Cultural shifts, changing relationships: Australia and the United States

Abstract

This article moves beyond generalisations which view Australia's deepening links to the US as reflections of the dependent nation's unique openness to imported cultural forms and forces. It is argued that American influences consolidated local cultural formations and discursive practices that built on persistent geopolitical insecurities and were sharpened by wars in the Asia-Pacific, decolonisation and Cold War. The pursuit of national interests, not foreign cultural (‘soft') power, and certainly not so-called ‘Americanisation', stimulated Australia's strategic reorientation after Word War II.

Keywords:

• Americanisation
• bilateral relations
• ANZUS
• Cold War
• national identity
• globalisation
• modernisation

Acknowledgments

This article first appeared as ‘Cultural shifts, changing relationships: Australia and the United States', in Peter Bastian and Roger Bell (eds), Through Depression and War: Australia and the United States, published jointly by the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, Fulbright Symposium, La Trobe University, 2001, pp 156–73, and was reprinted as ‘Cultural shifts, changing relationships: Australia and the United States', in Roger Bell, Australia and the United States in the American Century: Essays in International History, API Network, 2006, pp 267–286.

Notes

 1. J Nye, ‘Popular culture: Images and issues’, Dialogue, vol 99, January 1993, p 52.

 2. R White, ‘Americanization’ and popular culture in Australia’, Teaching History, vol 12, August 1978, pp 3, 21. See also, Albinski, ‘Australia and the United States’, Daedalus, vol 114, no 1, Winter 1985, pp 394–98.

 3. G Serle, ‘Godzone: Austerica unlimited’, Meanjin Quarterly, vol xxvi, no iii, 1967, pp 240–49.

 4. J Camilleri, Australian–American Relations: The Web of Dependence, Macmillan, Sydney, 1980, pp Preface, 16–17, 44–75, 120–29.

 5. P Adams, ‘Dolls on the American knee’, The Weekend Australian, 12–13 September 1993, p 2 and ‘United States of Desire’, The Weekend Australian, 9–10 September 1995, p 2. Letters to the Editor pages of major Australian newspapers routinely reflect fears of cultural ‘loss’ and compromised national identity as a result of ‘Americanization’. For more scholarly debates and hints of cultural imperialism. See M McNain, ‘From Imperial Appendage to American Satellite’, ANU History Journal, 14, 1977–80, pp 73ff; D Philips, Ambivalent Allies: Myth and Reality in the Australian–American Relationship, Penguin, Ringwood, 1988, esp. p ix; S. Alomes, ‘The Satellite Society’, Journal of Australian Studies, no 9, November 1981, esp. pp 2–11; Camilleri, op. cit.

 6. Serle, op. cit., pp. 248–49.

 7. G Poiger, ‘Beyond “Modernization” and “Colonization”, Commentary’, Diplomatic History, vol 23, no 1, 1999, pp 45–48.

 8. See C Thorne, Border Crossings: Studies in International History, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1988, p 42.

 9. Deakin, in N Harper (ed), Australia and the United States, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1971, pp 53–56. See also R Megaw, ‘Some aspects of the United States impact on Australia 1901–1925’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1966, esp. pp 18, 359.

10. See generally, N Meaney, ‘A proposition of the highest international importance’, Journal of Commonwealth Studies, vol 5, 1967, pp 200–13.

11. J Matthews, ‘Which America?’ in P Bell and R Bell (eds), Americanization and Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1998, esp. pp 16–17.

12. JD Lang, The Moral and Religious Aspects of the Future America of the Southern Hemisphere, James van Norden Press, New York, 1840; Hughes, in F Crowley (ed), Modern Australia in Documents, vol I, Wren Press, Melbourne, p 592.

13. See R Bell, Unequal Allies: Australian–American Relations and the Pacific War, Melbourne, 1977, pp 226–32, and ‘The myth of a special relationship’, The National Times, 10–15 October, 1977, pp 12–14. Responding to the recent terror attacks on New York, Kim Beazley invoked – as have other Australian leaders in times of crisis – a familiar version of the special relationship. ‘We in Australia owe our freedom to the US. In our darkest hour in 1941 our wartime prime minister called on the Americans and they did not let us down’. Beazley in The Australian, 19 September 2001, p 11.

14. See generally G Barclay, Friends in High Places: Australian–American Diplomatic Relations Since 1945, Melbourne, 1985.

15. Curtin, in Melbourne Herald, 27 December 1941, p 1.

16. Menzies, in Harper (ed), op. cit., p 141; The Sydney Morning Herald, 29 December 1941, p 2, Hobart Mercury, 30 December 1941, p 3.

17. Curtin, 3 May 1944, cited Bell, Unequal Allies, p 47.

18. G Pemberton, All the Way: Australia's Road to Vietnam, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987, pp 20, 1–2; See D Day, Reluctant Nation, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1992. Like Bell (1977), Day (1992) argues that the significance of Curtin's December 1941 statement has been ‘overrated by writers who have, with the benefit of hindsight, claimed it as the point at which Australia switched her allegiance from Britain to the US. This simply did not happen. The Dominion regarded the close relationship with America as a temporary measure. In 1945 Australia attempted to reconstruct the imperial framework … ‘It is worth repeating that the experience of war did not propel Australia from the protective British bosom into the arms of America, as popular mythology would have it’, pp 314–16.

19. Pemberton, op. cit., pp 21, 33.

20. The Sydney Morning Herald, 3 February, 1954, editorial.

21. Menzies, Australian cabinet documents, 1958, quoted in The Australian, 2 January 1988.

22. B Grant, cited H Gelber, ‘Australia and the great powers’, Asian Survey, vol 15, no 3, March 1975, p 189.

23. Prime Minister Harold Holt, 2 November 1967, in Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, HR 57, 2/11/67, p 2686. Responding to the UK plan to withdraw completely from East of Suez by late 1971, Holt stated that the US–Australia relationship ‘vital to us before the British decision … is even more important to us today’.

24. Pemberton, op. cit. p 332.

25. The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 November 1949, editorial.

26. R Ward, History of Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1958, pp 51–52.

27. R Casey, in The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 November 1949, p 1.

28. Harper (ed), op. cit, pp 135ff; Serle, op. cit., pp 259–42.

29. D Lowe, Menzies and the Great World Struggle, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1999, pp 7–8, 182–83.

30. See G Bolton, The Middle Way, 1942–1988, The Oxford History of Australia, vol 5, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp 119–23. See generally, J Murphy and J Smart (eds), ‘The forgotten fifties’, Australian Historical Studies, vol 109, October 1997.

31. See especially, M Rolfe, ‘Suburbia’, in Bell and Bell, Americanization, op. cit, pp 61–80.

32. J Docker, in The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 1987, Review of The 1950s: How Australia Became a Modern Society, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1987.

33. M Lerner, America as a Civilization, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1957, p 929.

34. Pemberton, op. cit, p 331. See also, P Bell and R Bell, Implicated: The United States in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1993, Part II.

35. Matthews, esp. in Bell and Bell (eds), Americanization, op. cit, pp 15–28.

36. These cartoons are reproduced in Bell and Bell, Implicated, op. cit, pp 188–89 (prints).

37. Not until 1992–1995, after the end of the Cold War, did the US displace the UK/EU as the principal source of direct or portfolio investment in Australia. For trends, by region and country, in Australia trade relations from 1949–90, see tables in R Bell, ‘Anticipating the Pacific century: Australia's response to the realignments in the Asia-Pacific’, in M Berger and D Borer (eds), The Rise of East Asia: Critical Visions of the Pacific Century, Routledge, New York, 1997, pp 208–10.

38. R Kroes, ‘Americanization: What are we talking about?’ in R Kroes, R Rydell and D Bosscher (eds), Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe, VU University Press, Amsterdam, 1993, pp 302–20.

39. R Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, pp 1–4. For a broader interpretation of American influences on post-war Europe, see R Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture Since World War II, Basic Books, New York, 1997; and Kroes et al., eds., ibid.; see also, in Bell and Bell, Implicated, op. cit.