Introduction: How IR came to Australia

Australian disciplinary histories of International Relations (IR) have tended to begin with the foundation of an IR chair at the Australian National University (ANU). As James Cotton has shown, however, there was a growing network of people teaching, thinking, and writing about the ‘international’ in Australia well before this.Footnote ¹ Similarly, Vineet Thakur, Alexander E. Davis, and Peter Vale have recently argued that today's IR discipline in some ways owes its origins to an imperial circulation of ideas that can be traced back to the forming of the Union of South Africa in the late 1800s.Footnote ² Key to this circulation was Lionel Curtis, who travelled the settler colonies, building support for his project of reorganising the empire. Curtis advocated for the ‘scientific study’ of international affairs, which was aimed at producing a shared frame of reference for the empire to look at the world. In doing so, he laid the foundations for some key institutions, notably the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), and a series of related institutes in Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, and India.

In this article, I take an historical look at the origins of Australian IR, taking up the framing provide by Thakur, Davis, and Vale, to examine the development of Australian IR emphasising racial ideologies and discourses, imperial networks and settler colonial ideas, beginning with the Round Table. In particular, I argue that out of this circulation of ideas, a stream of IR thought in Australia developed that was not just imperial, but explicitly settler colonial. Australia's IR thought engaged not just with realism and idealism, or internationalism and imperialism, the framing suggested by David Long and Brian Schmidt,Footnote ³ but focused on settler colonial matters of finding and analysing the ‘international’ at home. Early Australian IR thought about Indigenous peoples as ‘external’, discussed the need to settle Australia with the ‘correct’ people, the subsequent need for the ‘White Australia policy’, and tended to think of imperial hierarchy as natural and necessary for a peaceful international order. Moreover, as we will see, a large portion of the AIIA's institutional research priorities were what we would think of today as domestic. Furthermore, the Northern Territory of Australia was continually defined as foreign, based on its tropical climate and its Indigenous populations. When it came to external politics, a stream of thought developed on imperialism, and how Australia might be ideally connected to the empire, alongside analysis that emphasised the need to study Asian societies so as to defend against them.

In this sense, then, Curtis's ‘scientific study of international affairs’, as described by Thakur, Davis, and Vale,Footnote ⁴ became connected with the deep-seated fears of non-white immigration that came with Australian settlement. In the early 1900s, Australian identity was tethered to its ideologies about settlement. Australia saw itself as a vast outpost of British civilisation still requiring colonial settlements and threatened by ‘overpopulated’ Asia to the North. This idea is known as terra nullius: that Australia was ‘empty’ and its land ‘unutilised’ and ‘unsettled’ prior to the arrival of the British in 1788. This idea dominated (and likely still dominates) Australia's identity. Indigenous Australians were denied any place in society, and were not granted citizenship until a referendum in 1967. Debate on whether or not to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Australian constitution continues today.

That the debate over Australia's ties to Britain and its empire was a key element of its IR scholarship has been noted often by other disciplinary historians, such as Cotton. The ties between the study of the international in Australia and the Australian colonial project itself, however, are yet to be sufficiently elucidated or critiqued. Throughout the story shown here, IR's arrival in Australia produced a school of thought in which hierarchy was not so much a category for critical analysis but a deeply ingrained assumption. Civilisational hierarchy was discussed as a natural and desirable element of international affairs. Caution, even hostility, towards decolonisation was also consistent after the Second World War (WWII). Scholarship and the knowledge it produced was also tethered to government and governance, with the belief commonly held that new knowledge would produce a better reality. The discipline was also an intellectual front for Australia's own colonial mission in New Guinea and Nauru. This reflects not only an imperial outlook on the international, but a specifically settler colonial way of imagining the international.

The article unfolds in three parts. I first look at the historiography of IR's disciplinary history, arguing that the settler colonial nature of Australian IR has not yet been adequately addressed. I then present an historical analysis of how Australia's first IR institutions and publication outlets were built, from the Round Table, to the AIIA, through the foundation of three key institutional journals: the anonymous Australian articles in The Round Table and the AIIA journals The Austral-Asiatic Bulletin and Australian Outlook (which today exists as the Australian Journal of International Affairs). I end with an analysis of the ANU story, particularly the contribution to IR scholarship of Walter Crocker, who held the first chair in IR in Australia. Throughout, I couple this institutional history with a discursive analysis of the IR thought produced, looking at assumptions about Australian identity, settlement, international hierarchies, imperialism and race, to look at how international affairs were imagined. To conclude, I reflect on what this largely neglected history of the emergence of a settler colonial IR should mean for present day Australian IR itself, and the discipline more broadly.

