Empire's End

The Australian flag was lowered for the last time at the Port Moresby parade grounds in September 1975, leading to the birth of Papua New Guinea. At that very moment, Australia's role as an external coloniser also came to an end.

Australia's empire was not only a matter of territory. In Empire's End, historian Jon Piccini shows it was also a way of thinking, a world view shaped by culture, race, and the country's privileged past amid a sea of European empires in Asia and the Pacific—and their subsequent retreat. Moving between Johannesburg, Nairobi, Port Moresby, Saigon, Palm Island, Suva, Alice Springs, and Dili, Piccini traces the many paths that brought Australia's empire into crisis and would redefine Australia's place in the world.

Spanning the 1940s to the end of the twentieth century, Empire's End looks to the many settler, colonised, and postcolonial journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, archivists, academics, and activists who saw in the end of empire something vital to shaping Australia's future.

Empire did not just disappear, but shifted from an administrative question to a political reckoning as Australians faced new responsibilities in a postcolonial world that saw the formal end of the White Australia Policy, the emergence of multiculturalism, and partial recognition of First Nations rights.

Written from the periphery about the tumult of decolonisation, Empire's End reveals a country grappling with sovereignty and responsibility. Why has the 'colonial question' proved such a persistent one for Australians in the postwar era, and how have present-day agendas and alliances formed in a world where power is reordered?