AUSTRALIAN-AMERICAN ASSOCIATION
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE LUNCHEON
Hotel Canberra, Canberra, A. C. T. 19 September 1969
Speech by the Prime Minister, Mr. John Gorton
Group-Captain Nicholls, Mr. Buchan, Distinguished Guests, Mr.
Ambassador:-I think the first thing I would like to say to you is that I
welcome this opportunity on behalf of the Government to welcome the new
Ambassador from the United States, Mr. Rice, and his wife. We hope
that their stay in this country will be thoroughly enjoyable for them and
that it will help to cement even further the relations between our two
countries. I know they will be welcomed warmly wherever they go in
Australia, and I hope they go throughout the whole of this nation.
This gathering is a continuation of an association which
had its roots in the trials of the Second World War. It was then, I think,
for the first-time that there became a really close relationship between
the United States of America and our own nation. I know that as long ago
as 1908, Commodore Perry came out here with the Great White Fleet and
Alfred Deaki, who welcomed that fleet, spoke of " our American cousins"
And that was long ago. And there has been a continuing feeling along those
lines since that time.
Indeed, one of our most different and most well-known
politicians, Mr. King O'Malley, who was instrumental in founding the
Commonwealth Bank, came either from the United States or Canada it's
not quite clear. But at any rate, it was quite close to the United States,
if it wasn't in it: But that feeling really came to have far more deep-seated
roots in the Second World War. There are perhaps many people in this
room, or some people in this room who do not remember this because
the years are quick and memories are short, but we were threatened, as
we were, with actual invasion of our country, and that was strange to us
for we are one of the few countries in the world that has never had to suffer
an invasion. And when there was a sweep down of apparently irresistible
military power, closer and closer to Australia, culminating in ail attack
on New Guinea itself at Milne Bay, it was then that there came to our
assistance soldiers from the United States. It was then at the Battle of
the Coral Sea, which you have celebrated for so long, that the tide was
turned back. And those joint operations for they were joint operations
of our two nations, struck feelings of gratitude from the Australian people
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which I think have never withered and which I believe, even though younger
generations follow us along, will also never wither away.
This was why for so many years the highlight of the year
for the Austral ian-American Association was what was called the Coral
Sea Celebrations, and that was why for so long top admirals and generals
and air force officers from the United States were brought out by your
Association to tour Australia and to talk to your members. And I think
it right, proper and wise that you decided that the years having passed,
there should be a wider and deeper and even more significant association
than just the memories of the times when we stood together and some of
us fell together. And so you have thought it right, and I think it right, that
you should bring out here as your guest distinguished citizens from the
United States in all walks of life, that you should seek to broaden year
by year the kind of association between our two peoples, that you should
seek to see that we do not just look back to the past but accept the present
and look to changes in the future. Therefore you seek to broaden out into
student exchanges, in which young people from America come here and
young A ustralians go to the United States and you seek to have closer
cultural relationships. seeking by these means to get those who are
going in the future to be the leaders of our nation, to know more of the
United States and those from the United States who may be leaders of that
nation to know more about us. And we must never forget that each single
student who comes to Australia and spends some time here at one of our
schools and goes back to the United States is not just one person but is a
person who has a wide range of friends to whom he or she can speak, and
by speaking to them of how life is in this country, can do far more in
spreading amongst that community a knowledge of our own nation.
We have, of course, co-operation between the United States
and the Australian Government on many fronts, You have spoken of defeince
itself and I am not ashamed to say I believe that the true protection of
Australia in the years ahead while it is growing, while it is strengthening
itself, while it is strengthening its own defences, depends in the main on
the United States and on the ANZUS Treaty.
If it were not for that, we would in the charged circumstances
of the world, with Britain's shield having been removed from our North,
with the world in ferment, we would probably have to divert far more of
our resources than we should to building up to an even greater extent our
own defences. It is this Treaty which enables us to build our own defences
because as you said, the United States quite properly looks to people to
help themselves. But it also enables us, with some security, to build the
industrial muscles, to develop the industries, to bring in the population
which, in the long term, will be the real basis of our strength. And so
this is a sine qua non of our continuing development at the rate at which
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history demands we must develop over the next few years. That is one
aspect of co-operation. just recently you, Sir, from the United States fired the
imagination of the world, by sending for the first time men to wralk upon
the surface of the moon. A science fiction story which would have been
labelled, a decade ago, or fifteen years ago, by most people as nothing
but a science fiction story yet one which has turned out to be fact. And we
played some part in co-operation in that. It was Australian tracking
stations which helped in the mission. There was an Australian scientist
engaged in the planning. I am informed by reading a speech which you,
Sir, made of something which I didn't know before and that is that the
sunglasses were designed by Australians. And we even have a sample in
this country of moon rockts weighing some ounces I'm not quite sure how
many, but when you think of the distance they had to be carried, you will
realise that an ounce is the equivalent of a ton: We have them here, and
this is another example of co-operation between us.
