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From 1958 onwards, the Amsterdam–Jakarta dispute on the determination of sovereignty over the western half of New Guinea began to be affected by the developments of Indonesia's civil war and the tug of war between the US and the Soviet Union over Indonesia. This paper explains how this influenced Australia's WNG diplomacy. It argues that the major impact of Indonesia's internal war and of the US–Russian tug of war was that they destroyed Australia's assumption that the Dutch would maintain its presence in the Pacific permanently. The second principal impact was that Indonesia's internal war and the Washington–Moscow tug of war urged Canberra to set another new objective in relation to the WNG dispute, and produced a new policy for the achievement of this objective. With the outbreak of an Indonesian–Dutch war over Netherlands New Guinea becoming a real possibility, Australia set the avoidance of the war and the prevention of Indonesia falling into the communist orbit as another new objective. In order to keep a war from occurring in the Southwest Pacific, Canberra developed a policy of appeasing Jakarta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that much has been written about the relationship between Indonesia and Australia with emphasis on the role of government, little has been done in terms of examining Indonesia's changing domestic politics and the role of non-state actors in maintaining the bilateral relations between the two countries. With the emergence of democratic governments in Indonesia since 1998, there has been an increasing public interest in Indonesia in debating the complexity and the importance of this bilateral relationship. This article examines the deepening of democracy under the Soesilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) government and its impact on Indonesia's foreign policy towards Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]