farewelled Australian rule, and yet, in the 120 years between Chester’s act of annexation and the arrival of its troops on Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands featured continuously at the centre of Australia’s geopolitical imagination.

Imperial nationalism

Henry Chester had not acted on a whim. He was carrying out the express orders of the premier of Queensland, Thomas McIlwraith. Having been alerted to a 27 November 1882 article in the newspaper Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, suggesting Germany should annex New Guinea, McIlwraith petitioned the colonial secretary in London to annex New Guinea to Queensland forthwith, even suggesting Queensland would meet half the costs.⁴ Immediately on sending the petition, McIlwraith issued the annexation orders to Chester in strict secrecy, so that the imperial government would not learn of the mission until it was too late. He later claimed that he had acted in haste upon hearing that a German naval vessel, the Carola, had left Sydney with the intention of raising the German flag somewhere in the Pacific. McIlwraith’s intention was to present Whitehall with a fait accompli. In his speech opening the Queensland parliament on 26 June 1883, the governor, Arthur Palmer, stated, ‘New Guinea and the adjacent groups of Pacific Islands must form part of the future Australian Nation’.⁵ The Sydney Morning Herald’s Brisbane correspondent reported he had been ‘so overpowered by the audacity of the act’ as to have been dumbstruck.⁶

The British prime minister, WE Gladstone, rose in parliament on 2 July to announce that the action of the Queensland government was ‘null in point of law, unwarranted in point of policy, and the Imperial government would not confirm it’. Gladstone’s secretary of state for the colonies, the Earl of Derby, informed the House of Lords that the imperial government had refused to endorse Queensland’s actions, due to ‘the expense it would entail, the enormous amount of territory involved, the unknown character of the interior of the country, and the hostility of the natives’. If the Australian colonies wished to extend their territory, continued Derby, ‘it would be better for them to become federated, as they were unable singly to accomplish the task’.⁷ The colonial secretary belittled the Queensland premier’s claims that Germany wanted to annex any territory in New Guinea.

The reaction in the Australian colonies to this British response was one of anger. In November–December 1883 in Sydney, the Australian colonies and New Zealand convened a Federal Council of Australasia. In a ringing statement, they declared that ‘further acquisition of dominion in the Pacific, south of the equator, by any foreign power, would be highly detrimental to the safety and well-being of British possessions in Australasia, and injurious to the interests of the Empire’.⁸ The assembled colonies created a standing federal council, charged with managing ‘the relations of Australasia with the islands of the Pacific’.

By early 1884, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had started signalling a clear interest in annexing non-Dutch New Guinea. Despite this, Gladstone remained opposed to annexing the eastern portion of the island, notwithstanding clear signals that the Australian colonies would contribute financially to the administration of British New Guinea. Rumours began to circulate in the Australian colonies that Britain had done a secret deal with Germany. They were right. Bismarck ordered the creation of a German protectorate in northeastern New Guinea on 19 August 1884, and parallel negotiations with Britain concluded in a ‘friendly understanding’ that it would establish a protectorate over the southeastern portion of the island. The Australian colonies found out about the deal not from Whitehall but from eyewitness reports that the German flag had been raised on the northern coast of New Guinea, and the islands of New Britain and New Ireland. Victorian premier James Service cabled his agent-general in London:

The exasperation here is boundless. We protest in the name of the present and future of Australia. If England does not save us from the danger and disgrace, as far at least as New Guinea is concerned, the bitterness of feeling towards her will not die out with this generation.⁹

In Henry Chester’s proclamation and its aftermath lies not just the birth of Australian foreign policy, but the birth of the Australian nation. Reflecting on those events, historian Neville Meaney argued that ‘geopolitics was the determining condition of Australian nationalism’.¹⁰ Australians’ frustration at Britain’s unwillingness to prevent European powers from establishing colonies in the South Pacific had been simmering since 1843, when France annexed Tahiti. Angry demonstrations had erupted over further French expansion to New Caledonia and New Hebrides. But in relation to New Guinea, London had not only ignored Australian pleas, it had prevented the colonies from enacting their own solution, while negotiating with Germany behind their backs. ‘Like the dog in the manger,’ thundered Reverend John Dunmore Lang from Sydney, ‘Great Britain will neither undertake the great work of colonisation herself, nor permit it to be undertaken by her own people’.¹¹ It was a deepening distrust of Britain conducting imperial policy in the South Pacific sufficient to secure their security that helped drive the rivalrous Australian colonies towards federation. And it was the pervasive sense of insecurity created by non-British powers in the South Pacific that forged a conviction Australia needed its own Pacific policy and the means to carry it out. Its strategy towards the South Pacific laid the foundations of Australia’s role in the world. That region, so often regarded as an afterthought in its international affairs, continues to define how Australia relates to the outside world.

