P. R. Stephensen and Transnational

Fascism: From Interwar Adoption to Post-

war Survival and Transmission

Joseph Parro

ORCID: 0000-0001-9481-2795

Master of Arts (Thesis only)

September 2021

School of Historical and Philosophical Studies,

Faculty of Arts,

University of Melbourne

Submitted in total fulfilment of the degree

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Abstract

This thesis examines Percy Reginald ‘Inky’ Stephensen (1901 – 1965), Australian author,

publisher, authors’ agent, and political activist, in relation to the transnational fascist

phenomena of the twentieth century. It challenges previous characterisations of Stephensen as

an Australian nationalist first and a fascist second, who retired from political activism after

the war. It utilizes the historiographical frameworks of transnational fascism and historical

network analysis to position Stephensen within the history of fascism: first as it spread over

the globe in the interwar period through complex multidirectional processes of transfer,

adoption, adaptation, and recontextualization; and then in the survival of fascism, and its

transmission to new generations of actors, through marginalized mutually-re-enforcing

subcultural networks after 1945. Fascism as it emerged in Europe deeply resonated with

Stephensen’s nationalist vision of a racially homogenous white Australia, and his desire for a

cultural and political revolution that would rescue European culture from the decadent liberal-

democratic forces that were driving its decline. Australia’s history as a British colony, in

particular the violent process of colonization, complicated fascist understandings of violence

for Stephensen, but Hitler’s self-declared war against a racial Jewish-Communist enemy

became a foundational component of Stephensen’s support for the White Australia Policy.

After Stephensen’s release from internment, he played a significant role in the survival and

transmission of fascism in Australia by providing emotional and ideological encouragement,

validation, and support for like-minded actors, and serving as a conduit for material,

information, and ideas in an internationally-connected extreme-Right network that existed in

the political margins. Stephensen remained committed to the cause he had adopted prior to

internment, and demonstrated an ability to edit his message for different post-war audiences,

without compromising his belief in an international Jewish-Communist conspiracy that posed

an existential threat to white nations. This thesis therefore contributes to understanding not

only the impact that fascism had in Australia, but also the processes by which fascism spread

in the interwar period and survived in a hostile post-war environment.

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Acknowledgments

This thesis was produced with the assistance of the Australian Commonwealth

Government, through the provision of a Research Training Program Scholarship (Stipend and

Fee Offset). Other funding was provided by the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies

to access digital copies of archival material.

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Ángel Alcalde, whose skilful guidance, advice,

feedback, and encouragement have not only made this a better thesis, but have also, I believe,

made me a much better historian. I would also like to thank my secondary supervisor, Professor

Sean Scalmer, for his valuable feedback and support, and my advisory committee chair,

Professor Mark Edele, for his assistance and encouragement.

Thank you also to my friends and colleagues at the University of Melbourne: the

members of the History Postgraduate Association, especially my fellow 2020 – 2021

Committee members Cat Gay and Jonathan Tehusijarana; my office co-worker Sam Watts; and

everyone in the Australian History Reading Group. It was wonderful to be surrounded by your

enthusiasm, support, and intellect.

Finally, thank you to my family and friends for your love and support, especially during

this bizarre and challenging pandemic period. My biggest thanks of all goes to my wife,

Jennifer Medway, who somehow managed to give birth to our first child, Frederick Zoltan

Medway-Parro, return to her own work, support and inspire me throughout this process, and

co-wrangle our large dog Toby, all at the same time. This thesis could not have happened

without you.

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Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................. 1

Stephensen, Australian Nationalism, and Fascism ................................................................ 4

Historiographical Frameworks: Transnational Fascism and Historical Network Analysis ... 7

CHAPTER 1: ADOPTING AND ADAPTING FASCISM (1901 – 1945) .................................................................. 14 Percy Reginald ‘Inky’ Stephensen ....................................................................................... 16

The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay towards National Self Respect ........... 24

The Publicist: the paper loyal to Australia First .................................................................. 27

The Australia First Movement ............................................................................................. 35

Internment ............................................................................................................................ 36

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 42

CHAPTER 2: SURVIVAL AND TRANSMISSION: STEPHENSEN AND THE POST-WAR FASCIST NETWORK (1945 – 1965) ........................................................................................................................................................... 44

Post-war literary activism .................................................................................................... 46

Encouraging National Socialists: Graham and de Louth ..................................................... 48

Appealing to the mainstream ............................................................................................... 54

Literary activism continued: Willyan and Borin ................................................................. 55

Contact with a new generation ............................................................................................. 60

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 62

CHAPTER 3: STEPHENSEN’S POST-WAR IDEOLOGY (1945 – 1965) ................................................................. 64 ‘I am quite unrepentant!’ ..................................................................................................... 68

Challenges to the White Australia Policy ............................................................................ 70

Reaction to the Holocaust .................................................................................................... 74

Cold War anti-Communism ................................................................................................. 80

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 82

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................................... 85 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................................. 91

Archival Sources .................................................................................................................. 91

Published Primary Sources .................................................................................................. 93

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Secondary Sources ............................................................................................................... 96

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Introduction

Percy Reginald ‘Inky’ Stephensen (1901 – 1965), author, publisher, agent, and

Australian fascist, was arrested by police acting on the orders of Military Intelligence shortly

before dawn on 10 March 1942, and taken from the flat he shared with his wife, Winifred, in

Rose Bay, Sydney.1 The previous night, a group in Perth, Western Australia, calling itself the

Australia First Movement had been arrested after planning to aid a Japanese invasion by

assassinating politicians and sabotaging infrastructure. Australia had been at war since

September 1939, and fears of a Japanese invasion were high. Japanese forces had entered the

war in spectacular fashion, bombing the American naval depot at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, in

December 1941, before advancing swiftly southward, seizing the British base at Singapore and

dropping bombs on Darwin in February 1942. Following the arrests of the Perth AFM, a

dispatch was sent to the army’s Eastern Command headquarters in Sydney which named

Stephensen as the leader of the movement. On the day of his arrest, Stephensen was placed on

a bus, with his brother Eric and other members of the Australia First Movement, en route to

Liverpool internment camp in Sydney’s West. Stephensen would spend the rest of the war in

various internment camps around the country.2

Internment came as a shock to a man who considered himself an Australian nationalist.

Six years previously, in Stephensen’s most influential work, The Foundations of Culture in

Australia: An Essay towards National Self Respect (1936), Stephensen had articulated his

vision of a strong, sovereign Australian nation, built upon a foundation of distinctive national

literature and culture.3 Through various literary ventures since he graduated from Oxford

University in 1927, Stephensen had been hard at work realizing his dream. He published work

by renown Australian artists Miles Franklin, Eleanor Dark, Norman Lindsay, and Henry

Handel Richardson. He edited and ghost-wrote for the popular author Frank Clune. He edited

and published one of Australia’s enduring classics, Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938). His

1 Craig Munro, Wild Man of Letters: The Story of P. R. Stephensen (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1984), 223. 2 Munro, 223–47; Bruce W. Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots: The Story of the Australia First Movement (Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press, 1968), 93–114; Barbara Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 1936-1942 (Brisbane: Interactive Publications, 2005), 141–62. 3 P. R. Stephensen, The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay towards National Self Respect (Gordon, N.S.W.: W.J. Miles, 1936).

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work earned him an audience with H. V. Evatt, who consulted him in August 1940, when Evatt

resigned from the High Court and entered federal politics.4 Neither his connection with Evatt,

who as Attorney General held power over Stephensen’s internment, nor his contributions to

Australian culture prevented him from languishing in internment for over three years.5

Stephensen’s internment was welcome news to some. Stephensen had been denounced

for years by his opponents, in particular the Communists, as a fascist, a traitor, and a Nazi.6

Australian security agencies, including Military Intelligence and the Commonwealth

Investigation Bureau, had been keeping an eye on Stephensen since at least 1940, and perhaps

as early as 1937.7 As well as pursuing his nationalist mission through literary work, Stephensen

had been proselytizing in the pages of the pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic, anti-British nationalist

monthly newspaper The Publicist: the paper loyal to Australia First since its first issue in July

1936. Over the six years of the paper’s run Stephensen became a public advocate for the fascist

movement that had emerged in Europe, in particular Hitler and Nazi Germany. His

contributions became increasingly focused on a supposed international Jewish Communist

conspiracy and the need for an authoritarian leader to rescue Australia from decadent liberalism

and the clutches of colonial Britain.8 He carried the paper’s message onto the Catholic radio

station 2SM, where he gave weekly Publicist talks from March 1937 until the station cancelled

what had become a pro-Hitler programme in June 1939.9 He was also the leader of the Australia

First Movement founded in October 1941, which aimed by public talks, meetings, and study

sessions to further the cause that Stephensen by then identified as ‘Australian National

Socialism’.10 Stephensen was unaware of the plot hatched by the AFM group in Perth, but

Military Intelligence already had reasonable grounds to be cautious about Stephensen.

Stephensen remained in internment, separated from his ailing wife Winifred, for three

years and three months. He finally walked out of Tatura internment camp, in northern Victoria,

4 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 204. 5 Munro, Wild Man of Letters. 6 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 34–35, 94–95. 7 Winter, 55–63, 142–45. 8 Joseph Parro, ‘“Experiments in Australianity”: The Publicist, Australian Nationalism, and the Embrace of German National Socialism’ (Honours thesis (B.A.), Melbourne, University of Melbourne, 2018). 9 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 177; David S. Bird, Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2012), 79. 10 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 78.

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on 17 August 1945, two days after Japan’s surrender.11 The world he entered was a very

different one from that of March 1942. Rather than rescuing Germany from foreign

domination, as Stephensen had hoped, Hitler had plunged the world into another devastating

war. The supposedly weak, decadent liberal democracies had defeated Nazi Germany, and

Hitler, who Stephensen had seen as a beacon of national strength, was dead. The anti-Semitic

conspiracy theories that The Publicist helped spread were now associated with mass murder.12

Over the following two decades, before Stephensen’s death on 28 May 1965, the fascist

cause for which Stephensen had fought prior to internment underwent significant challenges

and, on the other hand, was buoyed by the anti-Communist environment of the Cold War.13

Stephensen’s reactions to his changing context form part of the story of fascism’s survival and

transmission after the Second World War.

Existing accounts of Stephensen’s life neglect Stephensen’s efforts to keep fascism

alive after 1945. This stems from an unwillingness to recognize Stephensen as a participant in

the transnational fascist movement that swept the globe in the interwar period, instead

foregrounding Stephensen’s Australian nationalism. This thesis conceptualizes Stephensen not

as an Australian nationalist first and a Nazi sympathizer second, but as a member of the

interwar and post-1945 transnational fascist movement. Stephensen participated in the process

of transmission, adoption, and recontextualization by which fascism spread over the globe with

the rise of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Stephensen’s desire for a revolution that would

overthrow the decadent forces of liberal democracy in Australia and replace them with a

racially-homogenous sovereign nation, drew him towards the fascist movement emanating

from Europe. In contrast to previous studies, which emphasize Stephensen’s retirement from

political activism after 1945, this thesis outlines Stephensen’s role in the survival and

transmission of fascist ideology in post-war Australia. Stephensen was wary of repeating his

experience of internment, and aware of public and government hostility towards fascism and

Nazism. Rather than launch another public campaign like The Publicist or the Australia First

Movement, Stephensen privately encouraged and supported like-minded actors and served as

a conduit for material and information. He thereby played a significant role in a network of

11 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 247. 12 ‘The Culturist: P. R. Stephensen’s Bright Noon and Sombre Afternoon’, Nation, 14 February 1959, 10. 13 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 201; On the treatment of (ex-)Nazis during the Cold War see Mark Aarons, Sanctuary: Nazi Fugitives in Australia (Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1989).

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actors who kept fascist ideology alive in post-war Australia. Supported by this network,

Stephensen remained committed to his fascist vision, privately encouraging other fascists and

publicly advocating for the parts of his vision that were more palatable for mainstream

Australia, until his death in 1965.

