If you want to see the expanding frontiers of Australia’s partnering with the US war machine, the gnarled limestone country south of Darwin, which spawned the abiding 1908 novel of Outback struggle, We of the Never-Never, is a good start.
Out here, on the 2800km desert highway that cleaves Australia’s centre, lies the baking town of Katherine, and just beyond, a once-forgotten wartime airbase that is now being readied for superpower conflict.
A runway extension able to handle the West’s largest military aircraft has just been completed at RAAF Base Tindal. Huge US and Australian fuel bunkers capable of storing 14 million litres of jet fuel are ready, and construction of aprons to park up to six US B-52 bombers – each with a 56m wingspan – will soon begin, ahead of their arrival next year.
The US is spending much of the A$3.5 billion that is turning the Outback base into a spearhead should war between China and the US and its allies erupt. It is in line with the declaration earlier this year by the chair of the US House committee on foreign affairs, Republican congressman Michael McCaul, that Australia is now “the central base of operations” for America’s military to confront China’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
Three and half hours’ drive to the north, just outside Darwin, the surging US military build-up is equally obvious. A towering new US fuel dump dominates the skyline, its 11 tanks holding 300 million litres of jet fuel for use by US forces and their allies. Above it, the thump of 10 US Marine Osprey tiltrotor aircraft operated by the 2000- strong US Marine Rotational Force housed in Darwin has become a familiar sound.
Behind the fast-enlarging US military presence in Australia is an urgent geographical imperative. America’s large military bases nearer China – those on Guam in the western Pacific and Okinawa in southern Japan – are now within range of the People’s Liberation Army’s land-based ballistic missiles, forcing a US retreat south.
Remarkably, the US military expansion across Australia’s north has gone largely uncontested, even unnoticed, by most Australians. Anthony Albanese’s Labor government remains as servile to Washington as its conservative predecessors. Albanese also accepted without question the Aukus deal negotiated by former prime minister Scott Morrison for Australia to acquire a nuclear submarine fleet using US and British technology at a lifetime cost of up to A$368 billion.
US Virginia-class nuclear subs will begin extended stays in Western Australia in 2027 – ahead of the intended late-2030s arrival of the first of Australia’s new subs. By then, Donald Trump, who Albanese confessed in 2017 “scares the shit out of me”, will have been back in office for two years.
When Joe Biden, Britain’s Boris Johnson and Australia’s Morrison first unveiled the Aukus deal in September 2021, Trump was a highly tarnished figure who had left the Oval Office eight months earlier after encouraging thousands of his followers to support his false claims that the 2020 US election had been “stolen”.
His return seemed almost unimaginable.
There are three large but lonely voices railing against Australia’s deepening entanglement with the US military.
Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating and ex-foreign ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr all fear the country is sacrificing its Australian sovereign independence to Washington; that if hostilities erupt, it will be Washington that calls the shots – not Canberra – as to how the allied war machine is used from Australia.
And, from January, Washington will mean the erratic, hawkish Trump.
Those of the Never- Never are suddenly and uncomfortably less alone.
