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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]

For the past twenty-five years Australia's bilateral relationship with India has been typified by an ongoing process of 'rediscovery', irrespective of whether Labor or Liberal administrations have steered foreign policy. This article explores the reasons why this might be the case by analysing Australia's foreign policy approaches to India spanning the period 1983 to 2011. It interrogates various Labor and Liberal strategies that have been mobilised to 'reinvigorate' the relationship and searches for reasons why they have only been partially successful in strengthening Australia's rapport with India. The authors draw upon discussions with strategic affairs editors of India's major daily newspapers and current affairs journals to gain insights into Indian impressions of Australia from a political and foreign policy perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to make a long overdue re-examination of Indo-Australian relations in the early Cold War years. By drawing on available secondary sources, it reassesses the existing literature on Australian engagement with Asia. In so doing, it seeks to understand the reasons why the Menzies government found it so difficult to forge a close partnership with India. Canberra's rather frosty relations with New Delhi during the Menzies-Nehru years had little to do with Menzies' alleged condescension towards the Asians or his personal antipathy towards Nehru. Rather, it had to do with the two leaders' different readings of Cold War politics as well as their responses to the structural changes taking place at the international level following the end of the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Australian observers see Australia and India as 'natural' partners whose strategic perspectives are likely to become ever closer in coming years. This article will examine recent developments in the Australia-India security relationship and consider some possible limits to the strategic convergence of Australia and India, particularly in Indian Ocean security. It argues that Australia's challenge in coming years will be not only to address areas of common interest but to also actively engage with India on the interests and expectations of littoral states and extra-regional powers in the security of the Indian Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is at risk of being left behind by the pace of India's emergence as a regional and global power and its lack of engagement with India during this emergence. The Rudd Labor government is developing a framework which may make Australia a significant partner with India. There is the potential for a thoroughgoing engagement of interests and ideals in proposals Australia has put forward in three areas. Australia's vision of an Asia Pacific Community, with cooperation as its habitual operating principle, and with a membership that includes India and the USA as well as China and Japan, fills a multilateral gap. Secondly, the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament may provide a global framework assisting the development of Australian and Indian initiatives in the controlling and winding back of nuclear proliferation. Thirdly, Australia's national carbon pollution reduction program is intended to demonstrate international leadership and engagement in climate change, and opens the prospect for Australia of a substantial bilateral partnership with India (and others) to advance common interests around climate change. Australia, while emphasising its close relationship with the USA, is preparing to live in a region where the USA will, over time, be less influential as its relative power declines. As other great powers rise, Australia can actively pursue a hedging strategy to diversify its dependencies, and develop a much deeper engagement with that other emerging Asian giant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the future role of Australia in the rise of new Asian powers, with emphasis on India. The author insists that Australian policy planners have underestimated India's peaceful rise in recent years. Also examined is the potential of the Australian government to modify the nuclear aspirations of India.

An interview with Michael Wesley, executive director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, is presented. He talks about the significance of the rise of India, the strategic and political implications for the relationship of India and Australia, and how the schools of thought in Australia perceive India's rise. He states that Australia and India have found themselves on different sides of global ideological divides.