This re-examination of Stephensen emphasizes that the rise of fascism had an impact

in Australia, and dispels the notion that Australian actors were limited to adopting a parochial

version of fascist-influenced Australian nationalism. It further emphasizes that fascism was a

complex phenomenon which drew from European ideological traditions, including

nationalism, which was transformed in the process of adaptation to specific contexts. It

demonstrates that fascism in Australia, like fascism in other contexts, had to contend with the

legacies of the Second World War, but that fascist actors proved capable of maintaining

fascism by adopting new methods of activism, creating subcultural extremist networks. It

thereby contributes not only to understanding fascism’s spread across the globe, but to

understanding the impact that this spread has had in Australia.

Stephensen, Australian Nationalism, and Fascism

Understanding Stephensen as a member of the transnational fascist movement is a

departure from previous studies which, reflecting the issues that have most concerned

Australian historians, have been dominated by a focus on Stephensen’s literary nationalism.

This focus is evidenced by Dan Tout’s recent review of the historiography surrounding

Stephensen, in which Stephensen appears as a nationalist who was also a champion for

Aboriginal rights, a settler colonial who appropriated Indigeneity for his own ends, and a

cultural cringer, as well as an inverted cultural cringer.14 He is evoked as a ‘sign of the times’

in discussions of Australian nationalism, the settler colonial predicament, and the various

global forces emerging in the inter-war years in Australia.15 Stephensen’s 1936 publication,

14 Dan Tout, ‘“A Gumtree Is Not a Branch of an Oak”: Indigenising Settler Nationalism in 1930s Australia’ (PhD Thesis, Swinburne University of Technology, 2018). 15 See for example: Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942 – 1945 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1970); Geoffrey Serle, The Creative Spirit in Australia: A Cultural History (Richmond, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1987); Noel McLachlan, Waiting for the Revolution: A History of Australian Nationalism (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1989); Ian McLean, ‘Aboriginalism: White Aborigines and Australian Nationalism’, Australian Humanities Review, no. 10 (May 1998); James Saleam, ‘The Other Radicalism: An

5

The Foundations of Culture in Australia, forms the basis for much of this discussion.16

Stephensen’s involvement with the Aborigines Progressive Association, his role in editing and

publishing Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, and his relationship to the nationalist literary group

Jindyworobak are also common references, which, along with Foundations of Culture, are

used by multiple authors to argue for his continuing impact on Australian culture and national

identity.17

Although many of these accounts address Stephensen’s association with fascism,

Nazism, and extreme-Right politics to greater or lesser extents, the scholarship that focusses

on this part of Stephensen’s life is small overall. Andrew Moore’s historical overviews of the

Australian Right and extreme-Right make passing mention of Stephensen as an intellectual of

the movement who remained involved after the war and influenced later actors and movements,

in particular James Saleam and the National Action organization that Saleam led in the 1980s.18

Likewise, Henderson’s thesis A History of the Australian Extreme Right Since 1950 features

Stephensen as an influential figure whose combination of ‘intense nationalis[m]’ and ‘support

for National Socialism’ influenced later actors, including not only Saleam but Frank Browne

and Graeme Royce.19 Both authors highlight Stephensen’s importance but do not provide much

more information. More recently, Kristy Campion has included Stephensen, as the leader of

Inquiry into Contemporary Australian Extreme Right Ideology, Politics and Organisation 1975-1995.’ (PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1999); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd edition (London; New York: Routledge, 2002); Anthony Moran, ‘As Australia Decolonizes: Indigenizing Settler Nationalism and the Challenges of Settler/Indigenous Relations’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 25, no. 6 (November 2002); Tim Rowse, ‘Modernism, Indigenism and War: A Comment on the Black Swan of Trespass’, ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia, no. 24–25 (2006); Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2007); Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Historylessness: Australia as a Settler Colonial Collective’, Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 3 (1 September 2007); Michael R. Griffiths, ‘Biopolitical Correspondences: Settler Nationalism, Thanatopolitics, and the Perils of Hybridity’, Australian Literary Studies 26, no. 2 (2011); Graeme Davison, ‘Rethinking the Australian Legend’, Australian Historical Studies 43 (2012); Ellen Smith, ‘Writing Native: The Aboriginal in Australian Cultural Nationalism 1927 - 1945’ (PhD Thesis, Princeton University, 2012); Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia Volume 4 (1901 - 1942): The Succeeding Age, vol. 4, 5 vols, The Oxford History of Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1986). 16 Stephensen, The Foundations of Culture in Australia. 17 Gregory Melleuish, ‘Randolph Hughes versus Percy Stephensen: An Australian Cultural Battle of the 1930s’, Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association 18 (1996); Gregory Melleuish and Geoffrey Stokes, ‘Australian Political Thought’, in Oxford Companion to Australian Politics, ed. Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts (Oxford University Press, 2007); Davison, ‘Rethinking the Australian Legend’. 18 Andrew Moore, The Right Road?: A History of Right-Wing Politics in Australia, Australian Retrospectives (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1995), 110–11, 124; Andrew Moore, ‘Writing about the Extreme Right in Australia’, Labour History, no. 89 (2005), 5–7. 19 Peter Henderson, ‘A History of the Australian Extreme Right Since 1950’ (University of Western Sydney, 2002), 160–62, 178, 238.

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the Australia First Movement and one of the authors of The Publicist, in her studies of

Australian extreme-Right ideology and the persistence of ‘Right Wing Extremism’ through

subcultural networks.20 Campion defines Stephensen as a ‘nationalist[]’ who was [a]ligned

with Axis ideology’, but does not explore Stephensen’s relationship with fascism.21 Muirden

and Winter have focused on Stephensen’s adoption of Nazism in their studies of the Australia

First Movement, while Stephensen features heavily in Bird’s study of Australian Nazi

supporters. 22 Muirden considered Stephensen a nationalist who was sympathetic to the

governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan, and all three works devote little space to the post-

war period, instead following the assertion that Munro puts forward in his biography of

Stephensen, that Stephensen retired from political activism after his release from internment.23

James Saleam, who Moore and Henderson argue was influenced by Stephensen, considers

Stephensen a ‘fascist intellectual’, and includes him in a ‘literary-fascist array’ of authors

which included the French fascist Robert Brasillach and the British fascist A. K. Chesterton.24

Saleam’s typological approach to fascism, which he distinguishes from other extreme-Right

ideologies, underemphasizes the fluidity of movements and ideas. Saleam and Bird, who calls

Stephensen an ‘unashamed Nazi’, distinguish their analyses by characterizing Stephensen not

as an Australian nationalist with Nazi sympathies, but as a fascist actor.25

The above studies have pointed towards Stephensen as an influential Australian fascist

who played a key role in adapting fascism, during the period of its emergence, to an Australian

context, and in the survival of fascism after the defeat of the major fascist regimes during the

Second World War. The ability of these authors to articulate this narrative, however, has been

constrained by not only the dominance of nationalism in Australian historiography, but also

the historiographical frameworks that were available or utilized. With the exception perhaps of

Bird and Campion, these studies predate the emergence of ‘transnational fascism’, as both an

approach to, and an understanding of, the fascist phenomenon. In turn, this failure to situate

20 Kristy Campion, ‘A “Lunatic Fringe”? The Persistence of Right Wing Extremism in Australia’, Perspectives on Terrorism 13, no. 2 (April 2019): 2–20; Kristy Campion, ‘Australian Right Wing Extremist Ideology: Exploring Narratives of Nostalgia and Nemesis’, Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism 14, no. 3 (2019): 208–26. 21 Campion, ‘A “Lunatic Fringe?”?’, 5. 22 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots; Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist; Bird, Nazi Dreamtime. 23 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 4; Munro, Wild Man of Letters. 24 James Saleam, ‘The Other Radicalism’, 50–51. 25 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, XII

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Stephensen within the broader history of fascism has led to a failure to analyse Stephensen’s

post-war life according to relevant scholarship, which draws on historical network analysis to

explain fascism’s survival after the war. This thesis utilizes the historiographical frameworks

of transnational fascism and network analysis to position Stephensen within the history of not

only the Australian extreme-Right, but of the transnational fascist movement.

Historiographical Frameworks: Transnational Fascism and Historical Network Analysis

Prior to the late 1980s, the nation as an organizing concept for twentieth-century

historical analysis was a relatively unchallenged approach. More recently, historians have

wondered what dimensions of history have gone unexplored due to the dominance of the nation

in histories.26 They have turned to two major approaches to overcome this perceived gap:

comparative history, and transnational history.27 Comparative history is not a new approach,

and has been employed by historians studying fascism who have wished to find generic models

of fascism, produce complex typologies, and demonstrate differences between movements and

regimes.28 Transnational history is comparatively recent. It is built upon recent trends across

the humanities and social sciences that emphasise fluidity and exchange. In the field of history,

these trends have been expressed in concepts and approaches which include entanglement,

Transfergeschichte, and histoire croisée. Proponents of these approaches argue that they enable

26 David Thelen, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History’, The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999); Glenda Sluga, ‘The Nation and the Comparative Imagination’, in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (New York; London: Routledge, 2004); Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Introduction: The Professor and the Madman’, in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (USA; UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 27 Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ‘Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung. Der Ansatz der Histoire croisée und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28. Jahrg., no. H. 4 (December 2002); Jürgen Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond’, History and Theory 42, no. 1 (February 2003); Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, ‘Introduction: Comparative History, Cross-National History, Transnational History - Definitions’, in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor (New York; London: Routledge, 2004), ix–xxiv. 28 Kocka, ‘Comparison and Beyond’; Martin Blinkhorn, Fascism and the Right in Europe, 1919-1945 (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000); Glenda Sluga, ‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism’, in The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day, ed. Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (USA; UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 381–83; Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, ‘Introduction’, in Fascism Without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe, 1918 - 1945 (New York, NY, UNITED STATES: Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2019), 1–38; Aristotle Kallis and António Costa Pinto, ‘Introduction’, in Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, ed. Aristotle Kallis and António Costa Pinto (Hampshire, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 1–12.

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the study of history that is not confined to, or defined by, national units and borders, while

detractors argue that they de-emphasize the importance of the nation in the lives of historical

subjects.29

The study of fascism has been deeply influenced by these historiographical trends.30

Contemporary historians of fascism argue that fascism studies have also been hampered by a

focus on the nation, and that important dimensions of fascism as a global movement, with

actors and ideas circulating between and across national boundaries, have been neglected. They

propose adopting new historiographical perspectives to re-capture these dimensions.31 The

result is a new understanding of fascism, not as a static set of ideas isolated to a few movements,

but as a constellation of ideas that emerged from previous ideological traditions, were subjected

to certain contextual forces, and travelled across the globe through countless complex

processes of transfer, adaptation, and re-contextualisation.32 Although this approach allows for

more fluidity in defining fascism, as ideas and aesthetics changed over time and space, it does

not render ‘fascism’ an empty term. Rather, it de-reifies fascism by placing fascist ideology

within a historical context. First Fascist Italy, and then Nazi Germany, were inheritors of pre-

existing European ideological traditions who were deeply influenced by the violence and

upheaval of the First World War.33 Through multidirectional processes of transfer, adaptation,

29 In addition to the above works, see: Matthias Middell, ‘Transnationale Geschichte als transnationales Projekt: Zur Einführung in die Diskussion’, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 31, no. 2 (2006); Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, ‘Deutsch-Französischer Kulturtransfer Im 18. Und 19. Jahrhundert. Zu Einem Neuen Interdisziplinären Forschungsprogramm Des C.N.R.S.’, Francia 13 (1985); Michael McGerr, ‘The Price of the “New Transnational History”’, The American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (1991). 30 For a thorough summary, see Ángel Alcalde, ‘The Transnational Consensus: Fascism and Nazism in Current Research’, Contemporary European History 29, no. 2 (May 2020). 31 Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919 - 1945 (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2010); Susanne Hohler, ‘Russian Fascism in Exile: A Historical and Phenomenological Perspective on Transnational Fascism’, Fascism 2, no. 2 (1 January 2013); Samuel Huston Goodfellow, ‘Fascism as a Transnational Movement: The Case of Inter-War Alsace’, Contemporary European History 22, no. 1 (2013); Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, ed. Aristotle Kallis and António Costa Pinto (Hampshire, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Fascism Without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation Between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 To 1945, ed. Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (New York, NY, USA: Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2019). 32 Ángel Alcalde, ‘The Transnational Consensus’; Aristotle Kallis, ‘Transnational Fascism: The Fascist New Order, Violence, and Creative Destruction’, in Fascism Without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe, 1918 – 1945, ed. Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (New York, NY, UNITED STATES: Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2019), 39–64. 33 On the importance of the war, see for example: Federico Finchelstein, ‘On Fascist Ideology’, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 15, no. 3 (September 2008), 321. The relationship between fascism and violence is further explored in chapter one.