The historiography of Australian IR

Numerous Australian histories of the discipline have focused on the 1960s onwards, when it is sometimes argued that the discipline ‘matured’, often concentrated on the return of Australian scholars around the world to take up positions at the ANU.Footnote ⁵ Martin Indyk's history of Australian IR begins with JDB Miller's taking up of the vacant chair at the ANU in 1962, and thus cuts out Australian IR's origins, and the role of Crocker, who held the first formal IR position at the ANU. If we think of anything prior to this time as some kind of prehistory of contemporary IR, we discreetly cut out the colonial history of IR and thus excuse the Australian discipline from any racial origins. Indyk, for example, dismisses even Crocker's role, on the basis that Crocker saw himself as a diplomat rather than an academic. This is despite the fact that Crocker held the first IR chair in Australia and produced scholarship before and after he took up a diplomatic posting in India.Footnote ⁶ As Richard Devetak usefully puts it, only with the arrival of Hedley Bull does scholarship in Australia begin to feature in international disciplinary histories.Footnote ⁷

J. D. B. Miller began his narrative of Australia's IR history with the establishment of the AIIA, and wrote to celebrate fifty years since its establishment, though he highlights the quality of some books on Australia in the world produced prior to 1933.Footnote ⁸ Miller emphasises debates on the extent to which Australia should follow British imperialism. Richard Higgott and Jim George, taking a sociology of knowledge approach, argue that ‘power politics realism has been the predominant influence on the study of international relations in Australia to date’.Footnote ⁹ As part of this analysis, they find a desire to identify threats and protectors as central to Australian IR scholarship. Without going into detail, they usefully identify the key questions that IR was asking in the interwar period, such as, should Australia strike out on its own or remain allied with Britain, should it emphasise its Asian geography over its European heritage, and should it continue to seek out great and powerful friends.Footnote ¹⁰ These questions, in various forms, remain key issues for Australian foreign policy and Australian IR today. As we will see below, however, these ‘big picture’ foreign policy questions were only one element of the early disciplinary discourse, with the management of colonies and the settlement of Australia as other key subjects of inquiry.

Perhaps the most thorough historical retellings of Australian IR's foundational history are those by Cotton. Cotton has unravelled the various funding arrangements behind some of the institutes discussed here. The AIIA was founded partly based on funding from American philanthropic institutes seeking to promote foreign policy agendas.Footnote ¹¹ In his broadest contribution, Cotton argues that there were eight key thinkers that made up an ‘Australian school’ of IR prior to the 1960s. These included thinkers included Frederic Eggleston,Footnote ¹² A. C. V. Melbourne, H. Duncan Hall, W. K. Hancock,Footnote ¹³ Fred Alexander, W. Macmahon Ball, and Crocker. Cotton, despite his detail, is ultimately ambivalent about colonialism's role in the foundation of Australian IR. Though he certainly acknowledges that imperialism was an element of Australian scholarship, he does not discuss in detail, for example, the colonial racial science or settlement politics that underpinned Australian IR scholarship. Although he notes some of the racial doctrines, particularly regarding the South Pacific, he does not critique the presence of such ideas. Rather, his primary argument is that a distinctive Australian school of thought was developing from the 1920s onwards. Although I agree, I ultimately depart from this argument here to unpick the founding assumptions of IR in Australia. By tracing the evolution of Australian IR from The Round Table, through to the establishment of IR as a university-based discipline, I show the methods and style of scholarship emanating out of Australia. These origins, I ultimately argue, are unseemlier than Cotton's history suggests.

Within these histories there is a tendency to look at the period through rose-tinted glasses, to ignore or minimise racial and imperialist language as germane to the historical moment, to point to the quality of work that was done,Footnote ¹⁴ even to write in celebration,Footnote ¹⁵ rather than to interrogate critically the history of the discipline and what it means for the discipline and how we think today. As we will see continuously throughout, ideas of empire, race, and hierarchy were constant assumptions of Australia's early IR. These were not mere undercurrents, and should not be forgotten or buried, in order that we carry on with our studies of great power politics. The depth of the forgotten history of imperialism buried within Australia's development of IR thought is troubling for a discipline whose foundational assumptions are being destabilised by critiques of its Eurocentric and imperial origins. Robert Vitalis has discussed this in the context of American IR, finding that the expansion of white supremacy was crucial to the formation of the discipline.Footnote ¹⁶ The same effort existed in Australia, and needs to be understood, analysed, and critiqued.

As my emphasis is on broader disciplinary currents, I do not focus on the lives and thoughts of specific key individuals, or seek to canonise the analytical quality of their work. This enables me to emphasise political discourse and the ideas, topics, and framings for discussion, rather than the personalities having them. This, combined with an understanding of the institutional structures in which work was published, allows us to understand how and why IR was founded in Australia, and how the international and imperial interacted within the origins of Australia's IR discipline.

Finally, it is worth noting that the authors examined here are overwhelmingly male. Patricia Owens has rightly pointed out that women have played important roles in international thought, but that their influence has been obscured or even actively erased.Footnote ¹⁷ As well as frequently being about settler colonialism, then, the scholarship analysed here is very much a white man's view of the world. As we will see, women were involved in this process, both in publishing and administration throughout.

The Round Table in Australia

I will begin with the Round Table story in Australia, as it contextualises the role of the AIIA, and places its founding within the circulation of ideas around the empire. Lionel Curtis arrived in Sydney on 16 September 1910 and toured Australia for three months. He spent his time primarily in New South Wales and Victoria, which were subsequently the two strongest bases for the Round Table movement and the first Australian states to form branches of the AIIA. Over these three months, he seemingly never ate a meal without discussing with political elites the creation of an Organic Union – a reorganisation of the British empire that he believed would come about if Britain and the Dominions could come to see the world the same way.Footnote ¹⁸

