LEAVING AUSTRALIA AFTER twenty-one years was not simply a matter of going home, even for us, and certainly not for the children. Great Britain had changed, we had changed. Our children spoke with Aussie accents. People couldn't quite place us. One evening, I was invited to dinner at Templeton College, and found myself sitting next to the Bursar. Knowing that I had spent several years in Australia, he said, ‘I’m glad you haven't picked up an Australian accent; that would have been so embarrassing.’ Though I was sorely tempted to put on an Aussie accent just for his benefit, I refrained from doing so.

We arrived in Oxford in the middle of the most severe winter for many years. Our children, used to snow only on ski slopes, found it hard to imagine that snow could blanket a city, burying cars.

When we arrived at Heathrow Airport, we were met by our old Australian friends Hedley and Mary Bull. We had known them at ANU, where Hedley was Professor of International Nations, but in 1977 he had been appointed Montague Burton Professor of International Relations in Oxford. He was author of one of the most influential books in the study of international relations in modern times, The Anarchical Society, arguing that even in the absence of a central international government ( meaning that an international system is ‘anarchical’), under certain conditions relations between states are such that together they may be regarded as a ‘society’. Hedley was to be an important supporter of mine in my early years in Oxford, while my colleagues and I were attempting to develop a new institute. Sadly, he died of cancer in 1985, and so missed the collapse of the Soviet Union, depriving us of what would have been his wise analysis of its implications.

The Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies had been formally inaugurated the previous September in a ceremony that I attended, having flown in from Canberra. The Nissan President, Mr Ishihara Takashi, made a speech in which he commended the study of modern Japan in the United Kingdom, where his company was planning major investment, strongly encouraged by Margaret Thatcher, which was to result in the building of a brand new automotive plant in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear.