The commitment of more than 600 soldiers, along with thirty civilian officials, to the United Nations Transition Assistance Group (untag) in Namibia in 1989 was the largest deployment of Australian forces overseas since the Vietnam War. untag was also the largest and most complex UN peacekeeping mission since the Congo in 1960–64 – one to which Australia made no formal contribution. Australia's previous peacekeeping missions – in Indonesia, Korea, Kashmir, the Middle East, Cyprus, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Iran – had all involved monitoring or observing a ceasefire by relatively small numbers of Australian military personnel or police. By contrast, untag's mission was to supervise Namibia's transition to independence, including the conduct of elections. Unlike previous missions, the civilian component (to which Australia contributed election monitors) was almost as large as the military force.

The mission was to a far distant area in which Australia apparently had little strategic or economic interest. Namibia is an arid, sparsely populated country on the Atlantic coast of southern Africa. With an area of 824,269 square kilometres it is slightly larger than New South Wales, but its population of barely a million was much smaller. And hardly anyone in Australia knew about Namibia. Australia had few commercial interests there, Australian tourists rarely visited, and there were no ties of race or family: the whites, who were less than a tenth of the population, were mainly Afrikaners or of German descent.