The Round Table journal was aimed at producing scholarship with the goal of fostering greater understanding among the Dominions. Each issue of The Round Table included a summation of politics around Australia, including domestic politics, trade, and finance as well as international affairs. Each was published anonymously. As described by Thakur, Davis, and Vale, this was done to produce greater mutual understanding of the Dominions. Australia, though, did not feature in the first issue of The Round Table, making its first appearance in the second issue. This article sought to provide a political update and to describe of the situation in Australia, but included a full-throated defence of the White Australia policy. Such defences were commonplace in the Australian updates in the journal, and it was generally coupled with a narrative of Australian settlement as background to its necessity. ‘To those unacquainted with local conditions the cry for a “White Australia” may seem somewhat hysterical, but there is no question upon which the people are more united and determined.’Footnote ¹⁹ This suggests not just an anxiety about Asian immigration but also an anxiety that the other Dominions might not understand. White Australia, then, was the first international issue deemed worthy of serious discussion. The author carried on that the entire Australian political community supported this, with the author stating, after a consideration of the trouble caused by Chinese migrants that, ‘when outsiders appreciate the menace involved in the proximity to our empty north of hundreds of millions of land-hungry Asiatics, they will perhaps sympathise with the view held in common by all parties in Australia’.Footnote ²⁰ Such tirades remained a common facet of this earliest form of Australian IR.Footnote ²¹

This was such common knowledge in Australia, that a later article discussing imperial defence suggested that ‘It was not worth the time to make [an] argument that Australia had to be wary of the ‘“the Yellow peril” [as][a]ll thinking men now subscribe to defence policies which involves [sic] this assumption’. The author concluded that Australia sees ‘peaceful immigration of eastern races as equally dangerous with conquest’.Footnote ²² Terra nullius was an inherent assumption within this as well, with another author writing on the labour movement that White Australia ‘means the reservation of the whole Commonwealth territory for the exclusive occupancy of people of European stock.’Footnote ²³ Within these early articles, the Northern Territory was narrated as foreign to Australia, with white settlement of the territory becoming a foreign policy goal.Footnote ²⁴ This suggests very much that racial categories were central, and that the Round Table's work in Australia was dominated by imperial racial ideologies and notions of race development.

Over the course of the First World War (WWI), political and war reporting came to the fore of the journal's focus, with less discussion of immigration and identity. Support for the war was a constant. In 1915 the Round Table looked at conscription, arguing that Australians had to understand that they were being defended from Gallipoli. Stating that ‘Truly, if there is any part of the British Empire which ought to comprehend this fact, it is Australia, the one continent upon the globe which is governed by a homogenous race.’Footnote ²⁵ Interest in the South Pacific was also sparked by WWI, given the German colonies in the area. The Australian reports began to include detailed discussion of Australian policy towards the South Pacific.Footnote ²⁶ This was maintained after WWI, when in 1920 Australia took possession of New Guinea as its first colonial territory. The Australian mandate in New Guinea would continue to be a major topic in Australian IR. The policies discussed in The Round Table related to the best way to ensure the advancement of New Guinea's ‘primitive’ or ‘stone age’Footnote ²⁷ people while ensuring they did not settle in Australia. Nauru also became a focus, after becoming another Australian mandated territory.Footnote ²⁸ Having received some small mandates, Australia's IR community began to look beyond just imperial politics of settlement in Australia and towards its own imperial projects in the South Pacific.

There were occasional moments of dissenting policy within these many anonymous reports on Australia's place in the world. One author, discussing the nature of Australia's maritime defence, noted ‘the difficulty of reconciling the claim to racial equality with the White Australia dogma’.Footnote ²⁹ Another focused on the problems created by the White Australia policy, without offering an endorsement or an explicit rejection, as it limited the development of some industries, as white settlers had higher expectations of pay.Footnote ³⁰ These moments, however, were few and far between.

At this stage, Australia's commentary on international affairs was framed around its engagement with the empire and Britain, imperial conferences, immigration, and tropical Northern Australia. Over the first twenty years of The Round Table, this very gradually began to include Australia's engagement with the South Pacific, primarily through its new imperial obligations in its mandated territories. Soon, the study of the international was reshaped by the founding of the AIIA, which offered deeper connections to London and a slightly more global outlook on how Australia studied the rest of the world.

Founding the Australian Institute for International Affairs

Fifteen years after Curtis's initial tour, the Round Table groups he established were merged with the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) societies, to form the Chatham House affiliated AIIA. Working from London, Curtis led the decision to merge the two institutes as a means for producing closer cooperation.Footnote ³¹ In 1929, discussions began on linking the New South Wales branch of the RIIA to merge with the IPR groups.Footnote ³² It would then be affiliated with the RIIA, institutional subscriptions would continue for members, and full privileges of membership of the RIIA were allowed for Australian members visiting London.

There were some tensions within the Australian community over the name, with the secretary of the NSW branch of the RIIA concerned that the proposed institute ‘could not properly be called the “Australian” Institute if it did not include the Victorian division of the existing Australian branch’.Footnote ³³ Ian Clunies Ross, a Round Table member best known for his contribution to veterinary science,Footnote ³⁴ was keen to ensure no rise in the subscription price to the Round Table, and a reciprocal membership for members of Australians and Canadian institutes. These terms were all thought of as tenable by the secretary of the RIIA in Victoria, Tristan Buesst. This was agreed to on the proviso that a similar arrangement be made in Victoria, and ensuring that the body would eventually become federalised.Footnote ³⁵ The discussions were led by Curtis himself from Chatham House, who was very supportive, though many of the issues were ultimately down to the local IPR and the RIIA groups in Victoria and New South Wales.