Dominion versus empire

The commission provided to Captain Arthur Phillip on his embarkation for Australia in 1787 gave him jurisdiction over ‘all the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean, within the latitude of 10 degrees 37 minutes south and 43 degrees 39 minutes south’.¹² No longitude was mentioned, implying Phillip’s responsibility stretched eastwards from Australia’s northernmost and southernmost latitudes to the west coast of South America. These instructions were also issued to Phillip’s three successors. The British settlements established along the continent’s eastern seaboard faced two implacable frontiers: a vast, unknown continent to the west, and a vast, unforgiving ocean to the east. Initially, the colonies knew more about the ocean than the continent, thanks to the reports of explorers stretching back to William Dampier in 1699. They knew there were bountiful islands in the Pacific and that the French were starting to become a regular presence along the region’s waterways.

The colonies’ smallness and isolation meant that both the continental and oceanic frontiers were existential threats. Over the horizon lay the unpredictable unknown, tormenting the imagination, keeping the colonists in perpetual dread of the sudden emergence of a raiding party or a man o’war. Convicts escaped either into the bush or into the waves, sometimes returning to prey on the colonists. Ferocious bushfires sprang suddenly from the land, just as terrifying cyclones came from the sea. No walls or moats would protect civilisation out here. The only way to tame the frontier was to own it. Safety meant wresting control of the continent and the ocean from their native peoples before others did. The Australian imperial imagination crept outwards over land and sea, seeking new points of colonisation, on the assumption that the spaces between them would eventually become a seamless British dominion.

Exile layered cultural anxiety on top of physical insecurity. Whether convict, soldier or free settler, the voyage to Australia meant leaving the heart of the world’s leading nation for the ringing silence of the Antipodes. The institutional migration was perhaps more confronting than the physical removal: the journey from Britain to Australia meant leaving the responsibility of the rowdy Houses of Westminster and becoming subject to the haughty, distracted jurisdiction of the Colonial Office at Whitehall—and jostling for attention with Britain’s other colonies. The journey to the other side of the world often led to an intensification of Britishness. As Australia’s second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, wrote in the London Morning Post in 1906, the British empire,

though united in the whole, is, nevertheless, divided broadly into two parts, one occupied wholly or mainly by a white ruling race, the other principally occupied by coloured races who are ruled. Australia and New Zealand are determined to keep their place in the first class.¹³

For many Australians, the psychological reaction to exile was to see themselves as the agents of a global civilising mission. As the nineteenth century matured, growing anxieties about competition from other imperial powers coincided with the rise of social Darwinism following the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871 and Bagehot’s Physics and Politics the following year. The emerging doctrine of Anglo-Saxonism attributed Britain’s pioneering of constitutional government, science and technology, industrialisation and liberal commerce to a particular national genius, traceable to the self-governing principles of the ancient Germanic tribes and brought by the Saxons to Britain, where it was nurtured and refined.¹⁴ Drawing analogies with ancient Athens, Anglo-Saxonism argued that Britain’s empire, founded on maritime power, democracy and free trade, was more virtuous and would be longer lasting than the authoritarian, protectionist, land-based empires it confronted.¹⁵ It was a doctrine that gained enthusiastic adherents and promoters in Australia.¹⁶ Anglo-Saxonism gave Australian colonists a sense of agency: no longer exiles, undesirables or surplus population, they could see themselves as the vanguard of a historic mission to bring the bounty of British rule to other regions and peoples. Only Australian dominion could convert the colonies’ isolation into safety; ‘to be pacific, we want the Pacific’ was how the country’s first prime minister put it.¹⁷ As geopolitical anxiety merged with racial fear, dreams of an Australian-dominated South Pacific provided comforting strategic depth from the menacing region to its north—Asia.