Thinking back in this space programme to the first time
when men circled the earth and in order that they shouldn't lose their way,
the citizens of Perth turned on all the electric light available so that they
would know where they were, much to the subsequent fury of the Perth
electric light ratepayers! These are merely some examples in the field
of scientific advancement in which we are co-operating co-operating
well in that so many of the inventions we make in Australia are developed
in the United States, and co-operating indeed in other ways.
We are co-operating on the far-flung frontiers in Australia
and we are a nation with frontiers still. Those of you who have at any
stage beein in the newly -developing towns in Western Australia or the
Northern Territory or Queensland will agree with me that there is there a
feeling of excitement in the air, a feeling of endeavour. There is a feeling
of pride when the length of railway line laid in a day breaks a world record,
a feeling of enthusiasm which goes with frontiers. Mind You, they aren't
the old frontiers of the West the West as we have seen it on television.
Nor are they the frontiers that many of us, including my wife and myself
came to, when we came back to Australia from abroad, because those
were, in my case and you can duplicate it in yours the sort of frontier
in the North of Victoria. There was no electricity and you had something
called a Coolgardie safe if you wanted to keep anything cool. This was a
contraption in W~ ihich you put a lot of water at the top and which was supposed
to keep your food from going bad, but I was never able to discover in fact
that it did. But these new frontiers are not like that. In these places,
there are shopping centres houses with air-conditioning..... swimming
pools community centres. The development going on is superb and
the advantages to this nation are immense and the advantages to those
United States citizens who provide some capital towards it are also
immense a co-operation there to the benefit, I think, of both of us. A
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co-operation in bases such as the North-West Cape base, such as the
other joint defence arrangements that we have. You could go through a
whole field and we would find, I think, as we went through that there
have probably not been any other instances where two nations have so
closely co-operated for what they believe to be the good of all.
Indeed, I would like to cast your minds back to something
I once said in the White House when I was being entertained by President
Nixon because it came in for a little comment in Australia at the time.
And having considered it, I think it was quite a reasonable thing to say.
refer to something about " Waltzing Matilda With You" and I would like
to tell you the background of that. I had been talking about the difficulties
that former Presidents of the United States had had to encounter, difficulties
which Lincoln had had to encounter in his problems over State/ Federal
financial relations, and which in many respects, because there was so
much division in the country then, bore some relation to the problems
and difficulties that President Johnson and President Nixon had to bear on
Vietnam. But I finished up saying and I still believe this is true
whenever there is an attempt by the United States or the United Kingdom
or any other country to try to raise the living standards of the underprivileged
peoples of the world, to try to improve the economies of underdeveloped
countries, to try to ensure that countries will retain their independence
against attack, whenever there are such endeavours and such approaches
by such countries, then we will go " A-Waltzing Matilda" with you. Perhaps
it should have been phrased " for we will then endeavour to follow the same
road" becauc I think we would and have endeavoured to follow the same
road of trying to lift the living standards by trying to develop the economies
and by trying to see that people govern themselves in independent states.
All these things of which I have spoken are areas of closer
co-operation. We have no doubt whatever that should we ever need
assistance in time of danger to us, the United States would provide that
assistance to us as we would help in our way in troubles she might have.
We believe that the basic desires of our people and the United States
people and our Governmentl and the United States Government are the
same, both for the widening of the horizons of life for our citizens and
both for attempting to bring peaceful conditions and better living conditions
to peoples in the world outside our countries.
In all these matters, there is a basic sameness, a basic
unity between our countries. This is something your Association can
help to further and this is why the Government takes such an interest
in your Association and what it is doing.
There are, of course, other fields in which co-operation
between our countries is not as entirely close as perhaps we would like
it to be. For example, it would be very nice if the United States, having
an insatiable appetite for meat, were to enable us to export, in order to
meet this appetite, some of the meat which at the moment we are not
allowed to send there. There are other areas such as sugar which seems
to be engraved on the heart of my friend and I say that genuinely my
friend, Senator Fulbright, as deeply as Calais was engraved on the heart of
Queen Mary. There is the long-standing question of whether it might not
be good and strengthening for both our countries if the kind of wool which
we can produce in Australia were allowed in to the United States of America
without such a crippling duty on it. But these, Sir, are merely passing
thoughts and introduced into this gathering in the hope and the belief that
all the areas of co-operation I have spelt out and which this Association
so strongly supports will be able to spread over in time into these other
areas of co-operation. But having said all that, and having at timcsendeavoured
to be not too deadly serious in saying it, it still remains completely and
irrevocably true that if this world is to be, in time, the kind of world that
we would like it to be, then the co-operation of men and women of goodwill
in the United States and Australia and in other countries must be fostered.
It must be furthered and the men and women of each of these countries
must learn more of each other, must learn more of their ideals, must
learn more of their problems. This you are doing. For this we give you
our thanks. And because of this I have been proud and honoured to have
been asked to talk to you today.