In the early 1990s, scholars talked about Australia’s neglect of South Asia, in particular Australia’s failure to understand the rising importance of India. We spoke of indifference, blind spots, missed opportunities, general indifference and even ideological differences between the two countries that began with Jawaharlal Nehru and Sir Robert Menzies. During the last ten years, Australia’s engagement with South Asia has changed dramatically – Australia has been involved in a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban in Afghanistan intermittently since 2002, and India has emerged as Australia’s fourth largest export market. The paradox that this chapter addresses is the way in which Australia’s strategic engagement with South Asia was dominated by Afghanistan while Australian commercial national interests lay with India. These two relationships have overwhelmingly defined Australia’s connection with South Asia. The focus is on Kevin Rudd’s period as prime minister of Australia (2007–10) and his subsequent role as foreign minister (from 2010), because the Rudd years capture the essence of Australia’s new relationship with this part of the world where some two billion people live.

It was in the Channel Fleet that Philip Durham came to the Admiralty’s attention as one of the Royal Navy’s ablest young commanders, and it was in that fleet that much of his career as a post-captain was spent. In July 1781, like several other protégés of Captain John Elliot glad to come into a flag-officer’s orbit given what that could mean for promotion, he was transferred from Elliot’s Edgar into the Victory, flagship of Rear-Admiral Kempenfelt, formerly captain of the fleet and now a divisional commander under Vice-Admiral Darby, whose flag flew in the Britannia. Kempenfelt was still refining the numerical signal code upon which he had been working for a number of years, and chose the sharp-minded Durham to be his signal officer, in the role of acting lieutenant. Durham was present at Kempenfelt’s heroic rout off Ushant, on 12 December 1781, of the Comte de Guichen’s Caribbean-bound transports, with the audacious capture of many despite de Guichen’s vastly superior strength. He continued as Kempenfelt’s signal officer following Darby’s replacement as commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet by Admiral Lord Howe, who in April 1782 raised his flag aboard the Victory. Kempenfelt – now the fleet’s third in command, under Howe and Barrington – raised his on board the Royal George, mounting 108 guns, with Martin Waghorn (written Waghorne in the documents below) as his flag-captain. When imminently due with the rest of the fleet to sail to the relief of Gibraltar, the Royal George sank at Spithead on the morning of 29 August while undergoing a ‘parliament heel’ so that a faulty starboard pipe leading to the cistern in her orlop could be replaced, provisions for the already well-stocked ship being simultaneously unloaded from a lighter that lay alongside.

Having examined the course and causes of this famous disaster in a recently completed but not yet published work, I will confine remarks here to the situation only in relation to Durham, who from 8am was officer of the watch. Nobody voiced concern regarding the extent of the heel, which seemed no steeper than when she was previously heeled, and though at length the worried carpenter, Thomas Williams, told Waghorn of nearly three feet of water in her hold, it proved too late to right her. Durham survived in common with Waghorn and most of the men on deck.

On Tuesday 18 March 2003 the Prime Minister John Howard moved a motion in the House of Representatives, in order to advance the government’s claim that Iraq’s ‘possession and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction’ constituted ‘a real and unacceptable threat to international peace and security’, that Australia’s commitment of military forces to the Gulf with the intention of disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction as a response to this threat was justified, and that this action was legitimised by successive UN Security Council resolutions, most notably Resolution 1441. The Opposition response was to oppose the motion on the grounds that while the disarmament of Iraq was a desirable objective, unilateral means were to be rejected in favour of entrusting the task to the United Nations.

The period 1996–2000 was a relatively difficult and turbulent time for Australia’s defence decision-makers. They had to deal with a number of unforeseen events and crises, adjust their policies and practices to changing political and social expectations, defend themselves from criticism from a range of quarters, and continue to do ’more with less’. The department was forced to acknowledge that it did not have the resources to complete its existing, let alone planned, equipment-acquisition program. And the Australian public was both entertained and appalled by a series of incidents and events that attracted unusual, and increasingly critical, media attention. These included a protracted public brawl between the Minister for Defence and his politically appointed civilian head; continuing revelations of sexual harassment and other misdemeanours within the armed forces; accounts of departmental ineptitude; and the spectacle of the current Secretary of Defence publicly lambasting his department and some of its senior officials.

