London, 17 November 1966
Confidential
Lord Carrington called on the Commonwealth Secretary yesterday (16 November) to talk about his recent visit to Australia. He said that he had been shocked by the change in the Australian attitudes towards ourselves and the Americans over the last year. Britain was now looked on with complete indifference as a country which no longer counted for very much and was no longer of great interest to Australia; on the other hand, the attitude towards the United States was now nauseatingly sycophantic. President Johnson’s visit2 crystalized and accelerated a change which had in fact been going on for some time. In Lord Carrington’s view, the change was the result of four factors:–
(1) the retirement of Menzies;
(2) the current view that Britain was down and out. This belief was constantly nourished by the Australian Press which printed only critical material about the frivolity, decadence and inefficiency of British life;
(3) 100% support from the Australian public, including most of the Government, for Ian Smith;3
(4) some resentment about our policy of non-intervention in Vietnam.
2. President Johnson had not missed a trick during his visit and Lord Carrington added to some of the stories in Sir C. Johnston’s recent letter to the P. U.S. Lord Carrington had seen Mr. Holt, but the latter had been so much under the spell of President Johnson that he could hardly talk of anything else. The rather crude public relations campaign mounted by President Johnson seemed to have been completely swallowed by the Australian public and by most of the Ministers.
3. Lord Carrington mentioned three other points:–
(1) he criticised the work of the B.I.S. in Australia in not putting Britain’s economic story into proper perspective. Nothing had been done by B.I.S. Officers to get him and a number of important British business men and industrialists who were in Australia at the time, interviews with the Press or on T.V. He appreciated that this was mainly because of the cuts in the B.I.S. in Australia—particularly, the withdrawal of Information Officers from Brisbane and Adelaide; it was almost more important to keep the B.I.S. going in a country like Australia than in under-developed countries in Africa.
(2) No member of the Royal Family should visit Australia for the next year or two since it would be impossible and inappropriate for them to copy President Johnson’s glad-handing and the contrast would be too marked.
(3) Lord Casey had talked to him about the growing Republican tendency in Australia. He was also worried about the relationship between the Palace and himself (Lord Carrington did not go into any further detail) and wanted to talk to one or two people about it when he was here. Lord Carrington thought that the Secretary of State should see Lord Casey and the Secretary of State agreed.4
1 O.G. Forster, Private Secretary to Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs; Sir N. Pritchard, Deputy Under-Secretary of State, Commonwealth Office.
2 Johnson visited Australia in October 1966.
3 Leader of Rhodesian Front and Prime Minister of Rhodesia, 1965–79, who unilaterally declared independence from the UK on 11 November 1965.
4 Carrington was not alone in expressing such concerns. Sir Paul Gore-Booth, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office in London, reported after visiting Australia in June 1966 that business leaders in Australia were critical of British business deficiencies, especially the unreliability of deliveries of British goods. They were also concerned about ‘where Britain appeared to be going’, and influenced perhaps by a number of British immigrants in Australia who appeared to give the impression that ‘the old country is washed up’. Other areas of concern were the Common Market, restrictions on UK investment in Australia, and defence. The war in Vietnam, according to Gore-Booth, assumed ‘a totally different aspect’: when seen from Australia. ‘To the groups that I met it presented itself as a matter of simple prudence to assist the Americans in containing, by force since this was necessary, what might become a direct menace to Australia itself.’ From the High Commission at Canberra, the High Commissioner responded, ‘we must keep our eyes on the goal of a steady, objective, and factual stream of information about life in Britain as it really is’. Encouraging short visits to the UK by young, influential Australians was one way of countering the negative image portrayed by a minority of British emigrants to Australia. (UKNA: FO 371/185912, notes of impressions and records of conversations by Gore-Booth, 28 June 1966, and letter, Johnston to Gore-Booth, 8 September 1966.) Downer was another to voice concerns, telling Herbert Bowden, Secretary of State at the Commonwealth Office, who was about to embark on a visit to Australia, that he should go out of his way ‘to explode the image which was developing in Australia of a decadent, weak Britain losing interest in Australia and the Far East and sinking beneath the weight of economic problems which we had not got the will to master’. Bowden .. should aim at ‘combating the feeling which was growing in Australia that the old country was not interested in her kith and kin down under any more, and viewed with complacency the prospect of Australia and Britain drifting steadily further apart’. (FCO 24/188, record of conversation between Downer and Bowden, 11 January 1967.) The following day Downer said much the same to Denis Healey, warning him that ‘strands of influential opinion in Sydney, both politically and in the Press, seemed to think that the United Kingdom was nearly finished, and that in future they must look to the United States’. Healey seemed ‘surprised by this, indeed a little pained… ’. (NAA: M1003, Harold Wilson and the Labour Government, 1964–70, record of conversation with Healey at the Ministry of Defence, 12 January 1967.)
[UKNA: DO 169/343]