End of the Cold War
Coming in the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the year after Australia’s Bicentennial, the end of the Cold War marked a significant reconfiguration of Australia’s sense of its place in the world. Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s reaction to the Tiananmen Square events was a test of Australia’s views of, and relation to, refugees, as well as being an event of foreign policy significance. The decision to let Chinese students stay in Australia, and the emotional strength of his reaction, profoundly affected those students and other refugee groups, such as those from Vietnam and Tibet. The non-English newspaper discussions of refugee questions are an important and usually overlooked element of public debates that continue in the 21st century. The period of the late 1980s and early 1990s was thus an important transition point between the Cold War and the era of Globalisation.