Fortifying South-East Asia

Wrestling with Asia: A Memoir
by Frank Mount
Connor Court, 2012, 393 pages, $34.95

As a young child, Frank Mount developed a romantic interest in Asia and international affairs, an interest he was to maintain during his university studies. Then, in February 1967, he received an unusual job offer. Bob Santamaria, the president of the National Civic Council (NCC) or the “Movement” as it was commonly known, offered Frank Mount a paid position travelling throughout South-East Asia. His role was to analyse and report on political developments in the region.

It was not uncommon for Santamaria’s staffers to work within authoritarian structures. Not so it seems in relation to Frank Mount’s assignment: “I was totally my own boss,” he writes. “Bob Santamaria had, in effect, handed me a bag full of money and simply said ‘go and report’. No one oversaw my mission and activities … I was totally free to do as I liked …”

At the time, Bob Santamaria was engaged in establishing links throughout South-East Asia with groups who were active in similar sorts of anti-communist movements to the NCC in Australia. In the period stretching from 1967 to the early 1980s, Frank Mount travelled extensively throughout South-East Asia, even living in Saigon and Manila for a number of years.

Mount provides a fascinating insight into the nature of Santamaria’s involvement in Asia as he sought to resist the spread of international communism in the region. The first part of Wrestling with Asia chronicles Frank Mount’s travels throughout South-East Asia in search of information and like-minded contacts.

Frank Mount lists the names of many supporters and contacts. The Vietnam War and the role of the Pacific Institute form important components of his story. During the war years, Mount spent considerable time in South Vietnam, where a key contact was the Australian Colonel Francis Philip “Ted” Serong.

Serong ran the Phoenix program. He told Mount bluntly: “I’ll run the war, you run the politics, keep me informed, and build the regional South-East Asian architecture.” Frank Mount proved adept at surviving a number of hazardous situations over the years.

The book reveals clearly that Santamaria’s regional strategic approach centred on the formation of an Asian-Pacific community in order to promote strategic regional co-operation, liberal democratic ideas, principles and institutions. Santamaria, Mount and their associates formed the Pacific Institute in 1967.

The Pacific Institute provided a forum for a diverse range of contacts in government, intelligence, security, military, political and religious areas. Mount argues that the Pacific Institute concept contributed to new forms of regional co-operation and ultimately to the formation of the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC). Prime Minister Bob Hawke launched APEC in January 1989 in Seoul.

Mount recalls the names and positions of many of the delegates and observers who attended Pacific Institute conferences. The typical conference format involved Santamaria as chair delivering the opening address focused on global, regional and strategic developments, followed by discussion among the delegates. Then individual delegates would report on political, economic, social and security developments in their countries. The delegates were encouraged to implement policy conclusions in their own countries.

As executive secretary of the Pacific Institute, Frank Mount kept no notes or minutes. This was a deliberate decision. It was intended to encourage delegates and visitors, some of whom had intelligence connections or were close to the leaders of their countries, to speak frankly at Pacific Institute conferences. Military co-operation was a priority, in particular securing the sea lanes of communication flowing through the Malacca Straits, the Indonesian waterways and the South China Sea.

Ultimately, the confidence in a South Vietnamese victory, which Frank Mount had maintained, was shattered due to the paralysis that Watergate induced in Washington followed by the US Congress severing all aid to South Vietnam. The United States, Mount writes, “never understood counter-insurgency”. They substituted firepower for strategic thought, he says.

Under the heading of “Addenda, Vignettes and Anecdotes” in part two of his book, Mount records observations on a range of matters including Wilfred Burchett, East Timor in 1999, and why he decided eventually to part company with Santamaria in the 1980s. Mount provides interesting background on the PKI attempted coup in Indonesia in 1965, on the Tet Offensive in 1968 and on the significance of US military support to the Australian-led Interfet force in East Timor in 1999. Frank Mount argues that John Howard blundered in his dealings with the then Indonesian President, B.J. Habibie. It was, according to Mount, “one of the greatest blunders in Australian diplomatic history”.

When Mount returned to live in Australia in April 1981, he decided not to work for the NCC. Mount had friends on both sides of a nasty internal fight that had split the organisation. And following the fall of Saigon in 1975, coming after the loss of all five DLP seats in the Senate in 1974, Frank Mount says Bob Santamaria was never the same. “Always a pessimist,” Mount writes, “[Santamaria] became increasingly pessimistic with the world at large.”

Frank Mount also disagreed with an increasingly protectionist, anti-American and anti-Asian stance in the NCC. To Mount, the NCC’s protectionist stance amounted to a betrayal of the regional free trade vision developed by the economist Colin Clark for the Pacific Institute. Mount records that he found Santamaria’s economic statements “embarrassing”. As a result, he ceased making contact with Santamaria.

Santamaria may not have been a good judge of people, Mount observes, but he was “one of the great international strategic visionaries in Australian history”.