Meg Gurry, ‘Australia has always been strategically inconsequential’ The Development of the India-Australia Relationship

Australia’s relationship with India has been slow to prosper. For all our cultural ties and mutual love of cricket, until recently the shared legacy of Empire tended to stunt rather than facilitate the two nations coming to understand each other. These issues were epitomised by the relationship between Menzies and Nehru, two record-setting leaders who could bond over a love of parliamentary democracy, but who otherwise viewed the world through very different eyes. With the advent of the Quad, and the recent blossoming of a new-found strategic alignment, it is worth looking back on just how far we have come. 

In this week’s episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to Dr Meg Gurry about the rocky road of the Australia-India relationship. 

Dr Meg Gurry is an Academic Fellow at the Australia India Institute and the author of Australia and India: Mapping the Journey, 1944-2014. She was formerly lecturer in Australian foreign policy at La Trobe University, as is currently a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International affairs (FAIIA). Her area of scholarship and academic publications focus on Australia’s engagement with Asia since 1945, with particular attention to India, and her research is principally archive-based, working out of the National Australian Archives in Canberra. Dr Gurry has also taught history and politics in a number of humanities subjects at secondary school and university level, and worked in the area of aid and community development. She has a BA and DipEd from Monash University, and a PhD in politics from La Trobe.