9

and re-contextualisation, fascism spread over the globe, assuming different characteristics in

different contexts. Of relevance to this thesis is the fascist belief that Western civilisation was

in a period of decadence and decline, owing to apparently illusory beliefs in liberalism,

egalitarianism, and democracy. Fascist actors believed that extra-parliamentary means, in

particular violence, should be deployed in order to affect a revolution and establish a new order

that better reflected the ‘natural order’. This meant the nation united under a strong leader as

the organizing concept for society, strongly linked to ideas of nature and, in the Nazi tradition,

genetics. Fascism was strongly opposed to Communism and Bolshevism.34 The Nazis also

imbued fascism with a strong anti-Semitic component and a specific belief in an international

Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.35 Of particular significance is the central place of nationalism in

fascist ideology: Griffin famously defined fascism in terms of ‘populist ultra-nationalism.’36

Understanding nationalism as a defining feature of fascism allows a conceptualization of

Stephensen not as a nationalist first and a fascist second, but as a participant in a transnational

fascist movement.

The second major historiographical framework underpinning this thesis is historical

network analysis, in particular as it has been applied to the study of post-war fascism. Historical

network analysis treats the ties between different subjects as objects of historical inquiry, which

can reveal answers to historical questions that studying subjects in isolation cannot. Networks

are separated into two basic components: objects, sometimes identified as nodes, positions, or

actors; and ‘a set of relations among these objects’, such as edges, links, or ties.37 Actors are

viewed as interdependent elements of networks, or “personal communities”.38 This approach

is supplemented by further analytical frameworks: the network is examined in terms of size,

34 For some perspectives on fascist ideology and the complications arising from emphasising fluid processes of transfer, exchange, and re-contextualisation, see: Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism, 27–35; Kallis, ‘Transnational Fascism: The Fascist New Order, Violence, and Creative Destruction’; Finchelstein, ‘On Fascist Ideology’; George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, First Edition (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999); Zeev Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology’, in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, ed. Walter Laqueur (Great Britain: Pelican Books, 1979), 325–408; Roger Griffin, ‘Interregnum or Endgame? The Radical Right in the “post-Fascist” Era’, Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 2 (2000), 165. 35 Josef Herf, ‘The “Jewish War”: Goebbels and the Antisemitic Campaigns of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (2005). 36 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 26. 37 Jörg Raab, ‘More than Just a Metaphor: The Network Concept and Its Potential in Holocaust Research’, in Networks of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust, ed. Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel, 1st ed., vol. 6, Studies on War and Genocide (New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 324. 38 Charles Wetherell, ‘Historical Social Network Analysis’, International Review of Social History 43 (1998), 127, 130.

10

composition, spatial dispersion, support, and so on, and the links between actors are conceived

of as channels for things like information and resources.39 Wetherall distinguishes between

‘Whole Network Analysis’, which is data-intensive and examines an entire network, and

‘Egocentric Network Analysis’, which focusses on the network of an individual, and utilizes

correspondence, diaries, etc. as source material.40 This study falls into the latter category. The

collection of Stephensen’s personal papers held at the State Library of New South Wales,

supplemented by smaller collections from Stephensen’s correspondents, as well as government

and security files held by the National Archive of Australia, have been used to reconstruct the

post-war network in which Stephensen was situated, and to determine the nature and function

of Stephensen’s ties to other network components.

This network approach has, in turn, allowed historians to articulate the form of post-

war fascist movements, and their reaction to the events of the Second World War and the post-

war period. Roger Griffin has proposed the notion of a ‘groupuscular right’ that constituted

fascism’s political formation after 1945: a heterogenous, non-hierarchical network of

interlinked and semi-autonomous nodes, existing on the margins of mainstream political

culture, which performed the function of adapting and preserving fascism without having to

accommodate mainstream attitudes.41 Conceiving of this network as a coordinated whole,

comprised of individual actors and organisations, is key. It explains how the network structure

of the groupuscular right amplifies the efforts of individual components, which together create

‘an ideological energy field far stronger than any of its individual nodes.’42 It also explains

how this network functions to re-enforce the beliefs of its members. Under the concept of

‘cognate grouping’, Jackson proposes that acting towards a common goal gave ‘individual,

radical positions… a sense of validity, and so are reinforced by their ability to fit within a wider

culture’.43 It also allows for the production of a shared outcome, while individual components

of the network act according to their own goals. Raab identifies a process of ‘integration’,

whereby shared beliefs, as well as mutual co-ordination and ‘informal communication’,

39 Wetherell, ‘Historical Social Network Analysis’. 40 Wetherell, 127–30. 41 Roger Griffin, ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction: The Incredible Shrinking Ism: The Survival of Fascism in the Post-Fascist Era’, Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 3 (2002), 4–6. 42 Griffin, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Ism’, 4. 43 Paul Jackson, ‘Accumulative Extremism: The Post-War Tradition of Anglo-American Neo-Nazi Activism’, in The Post-War Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate, ed. Paul Jackson and Anton Shekhovtsov (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014), 5.

11

function to produce a shared outcome from different elements that perform different functions

in a network.44

In arguing for Stephensen’s relevance in the survival and transmission of fascism in

Australia after 1945, this thesis notes the limits of Stephensen’s involvement within the

network, but argues that these limitations do not constitute the political isolation or inaction

that, according to previous Histories, defined Stephensen’s post-war life. Feldman and Seibel,

in their study of the Holocaust as a ‘division-of-labour-based crime’, argue that awareness of

‘organizational goals’ mean that ‘accomplices remain accountable for what they are doing even

when they act in networks that are fluid and opaque in nature…’.45 This concept assigns

importance to the awareness of a network’s common goals in relation to individual actions and

is particularly useful in cases like Stephensen’s, whose awareness of the goals of his

correspondents must be given some significance in determining Stephensen’s role in the post-

war fascist movement. The network also functioned to transmit Stephensen’s influence beyond

Stephensen’s own actions: As Jackson explains, the ‘remembered legacy’ of the movement’s

leaders increased the significance of their role ‘over and above their own achievements’.46

Past studies of Stephensen have not sufficiently considered how the structures within

which Stephensen was situated amplified his efforts to sustain Australian fascism after 1945.

This has contributed to the notion that Stephensen was politically inactive in this period. This

thesis, by situating Stephensen in a network where mutual co-operation and support between

like-minded actors created an ideologically potent, if politically marginalized, environment,

recognizes that Stephensen’s acts of solidarity, support, and encouragement carried

significance.

This thesis begins by tracing Stephensen’s adoption of fascism, from his university days

as a member of Queensland’s branch of the Communist Party of Australia to his internment, in

March 1942, as the leader of the Australia First Movement. It identifies Stephensen as a

member of a post-war generation who turned to visions of decline and renewal to both explain

44 Raab, ‘Introduction’, 321–22. 45 Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel, ‘Introduction: The Holocaust as Division-of-Labor-Based Crime—Evidence and Analytical Challenges’, in Networks of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust, ed. Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel, 1st ed., vol. 6, Studies on War and Genocide (New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), 6. 46 Jackson, ‘Accumulative Extremism’, 6.

12

the tragedy of the First World War and to guide their own political and cultural activism. Born

into a nation defined in terms of race, Stephensen inherited the European ideological tradition

that connected nationalism to notions of white supremacy and particularly Australian anxieties

about threats to national racial homogeneity. Stephensen’s Communist activism is seen not in

opposition to a later turn to fascism, but as a manifestation of his desire for an anti-liberal-

democratic political and cultural revolution. These ideological elements are seen as

commonalities between Stephensen and the emerging fascist movement. The first chapter

continues by tracing Stephensen’s engagement with fascism during the period in which he

worked at The Publicist. It uses material from this paper, as well as other articles produced by

Stephensen, and his personal correspondence, to demonstrate how he adopted Hitler’s

conspiratorial vision of a war between the white race and a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. It

examines Stephensen’s internment, which took place between March 1942 and August 1945,

for indications of the impact that this experience had on his worldview, and also, leading into

the next chapter, on the impact that internment had for Stephensen’s post-war network.

Due to the lack of attention paid by historians to Stepensen’s life after his release in

1945, the majority of this thesis is dedicated to illuminating this period. Chapter two

demonstrates that, contrary to previous understandings, Stephensen carried on his fascist

activism in forms that reflected both the impact of internment and post-war hostility towards

fascism. This included private correspondence with other actors who were working towards

similar goals, combining literary work with his campaign against a perceived Jewish-

Communist conspiracy, and attempting to leverage the influence of politicians and public

officials who shared Stephensen’s anti-Communism and support for the White Australia

Policy. Stephensen’s relationships embedded him in a post-war far-Right network, where he

served as a source of support and encouragement, as well as a conduit for information and

material. Stephensen therefore played a role in ensuring the survival of fascism in post-war

Australia and its transmission to the new generation of fascist activists that emerged in the late

1950s and early 1960s.

This network of mutually-supportive fascist actors also enabled the preservation of

Stephensen’s fascist ideology after 1945. The third and final chapter departs from the narrative

form of the preceding chapters, to examine Stephensen’s reaction to the challenges posed to

his conspiratorial, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, racial-nationalist vision in the post-war

world. In the face of the challenges posed to the White Australia Policy, Stephensen publicly

13

defended the idea of nations as biological, racially homogenous entities, while privately

arguing the need for an alliance of white nations against a global Jewish conspiracy that was

attempting to achieve world domination. In light of this ongoing belief in Hitler’s notion of a

Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, this chapter examines Stephensen’s reaction to the Holocaust.

Noting previous historians’ observations that Stephensen denied the events of the Holocaust,

this chapter establishes that while Stephensen may have been sceptical of press reports about

the Nazis’ genocide against European Jews, he also heard from friends whose family members

had been murdered by the Nazis. Stephensen’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge the reality of

the Holocaust, as well as his persistent belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and vague

references to removing Jews from the national community, challenge the notion that

recognition of the Holocaust would have altered Stephensen’s anti-Semitism. Finally, this

chapter examines Stephensen’s anti-Communism. Stephensen saw Communism as part of the

supposed Jewish conspiracy for world control. The acceptance of anti-Communism in the Cold

War climate allowed him to share this part of his vision more widely, while omitting its

connection to Stephensen’s Nazi worldview, highlighting how fascist actors self-censor

according to their audience, without changing their own beliefs.

While fascism seemed to be a defeated and discredited ideology in the aftermath of the

Second World War, current events demonstrate that this is not so. With the recent storming of

the White House by supporters of the outgoing US president Donald Trump, fascism, and the

mystery of its longevity, is receiving renewed and urgent attention. In the month preceding the

submission of this thesis, Australian newspapers the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald have

been running an exposé on the Australian neo-Nazi movement and the threat of violence from

the extreme-Right.47 Understanding the mechanisms by which fascism survives and circulates,

including in Australia, remains an important task.

47 ‘Nazis Next Door’, The Age, accessed 23 August 2021, https://www.theage.com.au/nazis-next-door.

14

Chapter 1: Adopting and adapting fascism (1901 – 1945)

Stephensen’s journey from the far left to the far right of the political spectrum is a

defining feature of Stephensen historiography.48 Between 1936 and 1938, Stephensen went

from condemning European and Australian fascists, including Hitler, Mussolini, and the New

Guard, to espousing a recognisably pro-fascist and anti-Semitic platform.49 By 1939 he had

adopted the language of the NSDAP and identified his cause as “Australian National

Socialism”.50 In part, this change is attributed to the influence of the older retired accountant

William John Miles, whom Stephensen met in 1936, as the two together embarked upon the

nationalist propaganda project that was The Publicist.51

Bird and Munro also recognise that this apparent transition was, in reality, not so

simple.52 Historically, fascism shared commonalities with the radical left of the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries, where ideas of “creative violence” and anti-democratic

revolution circulated.53 Fascists, anarchists, syndicalists, and communists desired a revolution

that would replace the decadent bourgeois liberal world of post-Enlightenment Europe with

their own particular vision. For some, this was the emancipation of the working class, while

for others, it was a society united under nationalism.54 Nor was Stephensen alone in making

the transition from left to right. In doing so he joined the ranks of Mussolini and Oswald

Mosley, the leader of the interwar British Union of Fascists, amongst many others.55 Long

before Stephensen met Miles, he and others of his generation longed for a revolution that would

sweep away the decadent and moribund European culture that had led to the disaster of the

48 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 185–86; Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 28; Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 15–16; Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 58. 49 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 185–86; Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 15; Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 58–61. 50 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 78. 51 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 58; Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 28; Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 15–16. 52 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 185–92; Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 59–62. 53 Jack J Roth, ‘The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo’, The Journal of Modern History 39, no. 1 (March 1967); Zeev Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology’, 325–408. The term ‘creative violence’ comes from Sorel. 54 Roth, ‘The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo’, 325–408. 55 Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology’, 352–53.

