‘A hundred years of mateship (2)‘, Pearls and Irritations, 30 July 2018
Follows an earlier piece under the same title and riffs off an ill-judged poster from the Australian Embassy in Washington. The poster was intended to illustrate 100 years of Australian military ‘mateship’ with the United States but was attacked for being too blokey and too white. And that wasn’t the half of it, as Reynolds points out in this piece. He focuses on the lack of self-respect displayed in statements like Prime Minister Turnbull’s ‘joined at the hip’, distinguishes between the Alliance, ANZUS and the relationship with the United States, and provides an analysis of ANZUS as a weak treaty of passing relevance to the time it was negotiated.