Richard Trembath reviews Evan Smith, Jayne Persian and Vashti Jane Fox (eds), Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia* (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2023), 266 pages including footnotes, introduction and index.
Australian writer Dennis Glover states in the Guardian (25 August 2024) that ‘we are entering a new age of savagery and organised lying that would have been almost unthinkable in Western democracies just a generation ago’, and that ‘the history of the 1920s and 1930s is already repeating’. I am not big on ‘we’re all doomed scenarios’, but as the editors of this volume claim in their introduction there has been in many countries ‘an expansion of fascism and the far right over the past decade’. They include Australia in their list.
Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia emerged from a symposium held at Flinders University in December 2019 and consists of thirteen articles which deal with far-right activities over the past century. It is a scholarly and wide-ranging work. I suspect that there will be many besides myself who will be reading about groups and individuals they have not encountered previously. So, we have an article on the New Guard in the interwar period and one on the much-harassed Egon Kisch. Then there are Italian fascists at a Second World War internment camp, and imported organisations such as the Ustasha, who take the story into the fifties, and finally further articles bringing us to the present day with the horrific Christchurch massacre. It is often an unpleasant story as well as one that contains elements easy to ridicule, such as the universal claims of groups that could hold their meetings in a public telephone box. If you are old enough to remember what these were. But violence has taken place, deaths have occurred as in Perth in the 1980s. It is not a laughing matter.
As readers of Australian Policy and History know, readability and the importance of communicating with one’s readers are hobby horses of mine. This book satisfies those criteria. Woolly examples of obscurantist expression are rare, though the language of the left, which includes such labels as ‘Strasserism’, will confound some readers. The tone of some pieces can become declamatory. That’s to be expected. What isn’t expected are editing errors with confusion of terms in chapter 5 where ‘throes’ is meant, but ‘throws’ is used, or in chapter 10 where ‘propogandist’ is found. There are some other instances, but it is unnecessary to labour the point.
‘Fascism’ is notoriously an over-used word. It can be narrowed in scope and meaning, but it can also be used in an elastic fashion as an abusive epithet. Donald Trump, for example, has managed to describe Kamala Harris as simultaneously a Communist and a Fascist. Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia largely avoids guilt by association, but I still think it is more accurate to see Pauline Hanson and George Christensen as popular nativists rather than Fascists, despite their unpleasant views on Islam and Muslim migrants.
This book is timely and significant, not only for filling gaps in the historical record but for raising important issues which need further discussion such as the historical relationship of Indigenous Australian issues with anti-fascism, and how a white settler society adapted European far right views to the local context. I have two further points where the arguments raised in this volume may be used fruitfully. In the Introduction the editors claim that the far right played a significant role in the anti-vax/anti lockdown protest during the early years of the COVID epidemic. I have researched the reactions to health measures undertaken in Australia during 2020-2021 and, with some exceptions, I don’t see the hand of the far-right there, but I may be proved wrong. More importantly, it would be useful to swing across the political spectrum and to examine hard line climate change protestors and the more disruptive pro-Gaza supporters. We see there a new tendency to disruption and civic disturbance. Perhaps, we need to look at how the popular front of Australian political engagement, in all its guises, has hardened up.
*Part of the Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right series.
