We have strongest of ties but remain a mystery to the US
When quizzed about our nation, Crocodile Dundee is never far away.
“The Australians have much in common with us – they’re a pioneering people, they believe in personal freedom, they love sports … but there are a lot of differences too … like tea, central heating, the best way to spend Sunday… but the main point is they like us, and we like them.”
The 54-page Instructions for American Servicemen in Australia, handed out to about a million US soldiers from 1942 onwards, is a reminder of how much Australia, perhaps more than America, has changed in the last 80 years.
Gone are the quids, sheilas, afternoon cuppas and the six o’clock swill, even if plenty of “bastards”, meat pies and the royal family linger.
What hasn’t changed is the close bond between Americans and Australians, and their respective governments, even if it has waxed and waned over the years, buffeted, respectively, by cultural fads and changing strategic priorities.
“We feel that our fate and that of America are indissolubly linked,” Francis Forde, Labor war minister said at the time, in remarks that were prescient. He continued: “We know that our destinies go hand-in-hand and that we will rise and fall together.”
But it didn’t have to be that way. New Zealand is part of the ANZUS treaty too, which celebrated its 70th anniversary last year, but its relationship with the US is on a lower plane than Australia’s.
The bonds forged in World War II could have fizzled out were it not for increasingly shared strategic interests that compelled ever closer cooperation at the government level. The Vietnam War, the War on Terror and now, more than any other factor, the rise of Chinese Communist Party power and coercion in the Indo-Pacific has brought the two nations closer together than at any point, fuelling a gradual renaissance of mainstream Americans’ understanding of Australia shorn of outdated stereotypes.
Caroline Kennedy’s appointment as Ambassador to Australia, scion of the US political family most akin to royalty, signals the high regard and importance Washington ascribes to Canberra. And her stature and celebrity, a former US ambassador to Japan, daughter of the most loved Democrat president of modern times, is likely to fuel American interest, both elite and mainstream, in Australia.
Paradoxically, ordinary Americans’ understanding of Australia was greatest pre-globalisation, in the US immediately after World War II, when the hundreds of thousands of US soldiers returned home, sharing their direct experience of Australian life. The US population then was only 140 million (it’s now 330 million).
As the generation who fought the Battle of the Coral Sea started to die, cliches, especially those spawned in the 1980s, when Australia culturally arrived in the US with a bang, took hold.
Even today Americans over the age of 40 are more likely to volunteer kangaroos, Lindy Chamberlain, dingoes, Men at Work, or Outback Steakhouses (an American chain of Australia-themed restaurants) than Australia’s new submarine deal with the US, which dominated US mainstream media for a week last year. “For average Americans the affection for Australia is based on myths that are pretty well baked deep,” says Mike Green, the incoming director of the US Studies Centre.
Even today in Washington, one of the most educated cities in America, it’s not clear the depth of knowledge has improved much. None of the six people I spoke to earlier this week outside the site of the new Australian embassy, under construction at Thomas Circle, knew the capital of Australia was Canberra.
Angela, 45, a 16-year resident of the US capital, gave the stereotypical summary: “I think a lot of great beaches, a lot of deserts, a big Aboriginal culture, things like the Opera House, koalas, all those sorts of things,” she said, conceding she hadn’t heard of AUKUS, the security pact between the US, UK and Australia.
When asked if she knew of any Australian movie stars or musicians, she said, “I don’t want to be one of those stupid Americans but Crocodile Dundee, I’m so sorry.” She declined to give her surname for fear of embarrassing herself.
Gene, 86, who lives across the road from the embassy, said its construction had spurred her interest in Australia, which had produced “a lot of tennis players” including Rod Laver and Evonne Goolagong Cawley. “Scott Morrison didn’t seem to be a good president,” she added, also guessing Australia’s population was 90 million.
