AUKUS is too ambitious for Australia on many fronts. It raises our nation’s profile in a way I would rather not have it raised. Aren’t our greatest security issues likely to be the potential for failed states in our immediate neighbourhood? What role would a nuclear-powered submarine play in those scenarios?

Was this just a male ego trip gone too far? And how will the investment required rob more essential parts of the ADF of the funding it needs? The decision raises too many questions without adequate answers. I for one hope it unravels.

Judith Masters

Foucault and homosexuality

Dear Editor,

Miles Pattenden begins his review of Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe by asserting that historians have grappled with the concept of gay history since Michel Foucault published his History of Sexuality (ABR, May 2024). In fact, by the time Foucault published the first volume in 1976 (translated into English two years later), there was, in a number of countries, a considerable historical literature that asked exactly this question. I recall a meeting with American gay and lesbian historians in the late 1970s who were discussing how far Foucault’s work might lead them to reconsider their own.

Foucault was undoubtedly a major philosophical figure, but he was neither as original nor as ground-breaking in his discussion of homosexuality as is sometimes assumed. Ironically, Pattenden implicitly acknowledges this in his second paragraph.

Dennis Altman

Whither Waitangi?

Dear Editor

Thank you, Miranda Johnson, for your excellent article ‘Whither Waitangi?’ (ABR, June 2024). The historical coincidence of the triumph of neo-liberalism and support for biculturalism in New Zealand and multiculturalism in Australia in the 1980s is a key development in both countries.

Marilyn Lake