He may be just months away from taking up his post as ambassador to the United States, but Kim Beazley was focused yesterday on a different episode in the history of Australian-American relations.
On the first day of the National Museum's symposium on the 1948 American-Australian scientific expedition to Arnhem Land, Mr Beazley was an invited speaker on the expedition's political ramifications.
A massive undertaking in the immediate post-war period, it was one of the most significant scientific expeditions ever mounted in Australia, and one of the least understood.
''It's one of the building blocks of the Australian-American alliance, and it's of course disappeared from our thinking in the active way,'' Mr Beazley said yesterday.
Funded by the Australian Government, the Smithsonian and the National Geographic Society, the expedition involved a team of 17 Australian and American researchers who spent seven months in Arnhem Land in 1948.
During the trip, they collected 24 tonnes of specimens, took thousands of photos and kilometres of film.
But today, the expedition has been largely forgotten, and six decades after it was launched, the museum is holding the four-day event to explore its complex legacy.
One of the controversies of this legacy is the fact that the expedition's deputy leader, Smithsonian curator Frank Setzler, collected human bones from caves and other sites, and took most of the remains back to the US.
Last year, at the request of the Australian Government, the Smithsonian returned about two-thirds of them to local communities, but the fate of the remains of the collection is unclear.
Speaking to The Canberra Times shortly before his speech, Mr Beazley admitted he had only recently been informed of the issue, and planned to be better briefed by the time he arrived in the United States in February.
''I've just become alerted to that, so I'd better be well-advised on it by the time I get there,'' he said.
He spoke about how the expedition was placed politically in the immediate post-war period, and why it had been important for the Chifley government to forge an alliance with the US.
''At that point in time, Australians were enormously conscious of the fact that they knew nothing about the north, and World War II exposed to them their vulnerability,'' he said. ''The military occupation in the north during the war had been difficult, and then enormously facilitated by the Aboriginal population in the north who very actively engaged in the war. But that in the history of the time was suppressed, so there was the sense that we failed to understand this region at our peril.''
He said the expedition was spurred on by the vision of then immigration minister Arthur Calwell, and it was easy to forget that it was unique in its scale and level of cooperation with America.
''I think this conference will actually situate it as a very important scientific event in this country.''
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