Following the success of our initial series of four annual conferences, the Robert Menzies Institute is pleased to announce a new trilogy of annual conferences on the theme Forging Australia: The Global Forces that Shaped a Nation. These conferences, held annually in 2025, 2026 and 2027, will explore the most significant cultural, intellectual, and historical influences on Australia—the British Commonwealth, America, and Asia.

Australia is an ancient land, yet its modern history has been shaped by almost 240 years of people, ideas, and external influences. Sometimes inspiring, at other times deeply challenging this dynamic process has helped forge one of the world’s most unique and successful liberal democracies.

To better understand this evolution, the Robert Menzies Institute will host a trilogy of conferences, each tied to a key anniversary from Sir Robert’s life:

2025: Menzies and the British Commonwealth of Nations
2025 marks 90 years since Robert Menzies’s first trip to Britain.

2026: Menzies and America
The 2026 Conference will coincide with 75 years since the signing of the ANZUS Treaty.

2027: Menzies and Asia
2027 coincides with the 70th anniversary of the signing of the landmark Australia-Japan Commerce Agreement, a key moment in Australia’s economic and diplomatic reorientation towards the Indo-Pacific.

Fifth Annual Conference 20 & 21 November 2025:

2025 marks 90 years since Menzies’s first and formative overseas trip to Britain, which he took as Attorney General in the Lyons Government in 1935. The trip was a transformative experience which did much to shape Menzies’s worldview and set him up for his future success as a statesman. While the notion of Britishness is no longer central to Australia’s national identity, the enduring impact of Britain, from which Australia has inherited cultural pillars from our language to our democracy, remains essential to understanding who we are, even in a multicultural 21st century Australia.

Menzies’s career corresponded with a period in which Australia’s British identity gradually but notably declined, hence the conference will cover both the continuities in the institutional, political and intellectual legacy of Britain, as well as the increasing divergences Australia took from following an explicitly British path. In this, the Commonwealth is an essential part of the story of a British legacy that was far from stagnant, as ideas, trends and discourses flowed in multiple directions across a wider ‘British World’. The Commonwealth not only provides for comparison with other British settler colonies who dealt with similar centrifugal forces pushing them away from the ‘mother country’, but the evolving nature of the Commonwealth was itself a central element of those forces. Conversely, in our region, it was often networks and affinities laid out by the Commonwealth that Australia utilised to chart a new path of engagement with our ‘near North’.

In this open call for papers, we encourage submissions interpretating the conference theme in a broad fashion. Covering such matters as geopolitics, institutional development, intellectual trends, comparative histories, economic policy, the adaptation of British ideas to an Australian context, and more. Proposals can be submitted for panels, linking three interconnected topics, or individual papers. Both require a title and an abstract of 300 words. Proposals should be emailed to: zachary@robertmenziesinstitute.org.au by Friday 9 May.

Successful applicants will hear back no later than Monday 26 May. Conference papers take the form of a 20 minute presentation, plus 10 minutes of audience Q&A. They will later be published as a chapter of up to 5000 words in a Melbourne University Publishing volume, which will be due by Monday 5 January 2026. Financial assistance is available for a limited number of presenters who would not otherwise be able to attend the conference.

Robert Menzies Institute’s conference partner for 2025 is Britain and the World Society.