Throughout its history, Australia feared on several occasions a possible invasion from other countries or from other cultures, especially after World War II with the rise of globalisation. I will try to examine the major events in which Australia showed this fear, and whether those threats had to be considered real or not. Overall, I will argue that in many cases they were just used as political or cultural means by Australian leaders.

WWI – German invasion?

During World War I there was an intensive use of visual art and posters to threaten Australians. War propaganda focused its efforts to show what would happen if Germany won the Great War. The posters were also used to encourage the men to join the army by manipulating their attachment to Australia, but also to Great Britain, which at that time was still seen as the “mother country” by many Australians.

Germans and Italians, but also the Australian-born Germans and Italians, were considered the “enemy within” and interned and/or deported. It was issued a ban on the German language in public schools. Many Germans decided to anglicise their names, prior World War I, to avoid persecution and to show their attachment to their new country.

World War I divided Australians because of different categories and how those categories were involved in the war effort. It is also to be noted the high number of casualties throughout the War in both fronts. However, on the other hand, the Great War in a way united the Australians against a common enemy enforcing the concept of a nation. However, World War I was mainly a divisive circumstance since it highlighted the differences between various groups of people in Australia. Australian authorities and the common people were really worried about a possible German invasion, which however represented a very remote eventuality due to strategic and military reasons.

WWII – The Brisbane Line

The Brisbane Line was a controversial episode of the Second World War. The Brisbane Line controversy started in October 1942 when Ward, a minister of the Curtin government, accused the Menzies-Fadden government of the elaboration of a plan for the evacuation of northern Australia. However, no documentary evidence was ever produced, as you could verify here, from an article of that time: <http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/2635023/684286>

Evidence of a possible existence of the plan can be found only in General MacArthur’s memories. MacArthur reported a military scheme that considered the sacrifice of the territory above the so-called Brisbane Line, in the event of a Japanese invasion during the Second World War. It was discussed but soon abandoned by him, because it would not be strategically viable, however he did never produce any written proof of such a plan.  A Royal Commission was held to examine Ward’s allegations. The proceedings were never transcribed, however the result was that Ward’s accusations were seen as an electoral stratagem.

The existence of the Brisbane Line plan could have been possible, but has never been proven officially or acknowledged by the Australian authorities. Many people still believe also today in the “Brisbane Line theory”, as I personally witnessed many times and also just recently while visiting Brisbane’s City Hall. As Mark Twain said ‘A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes’.

 

Then Australian started to fear and experience, in some cases, a more subtle kind of invasion: the cultural one.

THE COMMUNIST THREAT

The communist threat was yet again a very remote one, since in the 1950s with Stalin’s “socialism in one state” policy, Soviet Union no longer advocated for a direct spread of the communist ideology and/or conquest of non-communist states. However, in the so-called Cold War, Soviet Union helped and supported nations, especially in South and Central America as well as in South-East Asia, where the Communist ideology kept rising throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

The origin of the communist threat for Australia can be dated back to the 1950s, specifically to the American General and US President Eisenhower, and his renowned “Domino Theory”. According to Eisenhower, if Vietnam would have become a communist country, communism would spread in all South East Asia and finally to other Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines but also to Australia and New Zealand. Today we all know that did not happen, even if Vietnam became a communist country and it is still so nowadays.

Again, the fear of communism in Australia does not appear to have had any logical foundation. Instead, it seems that the communist fear was widely used by Australian politicians and leaders in order to have a gain in their consensus. It must be also said on the other hand that the fear of communism never really reached the American level of McCarthyism.

AMERICANISATION

The Americanisation of Australia has been a widely debated concept that in some forms can still be seen in today’s Australia.

Starting from the end of the Second World War, the United States became the role model for Australians especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Typical American objects that exemplified the “American Way” like jukeboxes, flipper but also action/western movie and American popular culture started to make their way also into Australia.  This was not accepted by the older generations, which feared a cultural invasion later known as Americanisation.

Americanisation has its origins in the loss of cultural influence of Great Britain in Australia after the second global conflict. After the war, the Australians started to turn to the United States and their system of values and way of life, that appeared to them as the middle-class dream.

Also today, Australia is still in some ways trying to follow the American example, so much that some scholars argues that what Australia is experiencing today is not globalisation but it is still an updated version of Americanisation or McDomination as some harsh critics prefer to call it. The so-called McDomination has been also experienced by many, if not all, West countries.

Overall, Australians have often feared invasion throughout history, especially in the 20th century. In the first half of the century the type of invasion feared by Australia was more a possible direct invasion from foreign countries, such as Germany or Japan. Later, instead the fear transformed in a possible cultural invasion, such as the communist threat or the one perpetrated with the use of soft power by the Americans. Altogether the Australian fears appear today as mostly baseless, apart for the Americanisation phenomenon that it is still visible today, and not sufficiently supported by facts.

 

References (and for further reading)

Barrett, J 1979, Falling In: Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’ 1911-1915. Southwood Press for Hale & Iremonger, Sydney.

Bolton, G 2012, Oxford history of Australia, vol. 5: the Middle Way 1942-1995, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

Canberra Times, 29 May 1943.

Cottle, D 2001. ‘The Brisbane Line: an episode in capital history’. Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 25, no. 69, pp. 113-121.

Day, D 2003, The politics of war: Australia at war 1939-45 from Churchill to Macarthur, Harper Collins, Sydney.

Eisenhower, DD 1954, ‘The President’s news conference of April 7, 1954’,  Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States of America, Office of the Federal Register, Washington, DC.

Fitzgerald, R 1984, From 1915 to the early 1980s: a history of Queensland, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia.

Haley, U & Boje, DM 2014, ‘Storytelling the internationalization of the multinational enterprise’, Journal of International Business Studies, vol. 45, no. 9, pp. 1115-1132.

Helmi, N & Fischer, G 2011, The enemy at home: German Internees in World War I Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.

Kramer, G 2000, ‘McDomination’, Harvard International Review, vol. 22, no. 9, p. 12.

Lake, M & Damousi, J 1995, Australians at war in the twentieth century. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Macarthur, D 2012, Reminiscences, US Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Maryland (USA).

Queensland Museum. Courage of ordinary men, Queensland Museum Permanent exhibition, <http://www.qm.qld.gov.au/Events+and+Exhibitions/Exhibitions/Permanent/Courage+of+ordinary+men/World+War+1#.VV7LlE-qqkp>.