The Washington Post, one of the nation’s top broadsheet newspapers, last Sunday ran a feature on golfer Greg Norman’s life and controversial involvement in Saudi Arabia’s bid to establish a world-class golf tournament. “A dashing figure from a curious land”, the journalist wrote of “The Shark”, noting Norman had at the start of his international career “capitalised on Americans’ late-1980s infatuation with Australian culture” by signing endorsements with Reebok and McDonalds.
Two universities in the US, Georgetown in Washington and the University of Texas at Austin, have research centres dedicated to teaching undergraduate courses on Australian politics and society.
“The depth of knowledge was pretty thin; I think American students really struggle to study the parliamentary system; they don’t get it,” Rhonda Evans, director of Australian and New Zealand Studies at UTA, tells The Australian. “Some were under the impression Australia was still somehow a dependency of the UK; I have to explain how independence came over time, not all at once,” she says, adding that the Queen’s role as head of state confused American students.
But that’s all changing, albeit slowly, as memory of Australia’s 1980s cultural explosion fades, and a more sober and accurate understanding replaces it. “I was used to having people say, ‘oh that’s niche’ or ‘do you study kangaroos?’” Evans recalls. “But I had a conversation with a new colleague at UT recently and they said, ‘Wow, that’s really important’.”
Alice Cho, a 22-year-old masters student at Georgetown, from upstate New York, who took a course on the US-Australian alliance, is part of a group of younger Americans increasingly interested in Australia’s relationship with the US in the emerging confrontation with China. “I’d never heard anything about Australia before 2019 but it’s a lot more prominent in the US news nowadays,” she says. “I didn’t realise how deep the relationship between the countries was,” she adds, pointing out she’s planning to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Australia.
Her teacher, Alan Tidwell, the director of Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies at Georgetown, says awareness of Australia ratcheted up significantly in the past few years for two reasons. First, Donald Trump famously hung up on Malcolm Turnbull in 2018, in an argument over asylum seekers.
“It was just stellar the amount of coverage Australia got then, endless column inches that started with what happened and then expanded on why the Obama administration had undertaken that deal with Australia, what was the context to it,” says Tidwell, speaking from Townsville, Queensland.
Turnbull managed to get Trump to honour a deal to resettle up to 1250 refugees who had landed in Australia from Iran, Bangladesh, Somalia and Myanmar.
“And the coverage surged again after AUKUS,” Tidwell adds. Living in the US when the pact was announced in September, this correspondent also remembers being struck by the deluge of mainstream press, day after day, as the Americans digested a deal that had been carefully kept under wraps. It was the first time the US had promised to share nuclear technology since the late 1950s, with Britain.
Perhaps this more grown up, important Australia is permeating US society, at least through the younger generations. Joseph Hughes and Skyler Ryse, both 21, students at the US Air Force Academy, knew, unprompted, about the AUKUS agreement, when I asked them what they knew about Australia outside the embassy in DC. “Australia’s a very important ally,” Hughes said, before explaining how he wanted to visit MONA in Tasmania.
Regardless of what ordinary Americans think, it’s the US elites, the top bureaucrats and politicians, cognisant of the growing importance of the Australian military and security partnership, that sustain the Australia-US affinity.
The Washington-based Centre for Strategy and International Studies in 2020 surveyed different groups of Americans on how willing the US should be to defend different nations from a future hypothetical attack by China.
Australia earned a score of 8.7 among “US Thought Leaders”, behind only Japan (8.9), where a score of 10 indicated “take significant risk” and 1 implied “take zero risk”. Among the broader public, however, Australia scored 6.4, behind South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, as part of an overall lower average score. Australia looms much larger among US elites, than among ordinary Americans.
Most state department officials would “marginally” pick Australia ahead of Britain if asked which was America’s closest ally, Tidwell, who also teaches American diplomats at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, says. “A common phrase you hear is ‘if you’re in a meeting and an Australian isn’t there it’s not an important meeting,” he recalls.