The creation of the AIIA was supported strongly by Ross, as he believed it would result in ‘one strong and united body … which will be able more effectively to stimulate and maintain interest in International Affairs’.Footnote ³⁶ Chatham House reacted very positively to the news of negotiations, and had only two conditions: that membership be confined to British subjects and that the institute not express any opinions on any aspect of international affairs.Footnote ³⁷ This is in line Curtis's original formulation for the scientific study of international affairs: a very narrow viewpoint on world affairs (almost exclusively that of white Anglo-Saxon men) coupled with a sense of political objectivity. A few members were reluctant, and, identifying more with London than with Australia, wished to maintain their Chatham House membership instead of joining the new institute.Footnote ³⁸ Those members who had joined Chatham House prior to the existence of its branches in Australia were eventually allowed to maintain their London-based membership.Footnote ³⁹

Following the successful establishment of the NSW branch of the AIIA, attention turned to creating a Victorian branch. The Victorians were rather warier of the move, though they did not entirely reject it. There were concerns that it may negatively affect other intellectual groups, such as the League of Nations Union and the Round Table groups. They cited the loss of revenue created by merging the IPR and the Victorian RIIA, as several people were members of both groups. They also questioned if the move would foster greater cooperation between the Victorian branch of the RIIA and London given that they already cooperated substantially and shared a joint secretariat.Footnote ⁴⁰ Still, these difficulties were overcome, and in early 1933, Victoria and Queensland branches joined the AIIA.Footnote ⁴¹ With this merger, the body was formally constituted. The first executive of the institute was made up of W. Harrison Moore, K. H. Bailey, E. Piesse, Tristan Buesst, Alfred Stirling, Douglas Copland, F. W. Eggleston, P. D. Phillips, Ernest Scott, and G. L. Wood.Footnote ⁴² Tasmania, South Australia, and Western Australia set up branches over the next few decades. Eggleston was also to represent the institute with the Pacific Council of the IPR. One woman, Eleanor Hinder, was involved at the high levels of the institute, as the Australian member of the IPR programme committee.Footnote ⁴³ Hinder published throughout this period, on women and labour, primarily in China.Footnote ⁴⁴ An internationalist and a socialist, she spent much of her time between the wars in Shanghai, where she was appalled by the working conditions of women and children.Footnote ⁴⁵ She became involved in the IPR in the late 1920s, leading to her connection to the AIIA's founding. Her role was a rare moment of both ideological and gender diversity, in what was often a closed ideological shop of the RIIA's network.Footnote ⁴⁶

At the meeting in which the AIIA was established, the three bodies selected their research priorities, which strongly reflect the direction that Australian IR was taking. Amid all the administrative details, the actual research priorities were telling. Victoria was to focus on the ‘peopling of Australia’ and land utilisation, Queensland was to focus ‘problems of tropical Australia with ‘special reference to settlement’, and NSW was to focus on the mandated territories of New Guinea and Nauru, with ‘special reference to the Government of dependences in the Pacific’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Another key research priority for the AIIA as a whole, worthy of a subcommittee of its own based in Canberra, was East Asian relations. Each of these priorities was related to Australia's own anxieties about its population and its colonial project. They reflected Australia's identity and vision of ‘the international’ at the time. Within Australia's white identity discourse, the north of Australia had long been narrated as ‘unsettled’, ‘foreign’, or even as part of Asia. In this case, this was so strongly felt that managing the Northern Territory was placed within the remit of international affairs. Land management and the discussion of immigration procedures remained another of Australia's key ‘international’ priorities. These priorities blurred the domestic, imperial, and international.

The final priority, though, the maintenance of Australia's imperial possessions reveals even more deeply the imperial nature of international affairs at this moment. Australia's management of New Guinea and Nauru, today both used as secretive detention centres for housing refugees who arrive in Australia by boat, were Australia's colonial projects. Most of these issues were ever-present subjects for discussion in The Round Table. The addition of East Asia, was in some ways a departure from the purely colonial focus of Australian IR. As we will see below, these territories were frequent topics of Australia's first IR journals, which were formed by the Victorian branch of the AIIA. This focus stood alongside the Northern Territory and Australia's colonial possessions as subjects for anthropological study under the banner of IR.

Australia's first IR journal: The Austral-Asiatic Bulletin

With the establishment of the AIIA, the Victorian arm of the institute decided to establish the first Australian IR journal. The Austral-Asiatic Bulletin was published by the Victorian Branch of the AIIA from 1937–46, before being replaced by a journal seeking to represent the institute nationally. Its editorial board was comprised some familiar figures: Eggleston, Macmahon Ball, E. C. Dyason, P. D. Phillips, and Ernest Scott. Its mission statement in its opening editorial, most likely written by some combination of the names above, discussed its goals, again describing them as apolitical:

The editorial continued, stating that this commitment to objectivity would not make the journal shy away from opinion. Indeed, it was hoped that the bulletin would lead to a greater mutual understanding between Australia and ‘the Orient’. Indeed, Australia was deemed to be part of the Orient:

The construction of Australia's relationship with Asia here is interesting. Although it frames Australia as part of the ‘Orient’, there are clear divisions drawn as well, even in the hyphenation of the title of the journal. We can see from this also that, in terms of theory and method, Australian IR remained connected to the original conception of Curtis: the gathering of facts with the purpose creating and improving reality. Within this, the knowledge produced was continually racialised, which was made even clearer when the focus fell on the White Australia policy and on the ‘race development’ in Australia colonial possessions.