The last five years in bilateral relations between Australia and Japan have been intriguing. Despite the extraordinary depth of the relationship, a period of drift was discernible between the late 1990s and mid-2002. Japan was (and remains) preoccupied with domestic economic problems, the rising political and economic challenge from China, and taking an active role in the formation of an East Asian Community. For Australia the preoccupation was closer alignment with the USA. The period since 2002, however, marked a return to intense, and at times frenetic, activity between Australian and Japanese officials. At the governmental level efforts were made to invigorate existing commercial, political/security, and cultural aspects of the bilateral relationship. Three government-sponsored conferences were held (in 2001, 2002, and 2005) with the specific task of energising a wide range of connections at the national level and showcasing the relevance of the bilateral relationship in a changing environment.

Three themes permeate most discussions of Australia’s relationship with Europe. The first is that relations are marked by extreme asymmetry. On one side there stands a large and economically powerful group of states, increasingly organised within the European Union (EU); on the other, a middling power that belongs to no regional bloc and possesses limited international clout. The second is that Australia’s relations with Europe are largely driven by trade issues, especially issues in the agricultural sector. And the third is that Australia’s close bilateral links with Britain are still a central feature of its European policy.

In the church at Upper Largo in Fife, where he lies buried in the family vault, there is a handsome wall tablet dedicated to the memory of Admiral Sir Philip Charles Henderson Calderwood Durham. Placed there in 1849 on the initiative of his great-nephew and residual legatee, [James] Wolfe Murray of Cringletie (whose brother Alexander, known to the family as Alick, was the putative author of Durham’s naval memoirs published three years previously), it notes that Durham’s ‘activity, gallantry, judgement and zeal were excelled by none in his profession and his numerous captures and successes were acknowledged by many public testimonials’ and that as a flag-officer he commanded in the Leeward Islands and at Portsmouth. It omits, however, both his survival, in 1782, of the capsizing of the Royal George, the worst naval disaster in British home waters since the sinking of the Mary Rose at virtually the same spot 237 years earlier, and his captaincy of a ship of the line at Trafalgar, where he took two prizes – pivotal events of his career. And Wolfe Murray’s unfortunate choice of words – that Durham spent his later years ‘generously spending an ample fortune’ – gives the impression that the admiral was a careless spendthrift rather than a man of prudence who liberally gave to individuals and causes that he deemed worthy, but was otherwise cannily restrained in his personal expenditure.

The third of the four sons of James Durham (1732–1808), the genial and gregarious laird of Largo, the equally genial and gregarious Philip Charles Durham (his other names were adopted in maturity), was born in 1763 at Largo House, his family’s Adam-designed mansion overlooking the Firth of Forth, presumably a few days before his baptism on 29 July (though that is the birthdate given on the church tablet). Descended on both sides from diverse prominent figures in Scotland’s history, the most incongruous being a grim Covenanting theologian admired by Cromwell, he counted many luminaries of the legal profession among his blood relatives both living and deceased. Not least of these was his mother Anne Calderwood’s cousin Thomas Erskine, a former midshipman who, having subsequently read for the English Bar, served from 1806 to 1807 as Lord Chancellor and was the first Baron Erskine. Also among his mother’s kin were several nautical eighteenth-century Dalrymples, notably Alexander Dalrymple, initial hydrographer to the Admiralty.

In 1996, the parameters of the Australia–Japan relationship were set to change in a manner that few observers had predicted. In the world of foreign affairs, changes of government usually do not dislocate foreign relations or policies. The paramountcy of the national interest normally transcends partisan politics; trade and the business of managing relationships with other nations carry their own momentum and their own rationale. When Hashimoto Ryutaro took over the prime ministership of Japan in January 1996, and John Howard became Prime Minister of a Coalition government in Australia in March the same year, we could justifiably have expected the basics of the bilateral relationship to continue largely undisturbed. While the rhetoric on both sides conveyed the ’business-as-usual’ message, subsequent events were to deliver a different reality. The issue at the heart of this transformation was regionalism.

The trans-Tasman relationship matured in the 1990s as Australia and New Zealand assumed somewhat more distinct identities, while simultaneously forging a closer partnership on the periphery of the Asia-Pacific region. No one in New Zealand pretends that the relationship with Australia is one of equals. Each is a central but asymmetrical priority for the other in economic, trade, foreign and security policies. The momentous global changes of the 1990s affected the two countries in similar ways and produced many similar responses. Along with the abatement of the Soviet threat from Southeast and North Asia, this gave rise to some fears of the retrenchment of the United States from Asia and to a resulting instability in Asia. Australian and New Zealand concerns therefore focused more sharply on the creation of structures of confidence building and security dialogues in the Asia-Pacific region. Yet New Zealand’s geopolitical distance from Asia relative to that of Australia, as well as New Zealand’s dissociation from the Australia, New Zealand and United States (ANZUS) security alliance for fears of nuclear contamination, took Canberra and Wellington along some separate defence paths.