Having negotiated a career in one mode, Watt now had to find new paths through the 1950s. At each step, it was clear how much had changed in the political and cultural valiancy of the international. He gave lectures for the Henry Lawson Labour College on the future of Palestine, the influence of economic security on the political life of nations and the psychological effects of the atomic bomb. Narrowly defeated for preselection for the state seat of Lane Cove in 1946, he unsuccessfully contested the federal seat of Bennelong in 1949. Employed briefly to teach English at the Burwood Migrant Hostel, he established a secretariat and library for the emerging South Pacific Commission before securing regular work for the Information Section of the High Commission for Pakistan.^[72] Gradually, he built a ‘public relations consultancy’, providing services for industries seeking to break into emerging overseas markets, whether with opals, condensed milk or poultry feed. In 1961–62, he wrote on commission for the Department of Trade, surveying, for example, the access gained by Victa prefabricated homes or DefENDer snail repellent to buyers in Asia.^[73] This was not quite the world of open international exchange he had envisaged through the 1930s, when his mantra had been ‘we either fight or trade’.

In the postwar decades, then, Watt found a meagre purchase on new modes prevailing in international engagement. While selling Chamber’s Encyclopedia door-to-door in 1951, he was drawn into conversation by an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) officer to whom he was ‘known’ as once being a ‘figure of interest’, but who now reported he found nothing of note in Watt’s views.^[74] When Alan Watt, who had joined a fledging diplomatic corps in 1937, was appointed permanent secretary of the Department of External Affairs in 1950 (returning, it was said, Australia’s diplomacy to the safe hands of a career diplomat), the Daily Telegraph speculated on the possible influence of his older brother, who had ‘spent most of his sixty years as an apostle for international understanding’. It was not a link Alan made himself: Ray does not appear in his memoirs.^[75]

What can be made of these contrasts across three decades, symbolised poignantly in the different circumstances of these two brothers: a parable of the talents? If one appeal of transnational history is to enable an appreciation of opportunities that exist when categories predetermined by national themes are suspended, Ray Watt—in his activism if not mobility—gives us one such narrative. Further, his experience prompts questioning of how concepts of the international are shaped. What gains legitimacy in that field and connects it with our sense of ourselves? A meeting with prayers, a radio talk or a pageant at the Trocadero are very distant from the ‘conspicuous compassion’ of ‘Live Aid’ and the shock and awe of CNN. Both are, however, performances of a kind, even if the last is managed through a television remote control that regulates for us (in Graeme Turner’s words) a world of ‘ubiquity that seems to displace geography altogether’ and put in its place ‘a generic corporate professionalism’ in covering the world.^[76] Dying of cancer in 1967, Watt gratefully accepted financial support from the Australian Journalists Association, of which he had long been a proud member. In his letter of thanks, he noted that while radio had stimulated open discussion, ‘whoever controls television will sooner or later control governments’.^[77] For all his archaism, Watt can continue to prompt reflection on what shapes the ways we enact the international, and what these modes enable or deny.