15

First World War.56 It was not such a leap from Stephensen’s past in the Communist Party to

his fascist activism of later years.

This chapter traces Stephensen’s adoption and adaptation of fascism, in particular in its

manifestation as Hitler’s German National Socialism. It draws on (and re-enforces) the

transnational approach to studying fascism, emphasising the cross-border transfer of fascist

phenomena that took place in the interwar period, and the resultant local manifestations of

these phenomena. This was a complex and opaque process, in which deeply embedded social,

cultural, and political ideas and values influenced, and were in turn influenced by, Stephensen’s

interaction with ideas and agents in Australia and Europe. This chapter serves to not only

emphasize Stephensen’s place as a participant in the interwar transnational fascist movement,

but to contextualize the post-war years that will be covered in the remaining chapters.

Stephensen, as a descendent of northern-European immigrants, was born into a settler-

colonial culture that was defined in terms of race and nation. His University activism

demonstrated the important role that nationalism played in his worldview, and his involvement

with the Communist Party in Australia, England, and France, evinced an opposition to the

existing political structure and a desire to work against it, as well as brought him into contact

with others who shared this vision. Stephensen’s early publishing ventures, in particular his

relationship with counter-cultural figures Norman Lindsay, D. H. Lawrence, and Aleister

Crowley, were attempts to re-invigorate European culture with a Nietzsche-inspired anti-

Semitic vision of moral and spiritual renewal. Returning to Australia, Stephensen combined

his mission of cultural renewal with his anti-British Australian nationalism. He began

supporting what he saw as Hitler’s national struggle against opposing forces, especially Britain,

and adopted Hitler’s belief in a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, which combined easily with his

vision of Australia as a racially homogenous white nation. Internment did nothing to change

his views. It did, however, estrange him from other members of the Australia First Movement

that he led, while bringing him closer to those who shared his extreme anti-Semitic ideology,

thereby playing a key role in determining Stephensen’s position in the post-war extreme-Right

network.

56 Noel Macainsh, Nietzsche in Australia: A Literary Inquiry into a Nationalistic Ideology (Munich: Verlag für Dokumentation und Werbung, 1975).

16

Percy Reginald ‘Inky’ Stephensen

Stephensen was born on 20 November 1901 in Maryborough, Queensland, into a

settler-colonial culture that defined itself in terms of race and nation. That same year, the

government of the newly-formed Commonwealth of Australia passed The Immigration

Restriction Act, designed to restrict non-European immigration. This was one of the first pieces

of Federal legislation, and gave administrative force to the White Australia Policy. The states

had already been enacting similar legislation in previous decades, and the IRA was followed

by other regulations that continued serving the function of preserving White Australia.57

The White Australia Policy was a set of interrelated ideas and decrees that aimed to

preserve and create Australia as a racially homogonous nation. It arose from “Social

Darwinism” and race theory that had become popularized in the previous century. According

to these concepts, humankind was divided into biologically separate races which were

hierarchically ordered according to their innate capabilities and character, and therefore

destined for varying levels of cultural sophistication and civilization.58 The idea of ongoing

competition between the races, and of biologically determined social units, was inherent in

these theories.59 In Australia, the uppermost category in this hierarchy, ‘white’, was an elastic

term that sometimes meant European, sometimes British, and sometimes “Caucasian”.60 The

White Australia Policy thus accommodated different perspectives on Australia’s racial

character without compromising its position at the top of the order, or its character as a

homogenous white nation.

Australia’s context as a British colony that was geographically situated amongst ‘non-

white’ nations determined the character of the White Australia Policy, its implementation, and

57 Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2005), 7–11; Andrew Markus, ‘Of Continuities and Discontinuities: Reflections on a Century of Australian Immigration Control’, in Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, ed. Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and Jan Gothard (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), 175–76. 58 James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7–8; Markus, ‘Of Continuities and Discontinuities’, 177; Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 7–11. 59 Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 11. 60 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2005).

17

the widespread support which it enjoyed. Almost unanimously at the turn of the century,

Australian politicians and the public believed that the preservation of Australia as a

homogenous white nation, occupying the whole continent, was essential to its survival as a

prosperous liberal-democratic civilization.61 For some, such as the author Charles Pearson,

whose influential book National Life and Character was quoted by Prime Minister Barton in

Parliament to support the IRA, the stakes were nothing less than the survival of white

civilization itself.62 In the pursuit of White Australia, legislation such as the IRA served to

restrict non-white immigration, particularly from Asia, aimed to evict racial others from the

geographic confines of the nation, and denied full membership of and participation in

Australian society for those who, like First Nations people, were already present but could not

be evicted. In reality, circumstance sometimes contravened these attempts, but in theory and

broad practice, the White Australia Policy was central to the notion of the nation in the settler-

colonial society into which Stephensen was born.63

Historians have argued about whether people in newly-Federated Australia thought of

their nation as ‘Australia’, ‘Britain’, or some combination of the two.64 Marilyn Lake has

argued that this binary ignores the importance of a perceived ‘Anglo-Saxon’ identity that, prior

to the First World War, emphasized kinship between Australia and non-British nations,

including the USA and Germany.65 There was also a popular strain of thought at the time that

environment influenced race, and that Australians would become a distinct race of British

descendants. 66 All of these ambiguities would be present in Stephensen’s worldview

throughout his career. It is in fact these very ambiguities that historian Dan Tout highlights in

61 Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 11–27; Neville Meaney, ‘The End of “White Australia” and Australia’s Changing Perceptions of Asia, 1945–1990’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 49, no. 2 (November 1995): 174–75; Markus, ‘Of Continuities and Discontinuities’, 177; Ien Ang, ‘From White Australia to Fortress Australia: The Anxious Nation in the New Century’, in Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, ed. Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and Jan Gothard (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), 51–69. 62 Meaney, ‘The End of “White Australia”’, 173; Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 13–14. 63 Meaney, ‘The End of “White Australia”’, 171–89; Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera; Markus, ‘Of Continuities and Discontinuities’, 175–89; Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia. 64 Neville Meaney, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography∗’, Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 116 (April 2001); Russell McGregor, ‘The Necessity of Britishness: Ethno-Cultural Roots of Australian Nationalism*’, Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 3 (1 July 2006); Christopher Waters, ‘Nationalism, Britishness and Australian History: The Meaney Thesis Revisited’, History Australia 10, no. 3 (January 2013). Additionally, see the special edition of History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013). 65 Marilyn Lake, ‘British World or New World?: Anglo-Saxonism and Australian Engagement with America’, History Australia 10, no. 3 (January 2013). 66 Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 13.

18

his assessment of Stephensen as a ‘settler nationalist intellectual’ who was striving at the same

time to remain connected to the colonizer as well as identifying with the colonized.67 Tout’s

assessment is valid, however, he goes too far in downplaying Stephensen’s desire for

revolution and identification with fascism, as we will see. These ambiguities about race and

nation were also accommodated, both in Stephensen and in the Australia of the early twentieth

century, by the ambiguities of the racial categories involved and their relationship to a

transnational conception of ‘whiteness’.68 Stephensen, as the descendent of northern European

immigrants (his paternal grandparents were from Denmark and his maternal grandparents

French-Swiss), sat squarely within the confines of this racially-imagined White Australia.69

Stephensen showed his hand in the debate between Australian and British nationhood

in his final year at the University of Queensland, where he had enrolled in the arts faculty in

1919. He took over as editor of the university magazine and renamed it Galmahra. 70

Stephensen later explained that “Galmahra” was an ‘Aboriginal’ word (he did not mention a

specific language) for “messenger”, and a deliberate ‘Australian retort to the Sydney

University’s Europocentric “Hermes”.’71 This combination of literary work and Australian

nationalist activism would be a defining feature of Stephensen’s life.

This example also illustrates that Stephensen’s vision of Australia included some

version of “Aboriginal” culture, as Stephensen saw it. The complexities of Stephensen’s

references to First Nations people and culture have been noted by historians. Stephensen’s

renaming of the university paper is reminiscent of Nicholas Thomas’ notion that ‘references to

the Indigenous may give the colonial project a legitimizing aesthetic depth, expressing its deep

belonging to the colonized place’. 72 Appeals to ‘Aboriginality’ and ‘nativism’ to articulate an

anti-imperial nationalism can be found, as Ian McLean notes, in Australian literature, visual

art, and History. 73 Historians have argued for more complex versions of Stephensen’s

67 Dan Tout, ‘Reframing “Inky” Stephensen’s Place in Australian Cultural History’, Settler Colonial Studies 7, no. 1 (2017), 72. 68 Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 69 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 4–5. 70 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 12, 19. 71 Percy Reginald Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs: Some Recollections of the Fanfrolico Press (Cremorne, Australia: Talkarra Press, 1954), 13. 72 Thomas in Rowse, ‘Modernism, Indigenism and War’, 40. 73 McLean, ‘Aboriginalism: White Aborigines and Australian Nationalism’.

19

engagement with First Nations people and culture. The opposite edge of the sword that is

referring to indigeneity to legitimize the settler connection to place is ‘honouring the vitality

of Indigenous tradition and thus implying limits to the effectiveness and legitimacy of the

colonial project.’74 Similarly, McLean views Stephensen not as one who sought a redeeming

vision of settler connections to place, but who articulated the limits of colonial ideology,

referring to the extermination of First Nations people and the strange terror of the land to

express the alienation that was foisted upon Australians in their settler colonial context.75

Anthony Moran proposes the concept of ‘indigenizing settler nationalism’, a form of settler

nationalism that seeks to accommodate the dispossession of First Nations people into the vision

of the nation.76 While Moran argues that Stephensen predates the emergence of indigenizing

settler nationalism as a popular approach to Australian national identity, seeing him instead as

a nationalist who thought the land’s first occupants posed no impediment to settler

identification with place, this concept can also be extended to describe Stephensen. It is indeed

the term that Dan Tout, in his extensive review of the historiography on Stephensen, chose for

a title: Tout argues that these contradictions and ambivalences in how historians have viewed

Stephensen are in fact indicative of the contradictions and ambivalences of settler colonial

society, in which Stephensen operated.77

While a university student, Stephensen also evinced his opposition to liberal democracy

and his desire for new forms of society to replace it. Following years of involvement with the

Workers Educational Association (WEA) in Queensland, which was assisted through his

friendship with Norman Lindsay’s son Jack, Stephensen joined the Brisbane branch of the

Communist Party of Australia in 1921. After securing a post as resident master of Ipswich

Boys’ Grammar School in 1922, he revived the Ipswich branch of the WEA. In the following

year, he wrote regularly for the left-wing paper The Daily Standard, using its pages to call for

revolution.78 After he procured the Rhodes Scholarship for Queensland in 1924, he travelled

to England to attend Oxford University, where he studied a program of ‘Modern Greats’ i.e.

philosophy, politics and economics.79 He continued his Communist activism in England, where

he joined the small Oxford branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain, as well as the

74 Thomas in Rowse, ‘Modernism, Indigenism and War’, 40. 75 McLean, ‘Aboriginalism: White Aborigines and Australian Nationalism’. 76 Moran, ‘As Australia Decolonizes’, 1014. 77 Dan Tout, ‘“A Gumtree Is Not a Branch of an Oak”. 78 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 14–23. 79 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 24, 33.

