This editorial prompted the resignation of one editor. The goal of Incite is to criticise, discuss and provoke. A wise Frenchman was reputed to say, "My friend, I do not agree with what you say, but I shall fight to the death for your right to say it." We couldn't agree more.

1975 and all that...

The decision to send Australian troops to East Timor has provoked a surprising degree of jingoism. The left seems quite happy with the situation for humanitarian reasons or perhaps because it's one in the eye for the Indonesian military. The average man in the street is also pretty chuffed because they have long regarded Indonesian as the regional boyeyman. People who should know better have spoken of Australia making amends for deserting East Timor in 1975 - a restoration of our national honour. The desertion of East Timor was one of several regrettable foreign policy moves made by the government that year.

In 1975 the Whitlam government turned its back on Vietnamese refugees who streamed ahead of the invading North Vietnamese Army. Whitlam, unmoved by what he called 'sob stories' from refugees desperate to escape 'revolutionary justice,' was keen to curry favour with the North Vietnamese regime. The Whitlam government went on to recognised Pol Pot's government in Cambodia. These betrayals and desertions are forgotten. (The Labor Party successfully courts the ethnic Vietnamese vote, despite the fact that it was the right who demanded Australia take more Vietnamese refugees, insisting that we do not forget those who helped Australians in Vietnam.) The claim that we betrayed East Timor lingers. What are the arguments for what Indonesia did?

Portugal, convulsed by revolution, left its former colonies in indecent haste. This left East Timor with three groups, the Democratic Union of Timor (UDT), Popular Democracy for Timor and Fretilin, battling it out in the streets. Timor dissolved into anarchy. By mid-1975 the UDT and Fretilin were engaged in a civil war. UDT initially supported gradual independence under Portuguese control, however with Portugal increasingly preoccupied with its own internal strife, saw the future for East Timor as an autonomous state within Indonesia. Fretilin, militant, uncooperative and quite capable of perpetrating atrocities, had some disturbing allies. It seemed that if Fretilin gained control of Timor it would become a base for communist guerrillas operating inside Indonesia and, more disturbingly for Australia, provide a communist power with a presence in the Indian Ocean. Indonesian, reluctant at first to annex the territory and fast running out of strategic options, sent in the TNI.

Australia opposed the annexation, but provided no constructive alternative. The government, inept and incompetent, was facing a budgetary and constitutional crisis. Given the anti-war mood of the day it was unthinkable that Australian troops be deployed to save East Timor (Rather ironic when one considers that the protesters for an independent East Timor are the ideological descendants of the anti-war protesters of the sixties and seventies). Good relations with Indonesia were, and are, of crucial importance. A tiny state 400 miles from Darwin moving from anarchy to communist control was not an attractive prospect.

To be sure, it was not Australia's finest hour, but foreign policy is first and foremost about national interests. Sending troops to East Timor is now in Australia's interest (contrary to a bitter outburst from a former Prime Minister in the peanut gallery). However, the glee with which some sections of the Australian community have anticipated clashes between Australian troops and the militia - or even better, TNI, is both depressing and counter-productive. It is all the more disheartening because some of these groups, ordinarily staunch advocates of peaceful solutions, would be the last to face the risks they so joyfully subject others to. Doves to hawks in the space of a week. It seems hypocrisy is not unique to foreign affairs.

1942 and all that...

Most nations have their darker moments, skeletons shoved into closets and so. Some have more than others. Some nations face up to their skeletons, Germany has, Japan has not. Australia too has its darker moments. Tarnishing the achievements of over two hundred years of European settlement is the treatment of Australia's Aborigines. They were conquered, betrayed, murdered and, perhaps more tragically, neglected. As Australians attempt to come to terms with this 'new' element of their history, other areas have come under review. For example, the role of the Irish in Australian history is increasingly romanticised and glorified, while the role of the English has been stereotyped to that of villain, oppressor and tyrant. Indeed in many ways the English, or rather the British component, in Australian history has become if not the new skeleton in the closet, a matter of national shame.

This parochial trend is disturbing. It leaves Australian history stripped, sterile, shallow and false, providing us with cardboard cut-out of national identity. Perhaps more dangerously, it leaves Australia with less of an understanding of where it has been, what it has been, and where it is heading.

The nationalism of the Australian republican movement stems from traditional Australian nationalism, a creature of the left. It was anti-Imperial, anti-English, dogged in its support of the working man and an 'independent' Australia. For many in the Australia of 1999 these are all laudable sentiments, elements in our history to be honoured and revered. They are for true believers, the work of the nations first true believers. Unfortunately, by today's standards these early heroes of an 'independent' Australia typified by the likes of Henry Lawson and The Bulletin, sometimes come across as ignorant, narrow-minded and xenophobic bigots.