Vietnam was a turning point. President Johnson begged the British to send troops, but they wouldn’t. “The myth in Australia is that the US pulled Australia into Vietnam, but it was Menzies pushing the US to get involved,” Mike Green says. “I wouldn’t say Americans take Australia for granted but there’s a feeling that if anyone is with us, Australia will be even more than the Brits.”
John Howard, who was in the US on September 11, 2001, solidified the relationship further. “I think for the past 20 years anyone who has even a little bit of experience with 9/11 was deeply appreciative of the fact the Australian military went in at the pointy end of the spear,” he adds.
The relationship had its hiccoughs. Timor in 1999 was another turning point, where the US wouldn’t help Australian peacekeeping forces with ground troops.
“I was walking in the Pentagon at the time and Australians were appealing to the spirit of the Battle of the Coral Sea but the Clinton administration, after the disaster of Somalia, was reluctant to put boots on ground,” Green says. The US ended up supplying intelligence and logistical support, and, fortunately, the mission was a success, generating little ill will.
But for all the history it has been China’s behaviour that guaranteed the longevity and increasing intensity of US-Australia relations.
Until 2016, the American establishment worried Australia was falling too much into China’s economic, and perhaps ultimately political, orbit, so dependent were we on Chinese trade. That was before President Xi Jinping fundamentally changed China’s foreign policy.
“When the first iteration of the Quad fell apart in 2008 many in Washington believed that Australia had backed away from it,” Charles Edel, the inaugural Australia chair at the CSIS and former State Department official, tells The Australian.
“After (Kevin) Rudd won the election, there was a sense in Washington that Canberra was downplaying both the importance and utility of the Quad,” he adds, referring to the group of four democracies, Australia, the US, India and Japan, which has risen rapidly in prominence in the last few years as a tacit bulwark against Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
Malcolm Turnbull should get the lion’s share of praise for shifting the levers on Australia’s overall policy orientation, Edel says.
“The US has been impressed with how Australia has frequently been the first mover in taking concrete actions to shore up its democratic institutions from malign foreign influence – whether that’s been excluding Huawei from building Australia’s 5G networks, upgrading foreign investment screening to prevent Beijing’s acquisition of sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure, and in ongoing efforts to enhance foreign influence laws.”
Australia’s growing strategic relevance to the US has come at the right time. For whatever reason, our nation’s cultural and sporting renown has declined relatively since the 1980s, as our strategic and economic clout has increased.
Australian actress Rebel Wilson is a staple of US media, but she’s no replacement for Mel Gibson or Nicole Kidman, whose careers have long since matured. Australian musicians haven’t had a No. 1 in the US since 2016, and almost all of them were in the 1980s and 1970s.
“My stepdaughter has people she follows from Australia, recipes for avocado toast; Australia’s lifestyle brand is significant, especially among younger people,” says Evans.
An article about Americans’ perception of Australia can’t ignore the elephant in the room. Australia’s response to Covid-19 shattered many Americans’ image, however mythical, of Australians’ supposed rugged individualism, and frontier spiirt.
“What happened to Mick Dundee,” a gun store owner in San Antonio asked me, unprompted, last week when I was in Texas.
Australia’s seemingly draconian lockdowns, to some, received at least as much attention in the US as AUKUS, and far more on social media, which the younger generation consumes relatively far more.
“It’s very worrying when Australia goes wobbly,” Phil Hamburger, chief executive of the not-for-profit New Civil Liberties Alliance, told me on Tuesday evening in Washington. “It’s not just about defending your borders, it’s about defending values. For the last six months I feel like I’m asked “what happened” every second week.
Ultimately, it matters little. Our two governments are this century destined for ever closer cooperation; Americans will come to appreciate a more sophisticated and powerful Australia.
“The story going forward is even more integration,” says Green, who expects the nuclear submarines promised under AUKUS, initially to be jointly staffed by Australian and US officers. But the cultural myths that tantalised Americans in decades past are disappearing with no obvious replacement.
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