Although it was similar in terms of its method and mission, Austral-Asiatic Bulletin departed from Round Table in some substantial ways. Rather than six or seven lengthy articles, the journal comprised around 15 short articles, each covering roughly one to three pages. Almost all articles were published with the author's name attached, though some authors used pseudonyms. Some familiar topics were covered frequently, including the development of Northern Australia, colonisation in New Guinea, and the pitfalls of immigration from Asia. Australia's place in imperial defences and the British Empire remained a subject, while a few discussions of Australia's relationship with the US took place. These connections, for the first few years prior to WWII at least, were the primary way in which the rest of the world was discussed in Australian IR.

The first article in the journal, by Charles Hawker, a politician in the Nationalist Party (a forerunner to today's conservative Liberal Party) was titled ‘Wanted: An Australian Policy’.Footnote ⁵⁰ It discussed the occasional clashes between Australian interests and ‘imperial patriotism’ arguing that it would be beneficial to all parties if Australia were to take more responsibility for its own defence. He did so, though, with a slightly different justification to Curtis's original formulation of Organic Union: Australia could not ‘treat British statesmen as super-men’.Footnote ⁵¹ Debate on the big picture of Australian foreign policy centred on the extent to which Australia could strike out on its own, and could it develop its own international policy. Most, if not all, though, still saw themselves as part of a transnational network of Britishness, which offered Australia overwhelming benefits.

The study of New Guinea became even more common with the advent of the new journal. One anonymous article wondered what would become of New Guinea if, as the Germans had demanded, Australia lost its mandate and they received all of their old colonies back.Footnote ⁵² Another anonymous author looked at problems of the New Guinean workforce in promoting the progress of the population.Footnote ⁵³ E. W. P Chinnery published a brief anthropological report on his experiences of touring New Guinea, focusing on native practices of sorcery, magic and religion and the summoning of ancestral ghosts.Footnote ⁵⁴ Chinnery was later hired on the basis of these experiences as Minister for the Interior, to implement Prime Minister John McEwan's plans to manage Aboriginal affairs.Footnote ⁵⁵ He argued that ‘the Australian aborigine is not inferior to the natives of Papua or New Guinea’. Such reports were common enough. Alexander Rentoul described his successes in ‘taming head hunters and cannibals to accept the white man's burden and abandon their care-free ways’, and described searching the jungle until, at the end of the day, having a translator meet with some ‘near naked savages’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Aside from explicit colonial burdens, race remained a consistent topic in the new journal. This included the White Australia policy, the Northern Territory and colour prejudice. Herbert Gepp argued that the lack of settlement of Northern Australia, even prior to white settlement, was to do with the inhospitable nature of the territory. The primary barriers to white settlement, then, were tropical diseases and the fact that white women did not want to live there. In a rare discussion of gender, Gepp noted that for women to want to settle in the Northern Territory, improvement to living conditions would be needed including ‘suitable types and colours of [women's] clothing and underclothing must be continually studied and improved’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Following up on this argument, Ernest Scott, an historian at the University of Melbourne, suggested that Asians did not want to settle Australia in any case, rendering changing Australian immigration procedures irrelevant. He argued that ‘the supposition that there are thousands of Asiatic eager to people Northern Australia is sheer nonsense’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although this minimised the threat of invasion, it also negated the need to allow Asian immigration legally. He gave the example of the Japanese government rejecting a South Australian proposal, although the South Australian and Queensland governments had also considered bringing in Indians and Pacific Islanders in to develop the Northern Territory, with the schemes falling over primarily due to fears of non-white immigration to the Australian population's fear of non-white immigration.Footnote ⁵⁹ Scott concluded that anyone thinking the ‘empty’ spaces of Australia were suitable to settling British immigrants were deluding themselves, thus, immigration to Australian should be kept at a minimum.

In an interesting moment of dissent, K. C. Masterman, writing in 1938, gave a forerunner to the rejection of explicit racial immigrations doctrines after WWII, when arguing that ‘one of the most striking results of the revolt against reason which has been the main characteristic of the last few years is the recrudescence of race prejudice’.Footnote ⁶⁰ He lamented the treatment of Jews in Europe, and pointed out the hypocrisy of Americans decrying this same hatred, when ‘drawing the line at negroes’. He carried on further suggesting that the successes in New Zealand of Maori villages would be replicated in Australia if they were given a chance.Footnote ⁶¹

What was newest in this journal, though, and perhaps a result of the AIIA's focus on East Asian affairs, was consistent analysis and commentary beyond the Northern Territory, South Pacific, and the Empire. Articles appeared that were written from around Asia, including India, the Philippines, China, Japan, as well as US and UK policy in the region. Occasionally, local, non-Australian authors would give their perspective, particularly in the case of imperial possessions like India.Footnote ⁶² Several reports appeared over the prewar life of the journal of Japan's colonial policies and its naval build-up.Footnote ⁶³ An American, Wilbur Burton, wondered whether the US would allow the Philippines to become a Republic, and argued it may be better off, given growing Japanese aggression, becoming a Dominion of the US.Footnote ⁶⁴ Elsewhere, Syed Amjad Ali, a future Pakistani ambassador to the US, argued for India's involvement in the war as a means of defending India from invasion.Footnote ⁶⁵

Women did publish in the Austral-Asiatic Bulletin. For example, Ada Constance Duncan published an article on ‘Education in China and Japan’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Georgina Sweet published on Women of the Pacific, drawing on her time as president of the Pan-Pacific Women's Association.Footnote ⁶⁷ In these cases, their publishing was largely confined to topics stereotyped as ‘feminine’. This shows us, however, that a broader agenda in IR publishing existed at this time, with tight disciplinary boundaries not yet established.

