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By Root 959 0

than content to defend the manner in which his department had dealt with the spat. As he told the Minister for External Affairs in Canberra, there had been numerous 'very frank telegrams' received from the Australian government during his time as secretary of state and he had appreciated these as 'frankness is the necessary basis of close and cordial collaboration'. On this most recent occasion, however, the unilateral statement on colonial policy had caused embarrassment in London. Not only had the British view been known in Canberra beforehand, and apparently ignored, there had been no prior warning or attempt to find common ground. For Cranborne to have not indicated the depth of dismay that this had caused in Whitehall would 'not have been fair to you nor to us'; indeed he thought the exchange had done some good and, even, cleared the air. Evatt did not agree and responded once again, this time petulantly pointing to occasions where the British government had embarrassed him, adding discussions about Polish boundaries to his now traditional complaints about the Cairo Conference, although it was not entirely clear how either had directly involved Australia. The Dominions secretary recognized these had taken place but they were a result of 'the emergencies of war' which sometimes required the making of rapid decisions. Where the future settlement of policy was concerned there was always time available for consultation with those countries that would be involved: this had not been forthcoming with the Wellington declaration.63 By way of conclusion he thanked both Dominions for their views and told them that British post-war Colonial policy had not yet been formulated. Batterbee was happy to report to London that he and Evatt had actually kept on good terms with one another, parting in 'the most friendly fashion', and the Australian seemed sincere in looking forward to next visiting London.64

There was, however, some anger in Wellington at what was considered to be the high commissioner's unnecessary interfering and his efforts to change the wording of the final resolution.65 Alister McIntosh was secretary of the War Cabinet and also secretary of the new Department of External Affairs. He noted that New Zealand had been 'soundly slapped on the wrist'; a British friend who had been the official secretary in Wellington, but was now back at the DO, wrote to him referring to it as 'a fairly hefty clout on the ear'. The recipient did not, however, object as he thought the admonishment was deserving and told the same to his former boss Berendsen, who was just settling in as the New Zealand minister in Washington. As he told him, if Britain had published something similar without prior consultation, he was pretty certain that Australia, at the very least, 'would have up and left the Empire, and the scream would have been heard all the way to Whitehall without benefit of submarine cable or wireless aerial'. He thought the DO faced an 'impossible job' and that New Zealand was not entirely without blame in terms of what had happened.66

The quarrel was ultimately resolved, but the message coming out of the discussions could not be so easily ignored, containing as it did an inexorable movement away from London and the pre-war Imperial system.67 One view, promoted by a renowned post-war Australian historian, saw it as 'not an aberration in Australian foreign policy but its logical outcome'. A former member of the Department of External Affairs described it as an 'explosive protest' challenging the Anglo-American domination of power.68 At the time two articles were printed in the London Evening Standard in January 1944 just after the initial announcement of the agreement that had been signed at Canberra. The author of these, the Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at London University, asked his readership whether the British Commonwealth could be kept together at the war's end. He provided a detailed review of how this grouping had historically operated, its basis being 'the principle of voluntary collaboration'. It went on to provide