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Task 41: Australian foreign policy in Essentials of history: Using history skills in Ian Gray’s
Essentials of history comprises an hypothesis statement for students to consider as they read
the six sources accompanying the statement—which are a mixture of four primary sources
and two secondary sources. Here, the topic of Australia’s foreign policy is used as a way to
highlight Australia’s declining reliance on Great Britain and increased connections with the
United States as a way to highlight the dissociation of Australia from Great Britain. The
historical skill this task teaches students is the judgment of the reliability of sources in order
to test an hypothesis statement (see Source 7.78).
Source 7.78. “Australian foreign policy” student task extract from Essentials of
history (Gray, 1988, p. 78).
The selected documents in particular highlight the dissociation of Australia from Great
Britain, both from changes in British laws at the instigation of Great Britain through “Source
1 The Statue of Westminster” (Gray, 1988, p. 78) and from Australia’s independent decision
as seen in “Source 3 Statute of Westminster Adoption Act, October 1942” (Gray, 1988, p.
78). Difficulties in establishing this independence is highlighted through the selection of a
secondary source (see Source 7.79).
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