Walter Crocker: The Afro-Asian Challenge to the International System

Abstract

Australia’s first professor of IR was Walter Crocker (Foster and Varghese 1996: 108); with Crocker begins the kind of institutionalized academic pursuit of the subject analyzed by Martin Indyk (1985) and the other contributors to the Australian literature on the emergence of the international relations discipline. Following study at Adelaide, Balliol College, and Stanford, Crocker became a member of the British colonial service in Africa before working for the League of Nations at the ILO, and after World War II for the UN. Crocker accepted the foundation chair at the Australian National University (ANU), arriving in Canberra in 1950. His tenure as a professor was brief, but long enough to provide the basis for a highly acerbic later memoir of the ANU and its leading personalities.¹ While he studied carefully the teaching of IR in America and Europe prior to his arrival in Canberra, he was not on the staff for long enough to have much impact beyond taking a role in making some appointments. He was soon lured back to public service, taking leave from his university position in 1952 after being offered the post of Australia’s high commissioner in New Delhi. He subsequently served in Jakarta, again in New Delhi, and later in East Africa, as well as holding appointments in Canada and in Europe.