Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

At length the day came and we stood in serried ranks in the Ambassador's study, ready to be introduced to the great man. The introductions over, the Ambassador (who liked everything to go according to plan) said: 'Prime Minister, I expect you will wish to know what you are going to do these next few days!'. The Prime Minister held up his hand, rather in the manner of King Canute seeking to repulse the sea, and said in his basso profundo voice: 'Ambassador, I will tell you what I am not going to do. I am not going to sit on the bloody floor!' At short notice a totally new programme was put together. Now let it not be thought that I criticise the great man for this decision. His shape and size were better adapted to the spacious comfort of the armchairs in the Members Enclosure at Lords Cricket Ground than to the simple austerity of the tatami mat. It must also have occurred to him that sitting on the floor might mean eating Japanese food and drinking sake, and that, for a man of Scottish ancestry, nourished on porridge and on dry martinis, would have involved a giant mental leap. Indeed, it is about mental leaps, not physical postures, that I propose to speak today. During our long relationship with the Japanese we have, for the most part, been reluctant mentally to sit on the floor. Or, if I may put it another way, we have found difficulty in traversing the narrow road from Bondi to Bonsai. Mark you, the Japanese have been equally reluctant to traverse that same road in the opposite direction; but since (in my opinion) Japan has, on the whole, been more important to Australia than Australia has been to Japan, the resultant loss has been ours rather than theirs. It has to be said that the relationship began on a somewhat unpromising note. The first recorded contact between Australians and Japanese took place in 1832, when the crew of a whaling vessel landed on the east coast of Japan and, in the absence of satisfactory linguistic communication, proceeded to 'do over'-to use the words of the historian-the hapless inhabitants of the fishing village that nesded on the shore. Now, to 'do over' is a very ocker expression. I remember being somewhat disconcerted, when I once related this story in Japan, to hear the Japanese interpreter who thought no doubt I was speaking the Queen's English-translate it as te ire wo suru, as in doing over one's kitchen to make it look better. The curtain of cultural incomprehension was already beginning to descend. Our two countries found themselves at war 110 years later. I will pass over the intervening century, except to say that, although there had been a spectacular development in economic relations, this had not been matched by a corresponding development in social and cultural ties. Australians and Japanese knew relatively little about each other or their way of life and thought. Certainly no body of men had less knowledge or understanding of the nation against which they were about to engage in battle, than the 8th Division Alf, which went to Malaya and in which I served as a junior Infantry officer. Those of us who read poetry had been nurtured on the sentimental patriotism of the British soldier poets of the First World War, of whom, I suppose, Patrick Shaw Stewart could be considered typical: , 137