Red. White. Blue. A 250th July 4 Perspective.

It may be mere coincidence that Australia’s and the USA’s national flags are both red, white and blue, but the interdependency is a tight weave.

Australia would not have continued on its same course if the U.S. had not intervened and prevented Japanese occupation during WWII. A different political and cultural trajectory was on the cards; military invasion came very close. My father, Waldon Rancie, was part of the Corps of Army Engineers that cleaned up after the bombing of Darwin on our northern coast.

Curiously, an earlier war, again involving the U.S., but long before the nation of Australia was founded, led directly to the founding of my home country. America’s Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, and the associated War of Independence led Britain to have to gather its tax revenues in other ways, and it had to find a different solution for the disposal of its unwanted convicts: America was no longer an option for either.

In 1768, Captain James Cook had led a naval sailing expedition to the South Pacific to observe the transit of Venus in front of the sun. He was also given orders along the lines of, ‘By the way, there’s supposed to be a big mass of land down that way, while you’re down there, please see if you can find it.’

Cook subsequently mapped much of the east coast of Australia. His report lay idle — no one knew what to do with this great empty landmass so far away from civilization — for almost two decades.

The advent of 1776 made everyone think harder and some Brit had the bright idea to transport the nation’s growing convict population to the great antipodean landmass, then known as Terra Australis.

The First Fleet arrived near the site of modern day Sydney on January 26, 1788.

The fleet consisted of 11 ships and about 1400 people, most of whom were convicts banished to at least seven years of servitude, a form of slavery; it was effectively a lifetime sentence, very few returned to England.

So the great nation of Australia began as a penal colony, a massive prison, a reflex response to America’s War of Independence from Britain.

Australia eventually got its own independence from Britain, without a war of independence and formed a cooperative union of states without needing a civil war.

Australia is a nation with a robust democracy, with its own Constitution, as sacred to the Australians who think about it as the U.S. Constitution is to Americans who think about it, and it’s equally critical to democracy and the rule of law.

If the USA did not exist, democracy would have a hard time keeping its tenuous foothold across this world.

Conversely, a robust democracy to the south of Indonesia and China, with strategic military bases and sophisticated communications installations, is essential to maintaining democracy in the southern hemisphere.