ANZUS break up in early 1973

[Rosencrantz]

So I've been reading about Goff Whitlam and his response to the Christmas bombings/ Operation Linebacker in December 1972. Here's an article http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/whitlam-v-nixon/story-e6frg6z6-1226439818865

Looks like things got a bit tense there, with Nixon and Kissinger locking Australia out for about 5 months.

How possible would Australia's exit form ANZUS have been in 1973? And assuming they did exit, what would happen next?

The topic of Indonesia will inevitably come up so I would humbly suggest that Australian air superiority would have discouraged Indonesia from trying anything if Australia did exit ANZUS. But Indonesia was backed by the US at the time so would Indonesia become America's new base in the south west pacific?

Then you've got the economic repercussions for both countries and so on.

 

[Orville_third]

I think it might wind up a bigger deal than the US locking out NZ after the NFZ. Australia does have major US bases. Still, Australia would be unlikely to be attacked.

 

[Cook]

Australia does have major US bases.

Really; care to name one?

 

[Salamander]

Really; care to name one?

These days, Darwin.

 

[Cook]

These days, Darwin.

While the US Marines are rotating a battalion's worth of personnel annually through training grounds near Darwin currently, something that has only recently started, they do not have a base there.

 

[Dominic]

Everyone knows Pine Gap is sitting on top of a secret missile base.

 

[Cook]

Everyone knows Pine Gap is sitting on top of a secret missile base.

I thought it was where they stored the bodies from the crashed alien spaceship? I went there in '96; it looks like where you'd store alien bodies! (And North West Cape is a transmitter for communicating with their home world.)

 

[Dominic]

I thought it was where they stored the bodies from the crashed alien spaceship? I went there in '96; it looks like where you'd store alien bodies! (And North West Cape is a transmitter for communicating with their home world.)

It's a secret missile base for the bodies from crashed alien ships. This is what comes from slashing defence budgets in the name of economies.

On another note, the concept of Indonesia invading Australia in the 70's is laughable. Putting aside the issue of how they get here and what we can do stop them, do you really think that 1970's America is going to tolerate anyone in the Asia Pacific actually launching a trans-continental war of aggression? Anything that seriously upsets the balance of power is going to be stomped on irrespective of how poor relations are with the invaded country.

 

[Riain]

I thought it was where they stored the bodies from the crashed alien spaceship? I went there in '96; it looks like where you'd store alien bodies! (And North West Cape is a transmitter for communicating with their home world.)

I went to North West Cape in March and the place is pretty run down, I think the aliens have had budget cuts of their own.

 

[Magniac]

Pine Gap and NW Cape are Cold War facilities that aren't bases, gotcha

(But seriously, reports about Gough having been interested in closing Pine Gap are rot, supported by no more than Nixon administration internal paranoid speculation--bug Brookings!--and Whitlam's meanderings in post-ColdWar retirement about how maybe we should change our status RE the Alliance. In fact, IMHO, the whole story is normally pushed by leftwingers who are prone to whitewashing the bitter fights they had with Yankee Stooges from the Labor Right, ala Whitlam & co, in the nineteen sixties, as historian Ross Fitzgerald recounts here.

tl;dr: Whitlam and his allies had to fight like hell to get their party to endorse the building of the first American base.)

On another note, the concept of Indonesia invading Australia in the 70's is laughable.

To be fair to OPer, he handwaved that menace away, and instead went with the more viable, not to mention also intriguing, concept of Indonesia accepting US bases on its soil in that era.

Unfortunately, that's a 'W-I the Philippines downgraded the American alliance big time', and that's really stretching it; Marcos ain't Whitlam (just like Whitlam ain't even David Lange or DeGaulle.)