It will take a good deal more time yet for these shifts in trading relationships to be mirrored in the accumulated stock of invested capital. The UK’s foreign investment in Australia during the country’s formative years was large, even for the UK. Between 1870 and 1913 about 8 per cent of Britain’s total foreign investment went to Australia.
As recently as the mid 1950s, the UK’s investment in Australia dwarfed that from any other country, and was more than double the investment of our second largest investment partner, the USA (Vamplew 1987; RBA 1997; Ukhov and Goetzmann 2005).