Australia’s interests in its external territories can conceivably have an influence on Australia’s international relations, depending on what amount of truth there is in the assertion that nowadays foreign policy and colonial policy are interconnected and interacting. These connections and reactions, however, are usually very difficult to trace and to document since they exist only in the highest national councils and behind closed doors. So far as New Guinea and Nauru in the period under review are concerned, the repercussions of Australian policy in these territories on Australian foreign policy do not seem to have been very significant. There are two main fields in which such repercussions might be felt: in Australia’s relations with the United Nations and in regard to specific international issues such as the West New Guinea question; these fields are covered more directly in other chapters in this book, and here attention is confined to an examination of those aspects of Australian “colonial” policy in New Guinea and Nauru which may have had a bearing on international relations.

Australia is a product and an agent of empire. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Australian colonies experimented with ‘sub-imperialism’, an expansionist project obstructed by the fact that the ‘self-governing’ white settler colonies of the British empire lacked external sovereignty. This chapter begins with the Australian colonies’ interdependence with and aspirations to annex ‘adjacent islands’ in the mid-nineteenth century. It follows the construction and administration of a Pacific empire beginning with the annexation of the Territory of Papua, to the administration of New Guinea and Nauru as League of Nations C Mandates and then as United Nations Trust Territories. Law proved an indispensable tool of Australian empire-building, producing complex relations of economic and cultural domination and resistance in Papua, New Guinea and Nauru. Amid the significant re-alignments produced by World War II, Australia attempted to renovate its empire in order to retain it. A professionalised administration of Australia’s territories and the regulation of legal citizenship were met with increasing Indigenous resistance and activism for real self-determination. Although decolonization in the later twentieth century brought Australian empire to an official end, the legacies of those expansionist aspirations continue to shape the Commonwealth’s legal, political and economic relationships with islands and communities in the Pacific region.

Chapter 1 is the introduction to the book. It explains the book’s central argument, its theoretical orientation, and its relationship to existing accounts of Nauru’s international legal history. Commencing with a critique of dehistoricised accounts of the island’s story as a parable, whether of environmental limits or of political corruption, the chapter then outlines the theories of jurisdiction and bureaucracy that inform the book’s focus on the history of imperial administration, rather than on the conceptual history of international law. It moves to contextualise this approach in the field of international legal history, explaining its intersections and divergences with Marxist and Third World approaches to international law. The chapter concludes with a summary of the subsequent chapters on the protectorate, mandate, trusteeship and state periods, and highlights the particular perspectives on German imperialism, Australian sub-imperialism, and geopolitical competition in the Pacific that emerge through this account.

Chapter 5 traces the final shift in Nauru’s status from trust territory to sovereign state in 1968. The dissolution of C Mandate status and the expanded trusteeship system placed Australia and South Africa out of step with global decolonisation movements. Their attempts to maintain control over Nauru and South West Africa attracted international criticism. The chapter examines the relationship between the South West Africa Cases and the UN’s embrace of Nauruan independence. Over the 1960s, the Trusteeship Council brokered independence negotiations between Australia and the Nauru Local Government Council. Australia gradually ceded political control and phosphate ownership but refused liability for the island’s rehabilitation. Nauru’s transition from trust territory to state was a profound achievement, but international recognition of Nauruan sovereignty was deeply ironic. The Republic was regarded less as a viable state than as a vehicle through which the Nauruan people could decide for themselves how to respond to the island’s environmental devastation. The chapter concludes that the 1968 Constitution marked a further accretion of an imperial form of established in the 1880s.