The Empire was distrusted, in part because it was multi-racial. It was felt that Britain would not always place the interests of Anglo-Celtic Australia above those of the coloured members. When the new Federal parliament voted on the White Australia policy, the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain view the legislation with regret, the British governor-general considered withholding Royal Assent. For them Australia was a member of a mutli-racial, multi-ethnic Empire, Australia's decision could only damage the fabric of that Empire.

This insular and limited nationalism was often contrary not only to Australia's national interests - but the decent and right thing as well. This nationalism opposed Australian involvement in the Boer war, where sympathy often rested with the Boers for reasons of parochialism as well as racism. After the Easter Uprising in 1916, Australian 'nationalists' opposed Australian involvement in 'England's war' in Europe, ignoring that if Britain lost, Australia faced an isolated and insecure future. The Victorian Labor newspaper raised the following opposition to the war in Europe;

'While the whites are butchering each other, Asia is waiting and grinning. Behind the fatalistic Buddha stands a new nation [Japan - an ally] with knowledge of War and Cunning, to lead the Asiatic hundreds of millions.'

In 1939 when Menzies committed troops to the fight against National Socialism, the Labor Party under Curtin argued that Australia should not be involved in a European war. Menzies' action meant that Australia played its part in the Commonwealth's 'finest hour' at a time when National Socialism seemed unstoppable. Australia played a vital role in North Africa - notably Tobruk and El Alamein (where Montgomery took to wearing an Australian slouch hat), Greece and Crete.

For Revisionist historians of today, these were wasteful imperial adventures, diverting vital resources from the real battle against Japan. For these historians, Britain betrayed Australia, leaving Australia to defend itself against the might of Japan. (We hear the echo of the early Australian 'nationalists' who warned that Britain would sell us out to the 'yellow peril.') This ignores the fact that the Pacific war hinged on the European theatre, not vice versa.

It seems no one told Australian POWs on board the Bioki Maru bound for Japan of Britain's betrayal. In an act of defiance one Australian, who had managed to smuggled a bugle on board, played the opening bars of Rule Britannia. Sick, ulcerous, skeletal POWs belted out the line 'Britons never, never, never, shall be slaves'. It seems odd now, and quite jaring, that Australians should describe themselves as Britons, but it was a common sentiment at the time. During the First World War some diggers, as Ken Inglis observed, may have been anti-English, but never anti-British - for they saw themselves as Britons.

Until the 1950s, Australians were British subjects, living in a distant outpost of an Empire that was quickly fading away. Joesph Chamberlain said that when the Empire ceased to exist there will no longer be an England. To an extent that is true. The England of Orwell's 'England, Your England,' has dissolved and a new England has emerged since the death of Empire. Jan Morris, in Farewell the Trumpets puts this death both conveniently and sentimentally at Churchill's death in 1965, the same year that Australia sent its first battalions to Vietnam. For the first time Australian troops entered a war without Britain alongside.

In 1999 Blair's England and Cool Britannia are alien to Australia. For all intents and purposes our head of state is a foreigner, a distant cousin at best, but not close family. There was a time when Britain and the Empire was not alien, and it certainly was not cool- it was phlegmatic, understated and sometimes cruel and ruthless. It celebrated glorious failures and defeats from the Charge of the Light Brigade and Gallipoli, to defiant last stands in Afghanistan. It was cricket, the Northwest Frontier and Rorke's Drift. For a time these things were deeply woven in the fabric of Australian society, they were, in Gavin Soutler's words, the crimson threads. Tattered and frayed, a much reduced, barely discernible, shadow, it marks the boundaries of what Australia was and what it did.

This is not a matter for shame, lamentation, revision or re-writing, or, for that matter, wistful nostalgia. It is to be acknowledge, not hidden. To deny this and remove Australia from the history of the English speaking peoples is wrong. To pretend that our history began in this vast continent not on islands off the coast of Europe, to indulge in frivolous exercises like the elevation of Ned Kelly and the Eureka Stockade to major forces in our political history in a search of a cardboard cut-out national identity, is to deprive Australia of a richer history and identity. It is an act of delusion, destined to provide a false reflection of Australia's own island story.

Stephen Barton, a founding editor and now the senior editor, is currently completing a Master's thesis on Political Leadership at the University of Western Australia. He has received a teaching post at Notre Dame University, Fremantle for the first half of 2000.