British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has reminded us of why Australians like the Brits so much. By audience acclaim, his dinner speech to Australia's business and political elites last week was the funniest delivered on any serious occasion in living memory.

He showcased the easy familiarity between Aussies and Poms, the shared cultural reference points, the common sense of humour. The laughter started at the very outset when he launched into a recollection of his 19-year-old self at the end of a year's sojourn in Australia. He had become a firm convert to Aussie pop culture who returned to Britain as "a kind of unconscious Les Patterson – a self-appointed and unwanted cultural ambassador" for Australia. "My conversation was studded with words like 'bonzer, mate' or 'you little ripper'," he told the audience of 600 in the cavernous Sydney Town Hall. "And on the streets of London in broad daylight I insisted on wearing the same Stubbies daks – shorts of appalling brevity – that I had worn in the bush until my then-girlfriend said that it was her or the stubbies daks. I am not sure how the contest was resolved."

At the same time, Johnson gave Australians a timely reminder of why we need to forge our own way in the world. Australia never wanted to be separated from the "Mother Country". Although Australia federated in 1901, it still thought and acted as a British colony. When the US, Japan and China each approached Australia about the possibility of establishing diplomatic relations in the 1930s, Canberra said no, as Allan Gyngell records in his book Fear of Abandonment: Australia in the World Since 1942.

Australia's relationships with the world were all conducted through London. Eventually, when prime minister Joseph Lyons decided in 1939 that Australia might actually need its own ambassadors abroad with another world war looming, his attorney-general, Robert Menzies, denounced the idea as a threat to British unity that would "lead to nothing but chaos and disaster".