Any Australian who looked sympathetically on Asia in the first half of the 20th century had to reconcile these sympathies with determination to defend white Australia. For example, Australia’s second prime minister Alfred Deakin’s fascination with, and passion for, Indian civilisation co-existed with support for a ‘White Australia’ policy. India might be all that was exotic, but it was also — like the rest of Asia — a threat to the emergent nation.

Labor Party prime minister Ben Chifley was one of those who did his best to reconcile support for a racially exclusive immigration policy with a liberal internationalism that welcomed the rise of Asia; an awkward, but characteristic, combination for progressive Australian intellectuals.

Largely in response to claims that Asian engagement was a pillar of the Labor Party’s foreign policy, the modern Liberal Party has displayed an interest in presenting its own side of politics as instrumental in building a new relationship between Australia and Asia after the Second World War.

While the Cold War shaped much of Australia’s engagement with Asia during the Liberal government of Sir Robert Menzies in the 1950s and 1960s, the Liberal Party can — and occasionally does — point to the 1957 Australia–Japan Agreement on Commerce and the ‘Colombo Plan’ of student scholarships. Australia also began selling wheat to the People’s Republic of China at around this time.

It was probably due to the enduring public image of Menzies as an Anglophile hostile to Asia that subsequent Labor prime ministers have been more successful than their Liberal rivals in presenting themselves as Asia-friendly. A succession of Labor prime ministers — Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard — have all sought to deploy Australia’s relations with Asia as a means of crafting an image of economic and political modernity.

For Whitlam, a rhetorical emphasis on closer relations with Asia was a way of distancing his party from the impression that Australia continually aligned itself with ‘great and powerful friends’ against Asian nationalism and communism. Famously, there was Whitlam’s 1971 visit as Opposition Leader to China and his government’s subsequent recognition of the People’s Republic of China. It was a mark of Whitlam’s achievement that the conservative coalition government of Malcolm Fraser (1975–1983), did not depart drastically from the pattern of relations with Asia that had emerged under Whitlam.

The Hawke (1983–91) and Keating (1991–6) Labor governments continued this trajectory and, as the decade wore on, increasingly emphasised Australia’s relations with an economically dynamic Asian region. In the wake of the economic crises of the mid-1980s there was a growing inclination to think about Australia’s future in terms of its relations with Asia. Australia played an instrumental role in the formation of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) at this time. This reflected, in essence, an economic vision of Asia, based on the ideal of Australia as a successful and prosperous trader in a regional economy free of the distortion of tariffs.

Keating’s government in particular tied a ‘modern’ relationship with Asia to a wide-ranging sense of Australian national identity: one that was economically ‘open’, multicultural, republican and ‘reconciled’ in its race relations. Keating was also a radical-nationalist, and one way of marking off a postcolonial Australian present and republican future from a dependent and imperial past, was to emphasise regional engagement with Asia. For him, Australians’ experience of the Pacific War forced them to recognise that their own future was irrevocably tied up with Asia, not that of some distant motherland.

When John Howard’s coalition defeated Keating at the 1996 election in a landslide, it was widely interpreted that voters had repudiated Keating’s vision of Asian engagement. But there was initially little change in the overall shape of Australian foreign policy. Australia gained international kudos from its role in the events leading to East Timorese independence in the late 1990s, while inevitably damaging its relationship with Indonesia.

But after September 11, discourses dependent on the concept of an Anglosphere proved attractive to neoconservatives. In the face of the alleged threat to national sovereignty posed by asylum seekers arriving in boats, and regional terrorist incidents including the Bali bombing, an older notion of defending Australia against Asia regained both credibility and prominence.

It was the spectacular growth of the Chinese economy that would ultimately do more than anything else in this period to reshape how Australian political leaders looked at Asia. There was surely a symbolism in Australia electing a Mandarin-speaker in Kevin Rudd as its prime minister in 2007 — no prime minister since Deakin had engaged so closely with Asia on a personal and intellectual level.

Yet it was ironically not Rudd who was most critical in driving the Australian relationship with China in this period: it was the senior executives of the mining companies feeding China’s apparently endless appetite for iron ore, coal and gas. When Julia Gillard’s subsequent Labor government delivered its Australia in the Asian Century White Paper in October 2012, it reflected this sense of growing economic interdependence.

There was no sign in either Gillard or her Liberal Party successor, Tony Abbott, of the driving intellectual curiosity that had motivated Alfred Deakin’s interest in India. It may well be that Malcolm Turnbull revives something of the Deakinite fascination with Asia. Both before and after becoming prime minister, he has delivered thoughtful and well-crafted speeches on China, a country with which he had considerable experience as a businessman. In some respects, Turnbull’s rhetoric harks back to Keating; the relationship with Asia, and especially with a rapidly-transforming Chinese economy, is presented as integral to his government’s ambitions for a new, more innovative and more dynamic Australian economy integrated with its region.

All the same one wonders whether a narrower vision of relations with Asia might still be more typical of official Australia’s attitude. As in the past, the temptation is to try to bend Asia to the economic and political purposes of the present. The ‘Asias’ we encounter in the discourse of Australian political leaders perhaps still tell us more about Australia than they do about Asia itself.

Frank Bongiorno is Associate Professor in History at The Australian National University’s College of Arts and Social Sciences.

An extended version of this article appeared in the most recent edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Stuck in the middle?’.