This paper is a study of the response of Paul Hasluck, the Minister for External Territories, and his Department to the growing crisis over West New Guinea in 1960. The paper is not another examination of Australia’s policy on Indonesia’s claim to West New Guinea in this era which has already been extensively covered by other historians. Rather it is an exploration of the fascinating solution that Hasluck and his Department proposed to the West New Guinea crisis. It is also a study of what their ideas tell us about how those Australians who were heavily involved in developing Australian policy towards the South Pacific saw the future of New Guinea and indeed of Melanesia at the turn of the 1960s. Hasluck and Department of Territories’ initiative was centred in a proposal to first expand Australia’s empire eastwards into the South Pacific to take-over the British Solomon Islands Protectorate and then only later expand it westwards to include West New Guinea. As a result, this paper is a study of how in the late 1950s Paul Hasluck and his officials envisioned a future for the South Pacific which included not only a unified New Guinea, but a Greater Melanesia. This paper demonstrates that alternative paths to the decolonisation of the region were seriously considered within the Australian state in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Chris Waters is an Associate Professor in History at Deakin University in Melbourne. He has published widely on the history of Australian defence and foreign policy in the twentieth century, Anglo-Australian history and Australia and the Decolonisation of the European Empires. His most recent book was Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of the World War II (I.B. Tauris, 2012). He is currently working with colleagues at Deakin on a project on the decolonisation of Melanesia in the 1960s and 1970s.

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