Losing the blanket

by David Goldsworthy

"When Britain's sprawling empire wound down with unexpected speed in the 1960s, Australia lost a comforting 'security blanket'. We had to struggle to re-establish and protect ourselves in a volatile and threatening world. Australia's interests in empire had taken many forms--strategic, economic, cultural and psychological. Indeed Australia had used British experience as a template for its own 'mini-imperialism', in Papua and New Guinea for example. The most important connnections between Britain's imperial interests and Australia's regional ones were in Southeast Asia, but they extended to the Indian and Pacific oceans and even to Africa. The effects of the end of empire upon Australia's external relations have tended to be eclipsed by historians' emphasis on Cold War imperatives and Australia's consequent alignment with the United States. Losing the Blanket rights the balance by showing how Australia's foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s was affected by the end of empire. Under