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Australia's relationship with India stands in apparent contrast with its relations elsewhere in Asia. Most accounts of Australia's links to India liken them to recurrent bouts of amnesia, arguing that Australia has not put the same efforts into engaging with India that it has into fostering ties with Japan, China and Indonesia and that, like a patient with injury to the hippocampus who has lost the ability to lay down long-term memories, Australia appears to approach each episodic moment of contact without recollection of the past. Australia's relationship with India has passed through distinct phases, from a brief moment of warmth in the years immediately after India achieved independence, through frosty decades of the Cold War. In contrast to many other accounts, the paper argues that since the 1980s Australia has sought with considerable consistency to engage with India and that the tenuousness of the relationship is primarily due to Indian indifference. Recent bilateral issues, including the supply of uranium to India and attacks on Indian students, have led to an enlargement of contacts which may signify that the engagement is at last becoming a mutual one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of papers focuses on the domestic and international politics of Australia's recent engagement with Asia. The theme of Asian engagement appears to be of particular pertinence to the current study of Australian politics given numerous pronouncements that we are entering an 'Asian century' during which key Asian economies will gain greater ascendancy and certain Asian states will come to play a more prominent role in global politics. We employ the idea of 're-engagement' in order to show how engagement with Asia has been turned to again and again by Australian governments, albeit in different political and strategic contexts. This collection aims to consider the politics of re-engagement from a number of different theoretical positions, as well as from a number of different perspectives (be it international relations/foreign policy, domestic politics, identity politics, or from the perspective of bilateral Asian partners). Emphasis is placed not simply on the foreign policy prerogatives behind re-engagement but also on the implications of the 'Asian century' for domestic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]