The focus of Austral-Asiatic Bulletin was broader than that of its contributions to The Round Table. Out of the original vision, a new stream of thought had emerged, in which Australia began to look towards Asia with a modified version of Curtis's imperial gaze. Throughout the commentary, though, the maintenance and development of Australia's small colonies and the fantasy of control and influence over Asia were ever present. Over the period of WWII, the Austral-Asiatic Bulletin came to focus far more on the destruction in Europe, the Australian war effort and the southward advance of the Japanese. This perhaps made the name of the journal outdated and led in some part to the change to Australian Outlook. The sense of abandonment by Britain in WWII also sparked a greater sense of national identity in Australia, and has been thought of as the beginning of an independent Australian foreign policy. The chosen ‘great and powerful friend’ of Australia shifted from the UK to the US. This was perhaps not an entirely ground-breaking change, but it did lead to Australia becoming far more engaged with the world, rather than having its foreign policy dictated from London. The Second World War was also a major turning point in IR theory globally, as well as in political and imperial ideologies around the world. The backlash against the horrors of Nazism led the imperial powers to gradually abandon their explicit racial doctrines. Race and racism, at this point, began to shift towards cultural, anthropological, and psychological analyses of non-white peoples.Footnote ⁶⁸ Australia kept is colonial possessions and continued the White Australia policy until its gradual demise through the 1970s.Footnote ⁶⁹

With the development of this journal, Australian IR had moved on from solely engaging with the colonial world, as was done in The Round Table, and its own settlement to examining and engaging with the rest of Asia. In doing so, though, its ideas of gathering facts to better the world were tethered to its deep anxieties about Asian settlement and invasion. This produced an attempt to understand Asia in order to soothe Australia's invasion anxieties. It also expressed a desire to exert influence and control.

Looking beyond Asia: Australian Outlook

Australian Outlook replaced the Austral-Asiatic Bulletin in 1947. This was not done because of any failures of the previous journal, but so that each branch of the AIIA could feel ownership of the publication. Moreover, a journal focused solely on Asia could not take in more detailed commentary on the changing world order after WWII. The opening editorial was written by R. J. F. Boyer, which argued that:

The editorial claimed that the journal would ‘act as a unifying influence among our widely separated branches, giving us a cohesion which is difficult to achieve by other means’. The idea of this publication as creating greater unity and a shared outlook on the world is a repetition of the idea of the construction of The Round Table and its ‘Organic Union’. The collection and dissemination of facts for the betterment of politics remained a key goal of the publication.

In concluding the editorial, Boyer repeated a common facet of Australian foreign policy discourse that Australia should punch above its weight in international affairs, arguing that ‘Australia's influence is, and must be, more than commensurate with the size of her population, and it is urgent that that influence should be wisely and nobly exerted.’Footnote ⁷¹ In this historical context, the colonial overtones here are far more obvious than they are today when Australians argue they should have greater influence over international affairs than Australia's population would suggest. Exerting an undue influence over a region of the world is one more mild form of imperialism.

Australian Outlook became a common outlet for Australian scholarship on international affairs. It published articles of far greater depth than Austral-Asiatic Bulletin, in which work was generally very brief. The new journal printed almost all the articles with the author's name included. The type of scholarship in this case shifted, and was somewhat less focused on Asian events, but the content was generally similar. The White Australia Policy was a common subject, as was the maintenance and benefits of colonial rule over the islands of the South Pacific. Race and hierarchy continued to be central themes, with decolonisation often treated with caution and suspicion.

With the change in focus, Asia receded somewhat as the subject for the journal's analysis. The construction of a world order, given the founding of the UN, received considerably more attention than was the case in the previous iteration of the journal. Eggleston remained a prolific author as he was in Austral-Asiatic Bulletin. Early in the journal's existence, he published a three-article critique of the UN's charter, looking at various elements of the organisation's founding. In one interesting example, he looked at the trusteeship provisions in the UN, and the organisations general support for decolonisation in a critical light. He opened with a narrative of imperialism as beginning with European navigators and that ‘Empires have been established, the primitive peoples have been exploited and, in some cases, enslaved.’Footnote ⁷² This system could not be maintained indefinitely, as:

There is little urgency to decolonise here, or questioning of the quality of European ‘stewardship’. Eggleston critiqued the foundation of the UN trusteeship provisions on the basis that:

This takes the suggestion rather further from the liberal social Darwinist position of Curtis that some people were not ready for self-government, but could be improved through imperial tutelage, to seeing some racial groups as static and unable to advance or govern themselves.