20

University’s Labour Club. His work on behalf of the Party almost got him expelled: at the

request of the Communist Party, who at the command of the Comintern were responsible for

propaganda throughout the Empire, he and a fellow student compiled a report on the

University’s Indian students. He also distributed pamphlets, written by Gandhi, to Indian

students.80 Stephensen would retain an admiration for Gandhi, as well as other male nationalist

anti-British leaders such as the Irishman De Valeri and Adolf Hitler, throughout his life. When

his activities at Oxford were discovered, he avoided expulsion by agreeing to end his

Communist activism, while negotiating to remain a financial member of the Party. Stephensen

was fluent in French, and over several trips to France during his years at Oxford, he participated

in workers’ rallies and French Communist Party events. He continued combining his literary

talents with his revolutionary efforts, writing for the London paper Workers’ Weekly, helping

to produce a workers’ paper called Searchlight, and translating Lenin’s Imperialism and On

the Road to Insurrection, both of which were published by the Party. During a ten-day general

strike in May 1926, in which over three million British workers participated, Stephensen

reportedly played a key role in strike efforts in Oxford.81 Stephensen’s interest in revolution

was more than theoretical, and in spite of his choice to remain at Oxford rather than commit

himself to the Party, the young Stephensen proved himself a fervent anti-capitalist activist.

Stephensen’s desire for revolution owed as much to the aestheticism of Nietzsche,

whose work he studied at Oxford, and the Lindsays, as it did to Lenin.82 After Stephensen

graduated from Oxford with a second-class Honours degree, he became manager of the

Fanfrolico Press. Fanfrolico was started in Australia, around 1925 or 1926, by Jack and

Norman Lindsay, along with a third, John T Kirtley.83 In 1924 Norman Lindsay had published

Creative Effort, a Nietzsche-influenced book in which he extolled the virtues of elite artists,

who he believed were constantly under attack by the feminine-minded mob, Jews, and lesser

races.84 Fanfrolico was essentially a vehicle for Jack Lindsay’s poetry, accompanied by his

father’s illustrations, and as Stephensen later explained, it was an attempt to materialize the

80 Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs, 20–21. 81 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 31–45. 82 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 45; Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs, 23. 83 Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs, 19–20. 84 Bernard Smith, ‘Lindsay, Norman Alfred (1879–1969)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, 18 vols (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1986); Macainsh, Nietzsche in Australia.

21

vision that Norman Lindsay had put forward in Creative Effort.85 For Stephensen, who came

of age at the time of the First World War, the war was a symptom of the decline of European

civilization. Looking back in 1954, Stephensen recalled, ‘Like others of that generation, I was

disillusioned with the bogus ideals of “Democracy”… which had been plugged in by the

professional propagandists to stir up hatred against the Germans in the First World War.’86

This reflection not just post-war retrospection. Stephensen had written about similar themes in

his introduction to The Antichrist, published in 1928:

‘During the World War the humbug of brotherly love was far too painfully

demonstrated. The spectacle then presented of the snarling embattled Christian and

Democratic nations ceased to be a joke when the stench of ten million corpses filled the

world’s air.’87

Stephensen looked back to Nietzsche’s ‘pagan joyousness’, his ‘simple

“transvaluation” (or reversal) of all Christian values… so terrifically laden with possibilities to

a human re-integration, a keener self-knowledge, and a cleaner morality of no-remorse’ to

reverse the disintegrating effects of ‘modern culture’.88 He thought it fitting that the ‘sunlit…

vitality’ of Australian ideas, coming from those such as Norman Lindsay, Hugh McCrae and

Kenneth Slessor, would now come back to the centre of Empire, to bring about a cultural

revolution, ‘a European, or at least… a British Renascence’. 89 Stephensen’s hoped-for

revolution would not only remake society, but, in the tradition of Nietzsche and Lindsay,

refashion man himself.

After Stephensen met D. H. Lawrence on a summer trip to Paris in 1928-9, he swapped

Lindsay for the English author. The affinities between Lawrence and fascism have been well

noted: as with Nietzsche, Lenin, and Lindsay, Lawrence’s works also featured a striving toward

a new man and a new state of society. 90 Stephensen had previously shown interest in

85 Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs, 7–8. 86 Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs, 21. 87 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Introduction’, The Antichrist of Nietzsche: A New Version in English by P. R. Stephensen with Illustrations by Norman Lindsay, trans P. R. Stephensen (London: The Fanfrolico Press, 1928), 1. 88 Stephensen, ‘Introduction’, The Antichrist of Nietzsche, 4–5. 89 Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs, 21–22. 90 Barbara Mensch, D. H. Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

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Lawrence’s Kangaroo, which was published in 1923.91 Kangaroo dealt with many of the

themes that occupied Stephensen, and would continue to occupy him for the rest of his life: the

relationship between European colonial settlers and the Australian environment; the “spirit of

the place”; the relationship between white Australia and First Nations people; and the warring

European ideologies of the interwar period, including the fictional ‘Diggers’, which Lawrence

based on the Italian Fascists.92 As Lawrence did not want to be associated with the Lindsay

aesthetic of the Fanfrolico Press, Stephensen handed over management to a Sydney journalist,

Brian Penton, and in 1929 established the Mandrake Press to publish works by Lawrence.93

This endeavour did not last long, but managed to publish The Paintings of D. H. Lawrence and

some work by the notorious Aleister Crowley, an anti-establishment eccentric who claimed to

practice “sex magic”.94 Stephensen’s time in Europe was drawing to an end: he had arrived

eight years previously as a Rhodes scholar, and was leaving as a former Communist activist

and a colleague of some of England’s most scandalous counter-cultural figures.

Stephensen received an invitation from Norman Lindsay to return to Australia and

manage an Australian publishing company, The Endeavour Press, and departed England with

his future wife Winifred and her son in September 1932.95 Stephensen now focussed his vision

of culturally-led national renewal on transforming Australian society through fostering great

national literature. Stephensen soon encountered irreconcilable differences with the board of

the Endeavour Press, which was managed by The Bulletin, and struck out on his own. The P.

R. Stephensen Publishing Company was, following his previous efforts, also short-lived. He

attempted to get a national literary company, based in Canberra, off the ground, but that too

never took flight.96 Stephensen declared bankruptcy in 1935.97Although financially destitute,

Stephensen had nevertheless established himself as an important figure in Australian literary

circles. He was vice-president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, had published work by

Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson, Banjo Patterson, and Eleanor Dark, all popular

authors of their time, and begun the long process of editing and publishing a future Australian

91 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 72–73; D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, Corrected Edition (Sydney; Amsterdam; New York: Imprint, 1995). 92 Raymond Southall, ‘Foreword’, in Kangaroo, Corrected Edition (Sydney; Amsterdam; New York: Imprint, 1995), v–xii. 93 Munro, Wild Man of, 73–77; Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs, 31. 94 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 88–93. 95 Stephensen, Kookaburras and Satyrs, 34; Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 111. 96 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 115–49. 97 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 27.

23

classic, Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia.98 Stephensen had left behind the revolutionary activity

of his University days, and was now focussing on cultural nationalism, enmeshing himself in

Australia’s cultural elite in the process.

He had not completely forgotten his revolutionary dream. In 1935 Stephensen came

into contact with his future benefactor, W. J. Miles, who had read the first and only issue of

Stephensen’s Australian Mercury (July 1935) and recognised Stephensen as a capable fellow

anti-British nationalist.99 Stephensen proposed an ‘Australia First Party’ to Miles: its platform

included the reorganisation of Australia into productive provinces, with certain high political

offices only available to Australian-born. It also included the arming of the citizenry against

potential government dictatorship, and the arming of the country for its own defence.100 If

Stephensen had decided to devote his time to stoking the flames of national cultural revolution,

he had not abandoned the idea of actual revolution.

Although Miles is often credited with leading Stephensen from the left to the right,

Stephensen’s life prior to meeting Miles showed many of the core beliefs that would determine

his engagement with fascism after 1936. He was firmly situated, by birth and context, in white

Australia, with its settler-colonial ambiguities. He came of age in the tumultuous period of the

First World War and its aftermath, and by the time Stephensen was attending University, he

was a passionate nationalist who was working on revolution. His time in Europe was steeped

in ideas of European modernist decadence and decline, and a redemptive vision of refashioning

man and society inspired by Nietzsche, the anti-Semitic Norman Lindsay, and D. H. Lawrence.

Stephensen’s meeting with Miles probably did have a significant influence on his politics, but

equally significant was the opportunities it gave him to fight for the causes that he had nurtured

throughout his early life.

98 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 115–49; Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 28. 99 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 162. 100 Munro, 163–64; Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 13.

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The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay towards National Self Respect

The first of these was the publication of The Foundations of Culture in Australia: an

Essay towards National Self Respect.101 It was the first instalment of Foundations, which had

appeared as an editorial in the sole issue of the Australian Mercury, that had so impressed

Miles.102 Foundations was Stephensen’s contribution to a debate about Australia’s capacity to

produce great literature that had appeared in Melbourne’s Age newspaper in February 1935:

Stephensen was particularly incensed by the English-born Professor G. H. Cowling’s assertion

that Australia was simply too young, and not interesting enough, to produce great novelists.103

Stephensen argued that Australia, by nurturing a distinct culture that expressed the national

spirit, would become “A New Britannia in Another World!”, a bastion of ‘white civilisation,

of white culture, of white traditions’ that outlived the decline of Europe.104 It would be a nation

built upon, and defined by, the ‘Spirit of the Place’, which transformed the mostly British, and

entirely European, colonisers into ‘a new variety of the human species’.105 Stephensen’s belief

in white Australia did not prevent him from acknowledging the brutal process of colonisation:

‘The Aboriginal human beings of the continent murdered, shot, poisoned; or enslaved,

a human sacrifice to sheep, brutally exploited, demoralized, the women raped, the

children starved or taught about God in missions – in all this can we take any pride?106

It was clear, at the same time, that this process of extermination had cleared the way

for white Australia to spread over the continent ‘without the extermination or subjugation of

other races’.107 The Australia that Stephensen envisioned in Foundations was clearly the white

Australia in which Stephensen grew up. It was an Australia defined in terms of race and based

on assumptions about European racial, and therefore cultural and industrial, superiority, and

the inevitable extinction of the continent’s original inhabitants. In a pattern that would define

101 Stephensen, The Foundations of Culture in Australia. 102 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 162. 103 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 151–55; Vance Palmer, ‘The Future of Australian Literature’, Age, 9 February 1935; Professor G. H. Cowling, ‘The Future of Australian Literature’, Age, 16 February 1935. 104 Stephensen, The Foundations of Culture in Australia, 189, 90. Stephensen was quoting the poet William Charles Wentworth. 105 Stephensen, 11 – 14. 106 Stephensen, 118. 107 Stephensen, The Foundations of Culture in Australia, 189–90.

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the next six years, in Foundations Stephensen had skilfully combined the White Australia

Policy with his own literary nationalism.

Historians have noted the affinities between fascism and the racial nationalist vision

that Stephensen expressed in Foundations, in particular the similarities between ‘Race and

Place’ and the Nazis’ Blut und Erde (blood and soil).108 There were also significant differences.

One of these was the place of violence. Violence was a distinguishing feature of European

fascism. The First World War, experienced both in the trenches by men such as Hitler and

Mussolini and by civilians who had experienced the unprecedented brutality of total war,

influenced the forms, ideas, and aesthetics of Italian Fascism and German Nazism.109 The

European Imperialist and colonial tradition also provided fascist regimes a precedent for

connecting violence with racial superiority and expansionist war.110 Influenced by the radical

left of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century who advocated for violent revolution,

violence became an instrumental extra-parliamentary tactic for fascist revolutionaries, and

paramilitaries a feature of fascist movements.111 Violence also held an aesthetic and theoretical

value for European fascists. Violence represented action over thought; primitive, instinctual

man over the Enlightenment vision of man as a rational being. Expressed in the work of the

Futurists, fascist violence was redemptive, transformative, performed rather than considered;

an expression and exercise of a kind of power that transcended democratic, liberal values and

politics.112

Although Stephensen shared the European fascists’ desire for revolution and disdain

for liberal democratic morality, he had a very different attitude towards violence, due to its

connection with the British domination of Australia. In his early articles for The Publicist,

108 Jayne Regan, ‘“Racy of the Soil”: Ian Mudie, Right-Wing Nationalism, and the South Australian Soil Erosion Crisis’, Environment and History, 2018, 1; Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 59. 109 Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology’, 359; Mosse, The Fascist Revolution, xvi; Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York; London: The New Press, 2003), 16–17; Federico Finchelstein, ‘On Fascist Ideology’, 320–21; Enzo Traverso, ‘Interpreting Fascism: Mosse, Sternhell and Gentile in Comparative Perspective’, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 15, no. 3 (September 2008), 306–10. 110 Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, 16–19. 111 Roth, ‘The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo’, 30–45; Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology’, 347–48; Dylan Riley, ‘Enigmas of Fascism’, New Left Review, no. 30 (2004), 138. 112 Roth, ‘The Roots of Italian Fascism: Sorel and Sorelismo’, 30–45; Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology’, 359, 370; Riley, ‘Enigmas of Fascism’, 138–41; Finchelstein, ‘On Fascist Ideology’, 320–31; Federico Finchelstein, ‘From Holocaust Trauma to the Dirty War’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 41, no. 3 (2015), 49; Aristotle Kallis, ‘Transnational Fascism: The Fascist New Order, Violence, and Creative Destruction’, 41.

