Losing The Blanket: Australia and the end of Britain's Empire

When Britain's sprawling empire wound down with unexpected speed in the 1960s, Australia lost a comforting 'security blanket'. We had to struggle to re-establish and protect ourselves in a volatile and threatening world. Australia's interests in empire had taken many forms-strategic, economic, cultural and psychological. Indeed Australia had used British experience as a template for its own 'mini-imperialism', in Papua and New Guinea for example. The most important connnections between Brit...