Crocker also critiqued the UN's new role in the world in an article published in Australian Outlook when he was working as a chair in IR at ANU. He argued that the principle of one state one vote which at the general assembly could result in ‘minority rule’, with poor states given the same status as larger, powerful states. He critiqued this on two terms. The first, and most important, being contribution to the budget. He argued that wealthy states that provided the bulk of UN funding should have a greater say in UN votes. The second, however, was the more amorphous contribution to civilisation: ‘Judged either by contributions to the budget or by contributions to civilisation, or even by mere population, the rule of unweighted voting which has been justified in the name of democracy and of the majority’ actually means ‘rule by a minority’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Depictions of Australian foreign policy still fell within ideas of Greater Britain and Commonwealth unity. H. A Wolfson's appraisal of Australia's relationship with the Commonwealth suggested that most Australians would see most conflicts with Britain as ‘familiar quarrels’. He also pointed to an independent streak within Australian identity, though, going all the way back to Curtis. He drew a parallel between Australia's response to Curtis's imperial federation in the 1910s and the contemporary call for a Commonwealth foreign policy arguing Australia had sought in both cases to make its own decisions on the scope of imperial obligations and maintain control of its own defences.Footnote ⁷⁶

The original method of IR, the analysis of social facts of colonies for the maintenance of imperialism, continued as a theme as well. One author, W. E. H. Stanner, summed up the need to take a more empirical approach to the diversity of colonies in determining their readiness for self-rule, suggesting that ‘It begins, I believe, with an effort to analyse by sociological methods the social facts of particular colonies.’Footnote ⁷⁷ Belshaw described what he saw as a new spirit of development and progressivism in South Eastern Papua, but tempered his optimism with a sense that there was not yet the administrative skill in the province necessary to allow self-government.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although the South Pacific was a common subject,Footnote ⁷⁹ it was not until Australian Outlook took over the publishing, that the settlement of the Northern Territory was no longer seen as an appropriate topic for IR. Australian IR had become a mix of events at the global level, the role of the Commonwealth, analysis of events in South East Asia and the colonial project in the South Pacific. Despite this, colonial ideas of Australia ‘punching above its weight’, or that the Northern Territory is underpopulated being construed as an international threat, remain remarked upon.

Establishing IR at the Australian National University

As Australian Outlook was devised, it was obvious that there had been something of a scholarly community developing in Australia since the 1920s at least. By 1950, this had developed into a distinct academic discipline, which was to be housed in universities. The first Australian school of IR was to be created with the establishment the Australian National University in Canberra. IR was housed within the ANU's Research School for Pacific Studies. Douglas Copland, one of the key founders of the AIIA, was chosen as the ANU's vice-chancellor, a position he took up in 1948. A new focus on international affairs was one of the founding goals of the ANU, with the training of cadets for the Australian foreign service, which grew rapidly throughout the Cold War, a part of its mandate.Footnote ⁸⁰ When departing his role as an Australian diplomat in China, he commented that the School of Pacific Studies would ‘keep me in active touch with many phases of Chinese life and scholarship’.Footnote ⁸¹ Pacific Studies was defined not just as focusing on Australia's immediate Pacific North, though this was a significant topic for study, but as focusing on East Asia as a whole.

Eggleston and Crocker were both central to the establishment of ANU and its school of IR, and Eggleston was key to hiring Crocker. The centrality of Australia's identity and its focus on Asia was shown by the institutional structure: The ANUs department of international relations was to be a section of the School of Pacific Studies. Even within this institutional setting, Australian IR's focus on its region was central and institutionalised.

Crocker was convinced, at least partly by Eggleston, to take up Australia's first professorship in IR at Canberra instead of a professorship in History at The University of Adelaide. Crocker had worked as colonial administrator in Nigeria for many years, where he was critical of British colonial administration. Despite his criticisms, he believed in imperialism and the white man's burden, arguing that it would have been better for most of Africa ‘if the colonial powers had carried on their work for another generation or two’.Footnote ⁸² He took up the chair in the School of Pacific Studies in 1949, making him Australia's first IR professor.Footnote ⁸³

Eggleston lay out the priorities for the school in a memorandum on the School of Pacific Studies and the methods that he sought to use, which was forwarded on to Crocker. The methods and priorities drew quite clearly from Curtis's original framing of what the scientific study of international affairs was to entail. Eggleston's memorandum advocated the detailed gathering of ‘facts’, its circulation around the department for review, and the belief that knowledge could create reality, rather than just describe it. Curtis's foundational method for IR is echoed here once again.

These methods were tied to a set of issues that the School of Pacific Studies should focus on:

These problems were bound with an idealistic call on its academics that:

Eggleston's memorandum on the School of Pacific Studies opened with its key priority as ‘the development of communities from the primitive stage to a stage in which they will be able to take their places in the modern world’. Eggleston commented:

He had suggested elsewhere that Australia's policies in its colonial possession New Guinea was to ‘rely considerably on the anthropological research’ of the School of Pacific Studies.Footnote ⁸⁷ Further priorities included the ideal means for distributing aid, comparing constitutions of colonies and mandates in the Pacific, race relations in the Pacific Area, a review of the process of decolonisation for Pacific states, and the integration of the community in Malaya. One explicit priority for the department of IR was to be ‘the equilibrium or balance of power of Forces in the Pacific’, including the ‘basic geopolitical factors’ of ‘population, natural resources, industrial developing and ideas and movements’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The idea of a balance of power or a natural equilibrium are more closely associated with classical realism.