26

appearing in the same year as Foundations, Stephensen emphasised the destruction wrought

on the land and animals by colonisation through the logging of trees, destruction of ‘native

birds, bees, and flowers’, and replacement of ‘gentle marsupials’ with ‘noxious European

nibblers’.113 The First World War meant the exploitation of Australia by Britain, who had used

Australian men as fodder for their own cause.114 Stephensen, situated in a settler colonial

context, had a very different relationship to war, Empire, and colonisation than Hitler and

Mussolini. In Stephensen’s estimation, violence had not benefited the nation; it had despoiled

and damaged its people and environment. Stephensen criticised the violence of Mussolini,

Hitler, and the New Guard in Foundations, and in the early years of The Publicist. Hitler and

Mussolini, he wrote, were ‘war-neurotic and fight-mad’, and Australian fascists would ‘get the

surprise… of their life if they ever [tried] seriously to impose a military, or semi-military,

regimentation upon Australian civil life.’115 In such statements, Stephensen rejected both the

instrumental and aesthetic violence of fascist militarism.

Such remarks contribute to the impression that Foundations was ‘probably

[Stephensen’s] final public statement as a liberal.’116 As we have seen, the picture was more

complex. Stephensen certainly retained the anti-fascist rhetoric that was in line with his

Communist past, condemning the violence that was integral to Hitler and Mussolini’s

movements. At the same time, he shared their ultra-nationalist vision, their desire for

revolution, and their distaste for modern liberal democracy. In particular he shared Hitler’s

notion of the nation as a naturally-occurring, racially-defined entity that was inherently

connected with place. These beliefs were not confined to Stephensen and European fascism,

but arose from European ideological traditions that were still powerful components of

European and Australian culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Nor were they

confined to the political right: this chapter has pointed out the commonalities between the

supposedly divergent extreme left and extreme right. Stephensen’s journey from left to right is

therefore not so far, nor so straightforward, as this dichotomy suggests. It was nevertheless

113 P. R. Stephensen, ‘The Bunyip Critic: Experiments in Australianity (II.)’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, August 1936, 3; P. R. Stephensen, ‘The Bunyip Critic: Experiments in Australianity (IV)’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, October 1936. 114 P. R. Stephensen, ‘The Bunyip Critic: Experiments in Australianity’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, July 1936. 115 P. R. Stephensen, ‘The Bunyip Critic: Experiments in Australianity (VI)’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 January 1937, 3; Stephensen, The Foundations of Culture in Australia, 132. 116 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 28. Muirden is referring to section two of Foundations, written before Stephensen’s contact with Miles.

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Nazi Germany to which Stephensen turned in the coming years, as he took up the crusade of

defending white Australia against a perceived Jewish-Communist conspiracy.

The Publicist: the paper loyal to Australia First

The first edition of The Publicist appeared in July 1936. The paper was printed in black

and white, with a yellow cover that advertised the issue’s contents. After the fourth issue, in

October 1936, the title The Publicist: the paper loyal to Australia First was accompanied by a

small illustration of a kookaburra holding a snake in its talons, set within an inverted triangular

border. The kookaburra, which Miles was fond of adopting as his numerous pseudonyms, was

clearly an avatar for Australia.117 The snake was less clearly defined, although given the

paper’s numerous targets of vitriol, perhaps this was fitting. Stephensen and Miles were the

paper’s main contributors. Stephensen was the far superior writer, and the complicated,

contradictory, and frequently confusing message of The Publicist can be credited mostly to

Miles, although Stephensen’s tendency towards provocation, hyperbole, and, sometimes,

disingenuity, also contributed. Despite this opacity, the initial issues of The Publicist carried

on the message of Foundations, encouraging Australians to remove the yolk of Empire by

realising their own distinct sense of nationhood.118

Over the course of the decade, Miles and Stephensen steered The Publicist in the

direction of German National Socialism, following what they regarded as the shining example

of national resurgence embodied by Hitler and Nazi Germany.119 Stephensen and Miles were

not alone in looking favourably upon developments in Germany under Hitler. To many

Australian observers, including the press and politicians, Nazi Germany was a success.

Compared to the ongoing issue of high unemployment in depression-era Australia, Germany

had apparently succeeded in reversing their flagging post-war economy. A concerted

propaganda effort, particularly surrounding the Berlin Olympics in 1936, had propagated the

image of a patriotic, clean, and orderly Germany. 120 Many Australian observers did not

117 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany, 63. 118 Parro, ‘“Experiments in Australianity”’. 119 Parro, ‘“Experiments in Australianity”’. 120 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 21–52; Gary Gumpl and Richard H. Kleinig, The Hitler Club : The Rise and Fall of Australia’s No. 1 Nazi (Melbourne: Brolga Publishing, 2007), 30–35.

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perceive the rapid dismantling of the restrictions imposed under the Treaty of Versailles,

including re-armament, as a threat to peace; some even considered these efforts a legitimate

redress for unjust treatment.121 Hitler’s anti-Communism found many supporters.122 Australian

nationalists in particular looked to Nazi Germany as an example of national resurgence that

was worth emulating.123

The Publicist’s pro-Nazi position came through in a number of ways. Most blatant was

the publication of lengthy English translations from three speeches by Hitler, which appeared

across ten issues of The Publicist between May 1937 and September 1939.124 These transcripts

were accompanied by favourable comments from Miles, who, boasting that The Publicist was

the only Australian newspaper to publish entire Hitler speeches, proclaimed: ‘… Hitler has our

high regard, and so we write, Hail!’.125 The Publicist also favourably reviewed books of Nazi

propaganda, and defended Hitler against criticism, such as Professor Stephen Roberts’ The

House that Hitler Built.126 Much of The Publicist’s pro-Hitler material, beyond the opinion

pieces of Publicist writers and contributors, was publicly available, but The Publicist did have

connections to Nazi organisations in Australia. Miles was in contact with Melanie O’Loughlin,

the Western Australian representative of The Link, an organisation founded in Britain in 1937

to promote Anglo-German friendship, and with Arnold von Skerst, The Link’s Australian

representative and the editor of the Nazi-funded Die Brücke newspaper, tasked with the role of

121 Andrew G Bonnell, ‘Stephen Roberts and the Nazi Threat, 1938 - 39’, in National Socialism in Oceania: A Critical Evaluation of Its Effect and Aftermath, ed. Emily Turner-Graham and Christine Winter, vol. 4, Germanica Pacifica (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), 185–99. 122 Andrew Moore, ‘Discredited Fascism: The New Guard after 1932*’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 57, no. 2 (June 2011): 191. 123 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, xi–xii. 124 ‘Excerpt from Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag, January 30 1937’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 May 1937; ‘Hail, Hitler! A Speech to the Reichstag: First Instalment’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 June 1938; ‘Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag: 20th February, 1938: Second Instalment’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 July 1938; ‘Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag: 20th February, 1938: Third Instalment’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 August 1938; ‘Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag: 20th February, 1938: Fourth and Final Instalment’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 September 1938; ‘Hitler’s Speech of 30th January, 1939 (First Instalment)’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 May 1939; ‘Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag of 30th January, 1939 (Second Instalment)’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 June 1939; ‘Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag of 30th January, 1939. (Third Instalment)’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 July 1939; ‘Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag of 30th January, 1939. (Fourth Instalment)’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 August 1939; ‘Hitler’s Speech to the Reichstag of 30th January, 1939. (Fifth and Final Instalment)’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 September 1939. 125 W. J. Miles, ‘Hail, Hitler! A Speech to the Reichstag: First Instalment’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 June 1938. 126 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 27–37.

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fostering the Nazi version of Deutschtum for Germans living in Australia.127 Stephensen

himself received material from the German Consulate-General to advocate for Australian-

German trade relations in an anonymous pamphlet, Trade Without Money!, that appeared in

1935. Stephensen does not appear to have had any significant direct relationships with Nazi

Party officials, but as a Publicist author, was probably closer to Nazi propaganda efforts than

a member of the public, and surrounded by far-Right literature: The Publicist bookshop sold

copies of the notorious and influential anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,

as well as the Italian Fascist paper Italo-Australian and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.128 Once again,

Stephensen had surrounded himself with ideas of political revolution and social transformation,

as he had a decade before in Europe.

Now, as the 1930s wore on, these ideas became focussed on the fascist movement that

seemed so successful in Europe, and in Germany in particular. By 1940, Stephensen had

abandoned his former condemnation of fascism, and was openly advocating for authoritarian

rule under an Australian version of Hitler or Mussolini.129 Only such a leader, he believed,

could save Australia from the grip of British Imperialism.130 Only British Imperialism was no

longer, in Stephensen’s estimation, the primary threat facing the nation. By 1940 Stephensen

had come to believe that an international Jewish conspiracy was working to destroy not only

Australia and other white nations, but nationalism across the globe. British Imperialism, as well

as Communism, were only tools at the hands of this conspiracy. Miles had introduced this idea

to The Publicist years before, when he referred to Hitler’s claim of a threat posed to European

civilisation ‘by the Jewish international Bolshevics in Moscow’. 131 It was this Jewish

Communist conspiracy that Stephensen now believed was the primary threat to Australia.

This conspiracy theory, as with other major strands of Stephensen’s thinking, belonged

to an ideological tradition that was particularly pronounced at the turn of the century.

127 John Perkins, ‘The Swastika Down Under: Nazi Activities in Australia, 1933-39’, Journal of Contemporary History 26, no. 1 (1991); Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 29–37, 117–22; Emily Turner-Graham, ‘Never Forget That You Are a German’: Die Brücke, ‘Deutschtum’ and National Socialism in Interwar Australia, Germanica Pacifica 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2011). 128 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 36; Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 54. 09/12/2021 14:25:00129 P. R. Stephensen, ‘The Bunyip Critic - Experiments in Australianity: Facing the Facts’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 July 1940, 5. 130 Parro, ‘“Experiments in Australianity”’, 22–35. 131 John Benauster [W. J. Miles], ‘The Coronation: Monarchy and Empire’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 May 1937, 6.

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Stephensen had encountered anti-Semitism throughout his life, from his grandfather, the

Australian Labor movement, and in the work of Lawrence and Lindsay.132 Anti-Semitism has

had a long history in Europe, and emerged in different forms in response to specific crises in

specific contexts: Jews were blamed for the Black Plague, the French Revolution, the

revolutions of 1848, and the Great War, for example.133 In the early twentieth century, this

belief in a Jewish conspiracy became intertwined with perceived threats to nationalism across

Europe. In the first decade the infamous and hugely influential Protocols of the Elders of Zion

appeared in Russia. Largely a forgery of an earlier piece of French political satire, this

document was presented as proof of a Jewish plot to take over the world. The tools of this

conspiracy supposedly included the promotion of liberalism and democracy, and using a

monopoly on press and culture to destroy nationalism.134 Stephensen read The Protocols

sometime around 1928 – 1929. 135 The threat of Communism, particularly following the

Russian Revolution, was incorporated into this conspiracy, and ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ (the notion

that Jews were behind Communism) became a perceived threat to not only nationalism, but to

the entire European/Western/Christian world.136

Hitler and the Nazi party adopted a racial version of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth as a

core component of their ideology and propaganda. This ideology was a potent mix of

conspiratorial thinking, in which unsubstantiated and unfalsifiable threats assume apocalyptic

proportions of good versus evil, alongside racial nationalism and anti-Semitism.137 Hitler

styled himself as the defender of Europe against the Judeo-Bolshevism that threatened its very

existence. ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ became a kind of shorthand for a shared nationalist worldview,

and Germany under Hitler an example of national resurgence.138 Stephensen was just such a

nationalist, and ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ became a core part of his worldview.

