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Picture of David Morris

David Morris

DAVID MORRIS was an Australian diplomat posted to Hungary in the early 1990s and later to Ireland, with short term assignments to the United Nations and European Union. He returned to his home of Tasmania be a senior political adviser and, later, Director of International Business for the state of New South Wales. More recently, he was founding Executive Director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, National Director of the bipartisan Australian Republican Movement and is currently the Chief Representative and Trade and Investment Commissioner of the Pacific Islands Forum in China. You can follow him on twitter: @dm_aus

RISING IN THE EAST

It was the summer of 1990 and I was on my way to Budapest, to take up a position as a junior diplomat in the Australian Embassy. The world had just tilted on its axis, sparked by the opening of the Hungarian border a year earlier and the ripples had travelled around the world. The Berlin Wall had fallen and old certainties had