So, Australians looked at their frontiers with a combination of anxiety and arrogance. The need to rule continent and ocean was both a necessity and an obligation. Watching a civil war erupt in Samoa in 1883–84 against the backdrop of Germany’s push for colonies in the Pacific, the Victorian government wrote to the Colonial Office of the need to annex Samoa due to ‘the manifest destiny of Australasia to be the controlling Power in the South Pacific’.¹⁸ Insecurity and Anglo-Saxonism combined the need for control with the imperative of excluding competitors. In the words of a delegate to the Sydney sittings of the Constitutional Convention in 1891,

The day is coming when the countless islands throughout the Pacific will be colonised, and though your power is great, and though you already have an enormous start in colonisation, there will be an enormous power in those southern seas that must either be part of Australasia, or more or less inimical to our interests.¹⁹

The language and the thinking behind it drew explicitly on those espoused by that other ‘branch of the Anglo-Saxon race’ across the Pacific, the Americans. As early as 1872, Australians were advocating making ‘the South Pacific between California on the one side and Australia on the other … an Anglo-Saxon sea’.²⁰ After the Melbourne Age’s regular championing of the term in the 1860s (possibly reflecting its editor’s sojourn in California), it became increasingly common for Australian leaders to invoke the Monroe Doctrine as a way of making their case.²¹ But whereas the original doctrine proclaimed strategic denial to other powers without contemplating annexing Latin America, Australia’s version was unabashedly imperial. In the words of one Victorian parliamentarian in 1884, ‘we are saying that the other nations of the world shall not obtain territory contiguous to the coast of Australia; but we are going further because we are proposing to take over those territories ourselves’.²²

But while Australia’s version of the Monroe Doctrine, like the American original, relied on British naval power to achieve its objectives, Australian leaders would find that Whitehall’s interests often did not coincide with their own. Just as Australian imperial ambitions were stirring, the mood in Britain was shifting strongly against colonial expansion. At the time it colonised Australia, British imperialism was low cost and high profit. Britain’s unchallenged naval power provided cover for its thrusting entrepreneurs to spread its influence on the cheap. But by the 1870s, Britain faced an internal fiscal squeeze, and external challengers in the form of increasingly assertive powers in Europe. The vigour of France, Germany and Russia had created doubts about the value of Britain’s maritime empire in comparison with the land-based assets of the continental powers.²³ The legacy of the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, and of twin military disasters in southern Africa and Afghanistan in 1879, further soured the imperial mood; while sensitivities to tax levels led to charges that the government was wasting money on futile colonial ventures.²⁴ Gladstone’s anti-imperial, pro-free trade Liberal Party returned to power partly on a stringent critique of Tory governments’ profligate adventurism overseas.²⁵ As France and Germany pressed for overseas colonies of their own, they confronted Britain with the choice of formally annexing territories over which it had formerly simply assumed supremacy, or standing aside and allowing others to establish control. Often, as in Egypt, these were situations that placed Britain in direct confrontation with one of its continental rivals, therefore making it dependent on the good will of the others. Meanwhile, as Britain’s naval mastery came under challenge from France and Germany, its strategic interests retracted towards the home islands.

As Britain’s economy slowed, its strategic circumstances darkened and its imperial policy choices became increasingly agonising, the South Pacific seemed more and more an irrelevance. To British eyes, that region presented few commercial opportunities, and where it did, Britain’s commercial interests had little need of protection. As naval planners in Greenwich became more and more anxious about the German challenge in home waters, the thought of extending imperial obligations on the other side of the world seemed ridiculous. And missionaries returning from the Pacific islands provided the anti-imperialist Liberals with constant ammunition in the form of ghastly stories about the evils of colonialism for idyllic island societies.²⁶ Under Gladstone’s Liberals, colonial ventures had to justify themselves via the benefits exceeding the costs, a framework that ruled out any interest in further expansion in the Pacific. There was not a more sympathetic ear when the Tories returned to power; at the time of the 1887 Imperial Conference, the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, remarked that the Australians in attendance were

…the most unreasonable people I have ever heard or dreamt of. They want us to incur all the bloodshed and the danger, and the stupendous costs of a war with France, of which almost the exclusive burden will fall on us, for a group of islands which are as valueless to us as the South Pole—and to which they are only attached by a debating-club sentiment … those Colonists sadly want taking down a peg.²⁷

The Pacific came to be seen by increasingly exasperated British governments as a convenient region in which its colonial rivals’ demands could be met, by trading what British diplomats saw as relatively worthless islands for more important concessions closer to home.