As we have seen, race and settlement was a foundational concern for the establishment of IR in Australia. I close, then with a consideration of how race was discussed at the moment in which, as Nicolas Guilhot has put it, race and empire were being written out of the discipline.Footnote ⁸⁹ Bearing in mind the suggestion that it was necessary to study the ‘equilibrium’ or balance of world politics, how did race play out at ANU under Crocker's chair? The immediate dismissal of race was not entirely the case in Australia, or at least not for Crocker. He had hoped to give a major public lecture on the subject, but instead had it published following his departure for India to work as a diplomat. We can see from his analysis of race and international affairs, that he felt race was still an issue in IR, not as a biological concept, though, but as a residual issue. Crocker argued, then, that ‘it is essential, then, to understand the factors that operate to disturb the equilibrium in international affairs, both by the material difficulties they create and by the emotionalism and the irrationality they provoke’.Footnote ⁹⁰ This was based on his experiences working in India as a diplomat but also revealed his approach to scholarship. Indeed, Crocker saw decolonisation as more significant than the Cold War, suggesting that ‘[I]n the long run, however, the biggest effects will be, I believe, the independence of the colonial peoples and the emergence of Asia and Africa.’Footnote ⁹¹ Asia was particularly pertinent to Australia, stating that ‘the awakening of Asia is, in particular, an immensely important fact of today, and one with which Australia will have to be more and more concerned’.Footnote ⁹²

To understand the argument, we must first consider the historical narrative on which it was based. Crocker argued that the supremacy of the white man was not based on race, but had been primarily achieved through superior technology, allowing him to ‘[dominate] the world through three or four centuries’. He began his history of different races, by sketching out a hierarchy, Africans and ‘Red Indians’ on the bottom, followed by Asians and then Europeans. His narrative is one of racial development. He argued that all races could learn from one another – specifically that Indians and the Nigerians could learn from the British, and that they had done so successfully. He placed this within Rudyard Kipling's framework. He argued that:

Although he acknowledged that injustice, cruelty, and oppression were part of this, he placed it as part of the normal abuse of power, and due to ignorance among colonisers. More important than this, though is that ‘the emotional attitude of the present generation of freed ex-colonials, while it is understandable, is at the same time incomplete’.Footnote ⁹⁴ He concluded by agreeing with Albert Schweitzer, a French medical doctor and philosopher, that the emotion of anti-colonialism ignores the value the ‘tutelage’ given by Europeans to their colonies which far outweighs elements of exploitation and oppression by colonial powers. Of course, Crocker saw the British as the best and most sensitive colonial administrators, as shown by by their rule of India.Footnote ⁹⁵

This is not so much an erasure of race, but an excision of colonial violence while framing race as more a matter of civilisational development. As shown by Nancy Stephen, ideas of race were shifting after WWII, moving from the biological to the social.Footnote ⁹⁶ Australian and other diplomats began to perform detailed racialised psychological analyses of Indian leaders throughout this period, to account for Indian foreign policy.Footnote ⁹⁷ Australian international thought moved with this. If race is not a biological concept, and the Europeans had successfully completed the ‘white man's burden’ in bringing the non-white races to their standard of civilisation, then why did Crocker still see race an issue for international affairs? Crocker's concern for IR, was that ‘emotionalism’ engendered by this process, might lead to conflict and division by disturbing the equilibrium of international affairs. Crocker built the argument that was race as a key element of contemporary international affairs, because ‘race relations are even more potent than population pressure in arousing irrationality and emotionalism’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Interestingly, as an opponent of the White Australia policy, he included Australia in this analysis, though only very briefly and without considering the implications that Australia might be needlessly afraid of non-white immigration.

He drew on his own experiences, as he felt that living among the ‘non-white’ had taught him how ‘passionately the non-whites are preoccupied with resentments about colour, and about slights, real or fancied, over colour … many non-whites live in a nightmare world of wounded self-esteem’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Africans had a worse experience of this, because they had further to go, and as a result ‘[are] still going through, the stage of being treated as a chimpanzee that can ride a bicycle or that can even pour tea out of a tea pot, though occasionally lapsing into drinking it out of the pot instead of first pouring it into the cup’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Crocker dismissed Indian thoughts on race relations and its anti-racist foreign policy as based on this partiality:

He defined the threat to equilibrium of racial prejudice, as based on irrationality of postcolonial states:

He concluded: ‘but the point to drive home is that the preoccupation with colour was, and still is, most passionate even if most irrational’. Here, racial discrimination is placed with the Indians rather that with white nations. The adoption of an ‘objective’, rationalist IR framework is used in scholarship to dismiss the concerns of Indians as an emotionalist passion. The dismissal of explicitly biological racial and imperial doctrines in Australian IR was taking hold here, yet the racism was maintained through a cultural and social understanding of race. By abandoning race as scientific category and absolving the Europeans from colonial violence, Crocker was able to turn race into a partiality with which only non-white peoples were afflicted.Footnote ¹⁰³

There were, however, some more sensitive approaches to the same topic to come. In 1963, Coral Bell published in Australian Outlook on India's non-alignment. She argued that non-alignment was shifting with the balance of power, and noted China's success in forcing India to rely on ‘an ill-gotten Indian legacy from the British Imperialist past’ to define its borders.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ With Bell, we move into a far more frequently studied period of Australia's history of international thought. Still, there is ample evidence to suggest that settler colonial politics were central to Australian international thought through to the formal establishment of IR at Australia's universities.