132 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 77. 133 Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitic Myths: A Historical and Contemporary Anthology (Bloomington; Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 138. 134 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide. 135 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 76–77. 136 Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Belknap Press, 2018). 137 Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, Second (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2013); Herf, ‘The “Jewish War”’. 138 Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe, 121–22.

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Stephensen’s belief in white Australia provided an easy structure in which the Judeo-

Bolshevik conspiracy theory could sit. The place of Jews in White Australia, and the measure

of anti-Semitism inherent in white Australian ideology, has generated debate amongst

historians. There is little doubt that Jews were discriminated against on the grounds of the

White Australia Policy: in the 1930s, as applications from European Jews seeking refuge in

Australia rose dramatically, the Government sought to place limits on Jewish immigration

while trying to encourage more immigrants from Central and Northern Europe. But whether

this was a result of a specific hatred of Jews, or rather an application of Australian xenophobia

that was extended to, for example, southern Europeans, is more difficult to establish.139 Stratton

has argued that the difficulty in ascertaining Australian attitudes towards the Jews is due to the

fact that Jewishness confounded the national and racial frameworks upon which the White

Australia Policy was predicated.140

This was not an ambiguous issue for Stephensen. Stephensen saw the Jews as a separate

biological race who could not be assimilated into, nor included in, White Australia. In 1939 –

1940, the anti-Semitic authors of The Publicist, including Stephensen, were incensed by efforts

to establish a settlement for Jewish refugees in the Kimberley region of northern Australia.141

Led by Dr. Isaac Steinberg, a representative of the London-based Freeland League for Jewish

Refugees, the proposed settlement was meant to accommodate up to 10,000 refugees fleeing

from Hitler’s anti-Semitic crusade in Europe.142 In the pages of The Publicist, as well as in an

article he contributed to the March 1940 Australian Quarterly entitled ‘A Reasoned Case

Against Semitism’, Stephensen objected to the scheme on the grounds that it contravened the

founding principle of Australian nationhood, the White Australia Policy, which aimed at

139 Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera; Geoffrey Sherington, Australia’s Immigrants 1788 - 1978, The Australian Experience 1 (North Sydney, NSW: George Allen & Unwin, 1980); Michael Roe, Australia, Britain, and Migration, 1915 - 1940: A Study of Desperate Hopes, Studies in Australian History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Paul R. Bartrop, Australia and the Holocaust 1933 - 45 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1994); Paul R. Bartrop, ‘Indifference and Inconvenience: Jewish Refugees and Australia, 1933 - 45’, in False Havens: The British Empire and the Holocaust (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 1995); Hilary L. Rubinstein, ‘Manifestations of Literary and Cultural Anti-Semitism in Australia, 1856 - 1946 (Part 1)’, Melbourne Chronicle 5, no. 39 (December 1983); Jon Stratton, ‘The Colour of Jews: Jews, Race, and the White Australian Policy’, in Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Milton Shain (Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 140 Stratton, ‘The Colour of Jews’. 141 Parro, ‘“Experiments in Australianity”’, 36–49. 142 Leon Gettler, An Unpromised Land (South Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1993).

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preserving peace through racial homogeneity. 143 For Stephensen, white Australia did not

include the Jews.

Stephensen’s opposition to a Jewish settlement in Australia was rooted in more than

the racial anti-Semitism easily contained within the White Australia Policy. Stephensen

specifically subscribed to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Hitler had propagated in

speeches, and in Mein Kampf, since Hitler joined the Nazi party in 1920: both Hitler and

Stephensen believed that the Jews were an inferior race, driven by their racial character to co-

ordinate amongst themselves in an effort to achieve world domination over the superior white

races through invisible means, including control of the press and racial degeneration through

interbreeding, or ‘miscegenation’. 144 Examples of Stephensen’s belief in this conspiracy

abound in the years before his internment. In August 1939 he warned a fellow-member of the

Federation of Australian Writers that the Federation was being used by the Communist Jewish

conspiracy to ‘denationalise’ Australia. 145 In ‘A Reasoned Case Against Semitism’,

Stephensen argued that the Jews, by instinct, organised together to advance their own interests

above the communities in which they were situated, and had therefore invited anti-Semitism

upon themselves wherever it was found.146 This included in Germany, where Hitler’s (now

infamous) prophecy, that if the Jews succeeded in plunging Europe into another war the

consequence would be the “removal” of Jews from Europe, had come true; and now those

Jewish refugees were threatening to likewise destroy the nations to which they had fled,

including Australia.147 In the same year, Stephensen warned Evatt, who had recently been

elected as a Labor candidate to the House of Representatives, about ‘Jewish Influence’. Largely

a summary of the argument he had made in The Australian Quarterly Stephensen also noted

that the press, ‘which depends to a considerable extent on Jewish advertising’, would not

publish articles critical of the Jews. He warned that Nationalism in Australia was under threat

from “internationalism”, spread by ‘League of Nations, Comintern, and similar trans-national

special interests.’ Who precisely these ‘trans-national interests’ were, in the context of

Stephensen’s views, is clear. Even when holding back his full anti-Semitic beliefs from Evatt,

143 Rex Williams [P. R. Stephensen], ‘Jews and the Kimberleys’, The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, 1 May 1940; P. R. Stephensen, ‘A Reasoned Case against Semitism’, The Australian Quarterly 12, no. 1 (March 1940): 52–62. 144 Perry and Schweitzer, Antisemitic Myths, 161–73. 145 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Davidson Re Communist and Jewish Conspiracy and the FAW’, 2 August 1939, ML MSS 1284: 41, SLNSW. 146 Stephensen, ‘A Reasoned Case against Semitism’, 52–62. 147 Stephensen, 55.

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the notion of a trans-national Jewish conspiracy that worked to suppress criticism in the

Australia press, and deliberately spread the ‘vague, sentimental, and deliberately misleading

propaganda of “internationalism”, was an important foundation for Stephensen’s politics. 148

In 1941 Stephensen complained to a puzzled Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting

Corporation (ABC). He charged that the ABC’s booklet “Design in Everyday Things” was a

piece of internationalist propaganda in line with the plan of Zionist Jews to destroy the British

Empire ‘from within’ through ‘weakening the basis of nationalism in all the “Gentile” nations.’

Stephensen claimed that such ‘cabbalistic propaganda’ had already ‘brought down the Russian

Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, and… the French Republic’.149 In

1939 – 1940, defending Australia against a supposed international Jewish conspiracy became

one of Stephensen’s main causes.

The full extent of Stephensen’s belief in this anti-Semitic conspiracy was evident in his

private correspondence with other anti-Semites. One of these was the architect and illustrator

of some renown, Hardy Wilson, who was also the author of anti-Semitic books about race,

climate, and identity. 150 From April 1940 Miles was required to subject The Publicist to the

censorship process, and anti-Semitic content in The Publicist decreased. 151 Stephensen

complained to Wilson that Jews at the Censor were responsible. ‘This is outrageous’, he

commented, ‘but the majority of Australians support Jews against Gentiles. What fools!’ He

shared Wilson’s fear that ‘thousands of Jews’ would be ‘dumped’ in Australia after the war,

but consoled Wilson with the thought that it may in the end have some positive effect:

I can’t look at [Jews] as “fertiliser”, but only as noxious irritants who cause social dis-

ease. In attempting to get rid of them, a nation often has to make itself healthy: to that

extent, the irritation which they cause has beneficial after-effects. It is not the Jew, but

148 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Evatt 22 August 1940’, 22 August 1940, ML MSS 1284: 41, SLNSW. 149 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to ABC Chairman Re Design in Everyday Things, Jewish Propaganda’, 16 May 1941, ML MSS 1284: 41, SLNSW. 150 Caroline Simpson, ‘WILLIAM HARDY WILSON: Architect, Author, Artist and Gardener (1881-1955)’, Australian Garden History 11, no. 3 (1999): 4–9; Richard E. Apperly, ‘Wilson, William Hardy (1881–1955)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, n.d.), accessed 28 May 2020; Deborah van der Plaat, ‘An Oriental Continent: Climatic Determinism, Race and Identity in the Interwar Writings of Australian Architect William Hardy Wilson (1881–1955)’, Fabrications 28, no. 1 (2 January 2018). 151 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 200–201.

34

the Creative Artist, who is a “fertiliser”. The Creative Artist produces the anti-toxin to

remove the Jew Poison from the Body Politic.152

Stephensen’s references to “fertilizer” and creativity echoed Wilson’s own language,

which was also Hitler’s. So was much of Stephensen’s anti-Semitism, including his belief in

Jewish control of the press, an ongoing battle between Jews and Aryans, and the inherent

danger of a Jewish presence within a nation.153

The vague suggestion of anti-Semitic violence was also characteristic of Stephensen’s

anti-Semitism. As we have seen in Stephensen’s proposal to Miles in 1935 about the formation

of an ‘Australia First Movement’, Stephensen entertained the notion of violence in defence of

the nation, even as he condemned fascist violence. He maintained a willingness to use violence

against the Communist threat to Australia, writing to a correspondent, Flexmore Hudson in

1941 that although he favoured arguing with ‘Leftists’, ‘if they looked like attempting to put

into effect their policy of murder as a political weapon… I would have to meet them on the

same ground’.154 Stephensen extended the same vague threat of violence to Jews. Despite his

objections that ‘Antisemitism’ did not necessarily mean ‘massacres’ or ‘ill-treatment’,

Stephensen warned that ‘when Jews gain too many advantages for themselves… they

invariably find (and, surely, should expect to find!) that the majority of non-Jews will resent,

and eventually will curb [these] privileges’.155 He did not specify what form this action might

take. In the course of a single article, Stephensen argued that there was no solution to the

‘Jewish Problem… while Jews remain Jews’; that ‘the remedy is that the Jewish Race would

abolish itself, by being absorbed in the common stream of mankind’; but that ‘they will not do

it. They will not become absorbed into the general stream of Australian life. They will follow

their instinct, and remain Apart.’156 How, then, was the Jewish race to be abolished? By 1940,

the idea of physical annihilation was inherent in Stephensen’s attitudes towards the Jews.

152 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson Re Copy of Eucalyptus’, 23 July 1941, ML MSS 1284: 43, SLNSW. 153 Perry and Schweitzer, Antisemitic Myths, 171–72. 154 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Hudson Re Rightist Nationalism’, 21 July 1941, 1, ML MSS 1284: 42, SLNSW. 155 Stephensen, ‘A Reasoned Case against Semitism’, 58, 61. 156 Stephensen, 58, 61–62.

35

Stephensen did undergo a transformation as he and Miles embarked upon The

Publicist’s propaganda mission. The ideas which Stephensen had so long nursed, about the

national regeneration of a homogenous white Australia, were now firmly attached to

Stephensen’s public support for Hitler and the war that Hitler had declared against the Jews.

Deep resonances between Stephensen’s racial nationalist vision and that of Hitler enabled

Stephensen to identify his cause with Nazi Germany’s, and to adopt Hitler’s anti-Semitic

crusade. Ironically, Stephensen’s anxiety about Jewish influence in Australia was heightened

by the prospect of Jewish refugees fleeing that crusade in Europe.