What for the British were worthless but convenient bargaining chips were for the Australian colonies possible strategic footholds that hostile powers could occupy and thereafter from which threaten Australia. The implication was that Britain refused to leave its security to the vagaries of diplomacy in its home waters, but was more than prepared to in the Pacific and the Far East.²⁸ Whereas Australians saw control of the Pacific islands as being as essential to their security as the Channel Islands were to Britain’s, British planners refused to accept the analogy. To the Admiralty, the Pacific islands were simply too far away to serve credibly as staging points for an attack on Australia; furthermore, the growing size of the Australian colonies meant they were more of a threat to German or French Pacific territories than French or German bases were to Australia. But Britain also realised that it could not afford to alienate the Australian colonies too much. Gradually, reluctantly, it moved to annex Solomon Islands and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and to establish joint control of New Hebrides with France. But in the meantime, France and Germany had established substantial colonies in the region also. An exasperated Alfred Deakin told parliament in November 1910:

Australia, in spite of herself, is being forced into a Pacific policy of her own because foreign interests and risks surround us on every side. A Pacific policy we must have … Our first steps in Papua, commenced long ago, were frustrated and partly defeated by official neglect on the other side of the world.²⁹

Even with Britain in full or partial control of most of the Pacific islands close to Australia, the newly established Dominion could not rest assured. Mistrust of Britain’s motives and attention span ran deep. The Constitution of the new Commonwealth made explicit the federal parliament’s authority over ‘the relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific’ separately from its authority over external affairs.³⁰ As soon as Australia federated, it began to agitate for Britain to cede control over its Pacific territories. Its first prime minister, Sir Edward Barton, argued that ‘the future interests of the Commonwealth not only in trade but in other respects as well [are] vastly concerned in the question of the occupation, management and government of the Islands.’³¹ From September 1901, the Commonwealth parliament began to petition the Colonial Office to hand over control of British New Guinea and British Solomon Islands to Australia. Whitehall relented on the former, and Australia became responsible for British New Guinea (now renamed Papua) on 1 September 1906. But Britain refused to cede control of its other Pacific territories to its pushy Dominion. For the next fifty years, however, Australia refused to take no for an answer. The urge to control the Pacific became a constant impulse in its foreign policy, for a range of reasons.

Strategic denial

Australians simply assumed that the intrusion of non-British interests into the South Pacific would be disruptive. They were convinced that the continental powers would bring their rivalries with them to the Southern Hemisphere, ‘a variety of nationalities … armed to the teeth’ was how one Victorian parliamentarian imagined such a future in the South Pacific.³² Australians, as much as Europeans, saw the Pacific as peaceful and pristine, and believed it should stay that way.³³ By and large, they shared the British view that local systems of rule should remain sovereign on the Pacific islands. Their annexing impulse was mainly driven by a need to prevent other avaricious powers from supplanting native sovereignty, and was episodic, rising to fever pitch only when an annexation by a non-British power appeared imminent. France began to show an interest in acquiring naval bases in the Society and Marquesas Islands shortly after the Colombian government granted France the right to cut a canal through the Central American isthmus in 1838. The prospect of easy transit through Central America opened up a more direct route to Eastern Asia, greatly increasing European powers’ interest in naval bases and coaling stations across the Pacific.³⁴ From that point forward, Australian politicians, media and, increasingly, the general public began to agitate for pre-emptive annexation of territories believed to be coveted by France and other powers.

Despite Australian concerns, France, Germany and the United States each established colonies and bases in the Pacific through the nineteenth century. At times, such as during the Samoan Crisis of 1887–89, when naval forces of the United States, Germany and Britain engaged in a tense standoff over control of Samoa, it appeared as if Australian fears of the harsh geopolitics of the northern Atlantic coming to the South Pacific were being realised. But for the majority of the late nineteenth century, the Australian dread of instability and the threat from French, German and American intrusions into the Pacific were not realised. Popular outrage in Australia at British perfidy in doing deals with other colonial powers in the Pacific typically didn’t last long, and there arose a minority countercurrent of opinion that the presence of other powers’ bases in the South Pacific was actually good for Australian commerce in the region.³⁵ Nevertheless, once war erupted in Europe in 1914, Australia wasted little time in moving to seize control of German New Guinea. It