Australia and the United Nations

The story of Australia's engagement with the United Nations is often told via big personalities – H.V. Evatt as one of the organisation's ‘founding fathers’ – or key events, such as the signing of human rights treaties under the Whitlam government. Our chapter explores Australia's involvement from the perspective of lesser-known contributors: diplomats, development workers, women's activists and ordinary people. In so doing, we seek to understand how Australia has long influenced – or chosen to ignore – goings on at the United Nations. We assess the ways in which individual Australians have played significant roles in multilateral institutions, and the extent to which they exhibited any distinctively Australian disposition and orientation toward global governance, or indeed used the UN to offer critiques of Australian practice. Furthermore, we consider how these actors negotiated engagement in the face of increasingly prominent Australian violations, particularly in Indigenous policy and immigration. Moving from the macro to the micro, we thread these unacknowledged internationalists into the bigger story of treaties, conferences and speeches that have characterised Australia's often pained relationship with the international order.

© 2023 Roland Burke, Jon Piccini.