Fear of Abandonment

Everything Australia wants to achieve as a country depends on its capacity to understand the world outside and to respond effectively to it.

In Fear of Abandonment, expert and insider Allan Gyngell tells the story of how Australia has shaped the world and been shaped by it since it established an independent foreign policy during the dangerous days of 1942. Gyngell argues that the fear of being abandoned – originally by Britain, and later by our most powerful ally, the United States – has been an important driver of how Australia acts in the world.

Spanning events as diverse as the Malayan Emergency, the White Australia Policy, the Vietnam War, Whitlam in China, apartheid in South Africa, East Timorese independence and the current South China Sea dispute, this vivid narrative history reveals how Australia has evolved as a nation on the world stage.

Fear of Abandonment is a gripping and authoritative account of the way Australians and their governments have helped create the world we now inhabit in the twenty-first century. In revealing the history of Australian foreign affairs, it lays the foundation for how it should change.

Allan Gyngell was Director-General of ONA, the Australian government’s central intelligence assessment agency, from 2009 to 2013. That followed six years as founding executive director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He was foreign policy adviser to Paul Keating and worked as a diplomat, policy officer and analyst in several government departments. He is the co-author of Making Australian Foreign Policy.