Denis McLean: The Prickly Pair: Making Nationalism in Australia and New Zealand

Reviewed by GREG ANSLEY

Last week, as Australia signed up for America's "Star Wars" missile shield and planned to buy cruise missiles for its strike jets, its trade negotiators were in Washington hammering out a deal with the world's biggest economy.

On the first, New Zealand could only tut-tut. On the second, Wellington could only stand on the sidelines with tight-lipped smiles, hoping to be picked up and carried along in the wake of the Australians.

It is as Denis McLean, a distinguished former New Zealand diplomat, ambassador and Defence Secretary would expect: time and technology have not served to narrow the turbulent waters across the Tasman since we first began ignoring each other more than a century ago.

"The more contact the two have with one another - in sport, the arts, business or politics - the more it becomes necessary to rehearse differences," McLean writes in The Prickly Pair: Making Nationalism in Australia and New Zealand.

McLean's book, broad in scope and entertaining in style, ponders the question he poses in his preface, reflecting back to his first prolonged visit to Australia and his observation that "vague, almost mystical essences of land, cultural identity and historical interpretation had long since been working to set New Zealand and Australia apart".

"Why was this so," he asks, "when the two countries were intertwined in so many ways, had the same origins and shared so much history?"

His answers are rooted in essential human tribalism and the development of distinctly differing nationalisms that defy the much greater similarities the two peoples share.

These separately developing forces, McLean believes, will work with weighty, practical, obstacles to thwart any political union between New Zealand and Australia, despite the sense this could make given our historical, economic, cultural, geographical and geopolitical realities.

But he does believe there is mutually beneficial potential in the creation instead of a new "Austral-Asian regionalism".

New Zealand's European counterparts - Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Ireland - can embrace European regionalism: proud, individualistic nations have been able to calculate the odds and accept that advantage lies in consolidation of their interests within a larger regional entity.

The Nordic Union of Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland has also achieved visa-free travel, common law enforcement arrangements, a common labour market, mutual recognition, an airline consortium and joint funding of a wide range of institutions and projects.

New Zealand and Australia have achieved a great deal of similar co-operation, but McLean believes much more can be done.

"How much more sensible to achieve maximum mutual advantage by pooling programmes and skills to achieve defined Antipodean aims? A combination of political and economic forces would strengthen the capacity of both to develop their place in the region."

McLean's proposal is made with a sense of resignation, after surveying the fractured relationship our two former British colonies have shared since the Empire usurped the lands of the Maori and Aborigine.

He believes New Zealand's decision to reject federation with Australia is an opportunity missed to create a new, different and vital structure - but also typical of the divergent and frequently petty nationalism that was to follow.

For decades we spoke to each other only through the Imperial court in London, and then as often as not to try to outscore the other. We made no joint cause until 1944, when Wellington and Washington signed the Canberra Pact in a bid to force a seat between Britain and the US in the division of Pacific spoils after World War II.

Our separate perspectives changed. In security, New Zealand at the outbreak of World War II was global in perspective; Canberra regional; now it is Canberra who adopts a globalist strategy, Wellington the regional. For all the closeness of our ties, we still irritate and frustrate each other.

There is, as a result, little political or popular support for a merger of the two countries.

But McLean argues for an alternative to enable the two countries to present a united front to the world.

"Formal marriage may be out, but a modern partnership agreement - an exchange of commitments based on a vision of a common destiny - is very much needed: a Declaration of Interdependence perhaps?"

* University of Otago Press, $49.95

* Greg Ansley is the Herald's staff correspondent in Australia.