Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler's Germany

David Bird. Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler's Germany. London: Anthem Press 2014. 448 pp. (Originally published 2012 by Australian Scholarly Publishing) AU$44.00 ISBN 9781783081240 http://www.anthempress. com/nazi-dreamtimeAustralia has long been seen, by both Australians and outsiders, as a place that escaped the ideological turbulence of the twentieth century. Books like Russel Ward's The Australian Legend (1958) and Donald Herne's The Lucky Country (1964) positioned Australia as a placid, practical, consensus-governed refuge from a conflict-ridden world. Australian fiction, necessarily, saw it differently. No one could read Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and not see resemblances between the paternalism of Sam Pollitt and that of worldwide authoritarian regimes (even if the setting was transposed to the US). Equally, few could view the portrayal of Mordecai Himmelfarb in Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot (1961) and not understand that his plight was a result of Nazism and the Holocaust. But the politics of Australian intellectuals are generally seen as being of the benign, democratic left, with a few dedicated communists (Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny) to spice things up, but nothing more than that. Australia is not associated particularly with intellectuals of the anti-democratic Right.Bird's information-laden, vigorously written book on Nazi sympathisers in the Australian intelligentsia explodes those myths. Of these Nazi sympathisers, the case of P.R. Stephensen was the most tragic. 'Inky' Stephensen, as his very nickname indicates, was at the centre of Australian writing and publishing in the 1930s. Stephensen cut a swath through the Australian intelligentsia in this era, starting out the 1930s as a Communist, ending as a crypto-Fascist, and making many attitudinal stops along the way, including Lindsayan vitalism, though Stephensen soon enough, as Bird diplomatically puts it, 'forfeited the good will and intimacy' (57). In retrospect, Stephensen's ideological odyssey might seem tactically imprudent as well as morally flawed. But, as Bird acutely points out, there was a fairly long period of waiting between the Nazi ascension to power in Germany in 1933 and the outbreak of war in 1939, and there were years like 1937 where Nazi Germany even attained a 'modest respectability' (68) as conditions seem to have stabilised, and Kristallnacht and the march of spurious annexations had not yet begun. In this atmosphere, Stephensen promoted a barely concealed anti-Semitism amid a stress on Australian distinctiveness, a mode of 'national, self-defined' (180) thought that would be in sympathy with the spirit of 'national rebirth' in Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Bird usefully tells us that, as of 1938, there were 27,500 Jews in Australia; and Stephensen's rhetoric seemed to blame them for all the supposed ills Nazism in general did: 'dissidence, cosmopolitanism, democracy' (69), all those qualities which were the antithesis of the militaristic and anti-democratic white Australian dreamtime that Stephensen advocated. In this, Stephensen was abetted by the editor and publisher W.J. Miles, the 'Sydney Kookaburra' to Stephensen's 'bunyip critic. ' Even though the majority of Australians never came close to endorsing the Australia First movement that Stephensen spearheaded, it did garner some respectability in mainstream circles. In 1939, then-Prime Minister John Lyons agreed with Stephensen that H.G. Wells was a dangerous radical and that Hitler and Mussolini were reasonable men who, whatever their quirks, should not be demonised. If there were thus areas of crossover with the democratic right, there were also continuities with various lefts. Not only were many Australian Nazis former Communists like Stephensen, but the leading female participant in Australian Nazism, Adel Pankhurst Walsh, described by one of her contemporaries as 'a screaming rat-bag if there ever was one' (92) was the daughter of the suffragette activist Emmeline Pankhurst. …