The Australia First Movement

Stephensen believed the time had come for action over words, and in October 1941, he

became the President of the Australia First Movement (AFM).157 Stephensen and Miles had

been agitating for the formation of an Australia First party after the war in the pages of The

Publicist since the outbreak of war in September 1939.158 By 1941, with Miles seriously ill and

two other ex-Communists, the Melbourne organiser Leslie Cahill and the pro-Japan Adela

Walsh, both instigating moves for their own Australia First parties, Stephensen took the lead

in the new movement. AFM activities consisted of public meetings, at which Stephensen,

Walsh, and Cahill spoke, executive meetings, and speakers’ classes.159 These public meetings

were never attended by more than a few hundred people, but attendees included reporters from

Military Police Intelligence and the Commonwealth Investigation Branch.160 The final AFM

meeting, on 19 February at Adyar Hall in Sydney, was attended by more than a hundred

opponents, and descended into violence.161 With the Movement struggling to attract members,

Cahill and Walsh already having left, and the New South Wales Commissioner of Police

William J. McKay ordering (or requesting, according to Muirden’s account) Stephensen to

cancel meetings, Stephensen suspended the Movement in early March.162

157 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 197–211. 158 Munro, 199–201. 159 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 101. 160 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 212. 161 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 66. 162 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 101–9; Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 215–19; Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 64–71.

36

A group in Perth, including The Link’s representative Melanie O’Loughlin and

Laurence Frederick Bullock, a veteran of Gallipoli, had meanwhile formed their own Australia

First group, as a branch of the Sydney group led by Stephensen. The Sydney AFM appeared

little concerned with the Perth group, having had some contact with them but being unaware

of the plans that would lead to their arrest.163 The Perth group was infiltrated by a paid police

agent, Frederick James Thomas, who had been previously used in campaigns against the

Communists. Thomas procured evidence that the Perth AFM were planning to assassinate

Australian politicians and sabotage infrastructure to assist a Japanese invasion, which they

envisaged would turn over the Government to the AFM. On 9 March members of the Perth

AFM were arrested, and news of the arrests, including mention of Stephensen as the leader of

the Movement, was telegrammed to the army’s Eastern Command headquarters in Sydney.

Police acting on the orders of Military Intelligence arrested Stephensen before dawn on 10

March 1942.164

Internment Despite the frustration of a failing political movement and the financial difficulties facing The

Publicist after Miles’ death in January 1942, Stephensen went into internment at the height of

his ‘Australian National Socialist’ activism. He had behind him six years of sponsored activism

through The Publicist, and had finally attempted the Australia First Movement that he had

proposed to Miles in 1935. Now, he was to be confined to various internment camps around

the country for over three years. These years would be integral to determining Stephensen’s

life after 1945. They would embitter him to the Australian public and politicians, confirm his

belief in the Jewish-Communist conspiracy that he blamed for his internment, estrange him

from most other members of the AFM, and bring him closer to actors who shared his extreme

views.

Stephensen was initially interned at Liverpool, on the western outskirts of Sydney, with

fifteen other AFM members and associates (see table below): his brother Eric, Gordon Rice,

163 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 117–36. 164 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 128–41; Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 77–87; Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 223.

37

Keith Bath, Valentine and Clarence Crowley, Edward Masey, Cecil W. Salier, Sydney Hooper,

Edmund Arnold, AFM treasurer Walter Tinker-Giles, Harley Matthews, Martin Watts, John

Kirtley, Trooper Downe, and former AFM executive member Leslie Cahill.165 Initially the

AFM internees were quarantined, but joined the rest of the internee population, who were

mostly Italian and German civilians deemed “enemy aliens”, after a month. The AFM internees

roomed together at ‘Australia House’, where they began holding nightly talks from 11 March,

the night after their arrival, to 4 June.166 The British Union of Fascists internees had enjoyed a

similar situation: housed together and given the freedom to organise their own political

meetings and debates, many members’ sense of camaraderie and devotion to the cause was

strengthened.167

Arrest and release dates for AFM internees

AFM internees,

arrested between

10 – 12 March

1942

Released after

appeal, 22

August 1942

Released after

Evatt’s review,

September –

October 1942

Released 6

February 1944

Release 17

August

1945

P. R. Stephensen

Eric Stephensen

Gordon Rice

Keith Bath

Valentine

Crowley

Clarence Crowley

Edward Masey

Cecil W. Salier

Sydney Hooper

Edmund Arnold,

Martin Watts

Walter Tinker-

Giles

Clarence

Crowley

Keith Bath

Cecil W. Salier

Eric Stephensen

Trooper Downe

Harley Matthews

Sydney Hooper

Edmund Arnold

Val Crowley

Edward Masey

Leslie Cahill

John Kirtley

P. R.

Stephensen

165 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 104–5; Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 147. 166 Muirden, 116–18; Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 224. 167 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism after 1945 (New York and London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 15–20.

38

Walter Tinker-

Giles

Harley Matthews

Martin Watts

John Kirtley

Trooper Downe

Leslie Cahill

This was not the case for most of the AFM group. Relationships between the AFM

internees deteriorated at Liverpool. Two major groupings formed, with Stephensen and his

brother Eric included in neither, but sticking together themselves.168 When another AFM

member, Thomas Potts Graham, arrived, eight of the other internees petitioned for his removal.

Stephensen did not join them. 169 Graham’s anti-Semitic worldview shared much with

Stephensen’s: in 1941 – 1942 Graham conducted his own pamphlet campaign in Sydney,

distributing pamphlets which he had written warning Australians about ‘the Jew, who is the

curse of all mankind’, and, in the wake of Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbour, arguing that

military co-operation with America was part of a Jewish plan of world domination.170 This

campaign led to his arrest in the late hours of 9 February 1942 at his apartment in Leonard’s

Bay, Sydney, and it was only after completing six months of hard labour that Graham was

released to internment at Liverpool.171 While Stephensen was growing apart from the other

AFM internees, post-war correspondence between Stephensen and Graham, which will be

examined in later chapters, indicates that internment brought these like-minded actors together.

Stephensen was further alienated from his fellow AFM internees by the appeals

process, and other internees’ release. Under Security Regulation 26A, the internees’ only

168 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 165. 169 Winter, 166. 170 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 334; Thomas Graham, ‘Gentiles Awake!’, July 1941, NAA: A472, W5932 (Distributed under the pseudonym ’T. Brown’); Thomas Graham, ‘Australians Awake! Get Ready! Beware! The Greatest Betrayal of All Times’, n.d., NAA: A472, W5932. 171 George A. Watson, ‘National Security Act 1939-1940: Arrest of Thomas Potts Graham Under Section 13 (2)’, 12 February 1942, NAA: A472, W5932; (Sgd) Gen S Knowles, ‘Memo for The Crown Solicitor Re Thomas Graham Internment’, 29 July 1942, NAA: A472, W5932; George A. Watson, ‘Memo from the Crown Solicitor Confirming Graham’s Internment’, 14 August 1942, NAA: A472, W5932; ‘Prisoner of War/Internee: Graham, Thomas Potts; Date of Birth - 17 October 1906; Nationality- Australian’, 1842 – 1944, NAA: MP1103/1, N1729.

39

avenue for appeal was through a special tribunal. Many internees withdrew their appeals when

they learned the nature of the process, and Stephensen applied for a writ of habeas corpus to

the New South Wales Supreme Court in July. Stephensen’s application was denied.172 As a

result of the appeals before the tribunal, five internees were released on 22 August 1942, on

the condition that they not associate with anyone from the Australia First group.173 In October,

Attorney-General Evatt returned from overseas and ordered a review of the AFM internments.

Consequently, eight more internees were released in September – October.174 By 19 October,

only Stephensen, Cahill, and Kirtley remained in internment, and after February 1944,

Stephensen was the sole internee.175 Stephensen felt persecuted by the appeals process and

deserted by his fellow internees. In November 1945, only months after his release from Tatura,

he would write to a fellow ex-internee, Sydney Hooper, who had been freed after Evatt’s

review, that all sixteen of them should have refused ‘the secret tribunal’ and stuck together, but

that Evatt’s tactics had divided them into ‘eight sheep and eight goats’, with Stephensen being

‘the principal “goat” (scapegoat)’.176 Stephensen’s continued detention, statements that Evatt

made to Parliament, and the tribunal’s attitude towards Stephensen no doubt enforced

Stephensen’s feelings of persecution.177

In mid-September 1942, Stephensen, along with Cahill and Kirtley, was transferred to

Loveday internment camp in South Australia. Stephensen was in the “mixed” compound, camp

number 14, which had a population of about 1,000, who were mostly Italian and German

civilians but also European refugees, including Jews.178

Reports from Loveday indicate that the months Stephensen had spent at Liverpool had

done nothing to change his worldview. Stephensen demonstrated his willingness to side with

Germany and Japan over Australia when he suggested to a meeting of Loveday internees that

Germany and Japan, who both held Australian POWs, could be approached to put pressure on

the Australian government to treat its domestic internees better. His sympathies were firmly

172 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 123. 173 Muirden, 120. 174 Muirden, 125–26. 175 Muirden, 126. 176 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Hooper Re Being Right and Starting Again’, 13 November 1945, 1–2, ML MSS 1284: 112, SLNSW. 177 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 121–26; Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 235–36. 178 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 236.

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with the Axis powers: he expressed hope in a Japanese invasion, and for Australia’s deliverance

from Britain and America by Germany and Italy. He tried to replace the camp leader, Alex

Graf, with a Nazi leader. He was criticised for associating with fascists, including the British

fascist Mortimer Alexander. He learnt German and, like Mosley, read Faust in the original. He

complained about being interned with Jews and Communists, who apparently harassed him

with no provocation, and asked to be transferred, perhaps to a Nazi camp. 179 It seemed that

internment had done little to alter Stephensen’s support for Nazi Germany, his affinity for

fascism, or his enmity towards Communists and Jews.

At Loveday Stephensen continued to associate with like-minded actors. As will be

discussed in the following chapters, these actors became important contacts for Stephensen

after his release. One of these contacts was the lawyer, author, and Odinist Alexander Rud

Mills. Mills stands next to Stephensen as one of Australia’s most significant interwar fascists.

In the 1930s, Mills travelled throughout Europe, meeting leaders of the British fascist

movement Arnold Leese, A. K. Chesterton, and Oswald Mosley, as well as Hitler at the ‘Brown

House’, Nazi H. Q. in 1932.180 This was the year before Hitler assumed power as Chancellor.

In a series of books throughout the 1930s, under the pseudonym ‘Tasman Forth’, Mills set out

his beliefs on ‘Odinism’. He also convened various Odinist organisations, including the

Anglecyn Church of Odin and the Odinist Society, with members meeting around Melbourne

and in the Dandenong mountains to perform ceremonies.181 It was Mills’ particular racial

mysticism that contributed to his influence: for several decades from the 1960s, Alex and Else

Christensen used Mills as inspiration for their esoteric Nazi movement. 182 Mills was arrested

and interned months after Stephensen and most of the other AFM internees, in May 1942, and

released from Loveday in December.183

Stephensen also made the acquaintance of the Thiele brothers at Loveday. Reginald

Hartley Thiele and his younger brother Cecil Murray were farmers from Loxton, South

179 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 127; Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 173–74; Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 238. 180 For a brief outline of Mills’ activities see: Peter Henderson, ‘Frank Browne and the Neo-Nazis’, Labour History 89 (November 2005), 77; For a more detailed outline, including Mills’ relationship with Stephensen and the AFM, see: Bird, Nazi Dreamtime. 181 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 117–18. 09/12/2021 14:25:00182 Regarding Mills’ influence on the Christensens see: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 59. 09/12/2021 14:25:00183 Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 127–28; Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 342–43.

41

Australia, who were Australian-born but deemed ‘German’ in nationality. They were interned

from 20 March 1942 to 22 March 1945. The Thieles were interned with Stephensen at Loveday

for about two months at the end of 1942, and camp reports list them as camp contacts of

Stephensen’s. Stephensen and the Thiele brothers were also all at Tatura for a shared period of

a little over three years. Though there were seven camps in the Tatura group, all three were

likely housed in either camp one or two, which were for single non-POW males.184 While at

Loveday, the Thiele brothers apparently supported Stephensen when he expressed hope for a

Japanese invasion.185 The Thiele brothers will appear as key financiers of the Australian far

Right, and supporters of Thomas Graham, in the next chapter.

In February 1943, Stephensen was transferred a final time, to where he would spend

most of his internment: to Tatura in northern Victoria. While Stephensen was at Tatura, the

Government appointed Justice T. Clyne to investigate the AFM internments, for which

Stephensen gave testimony twice.186 These hearings, as with Evatt’s earlier revocation of some

internees’ detention, would further contribute to Stephensen’s impression that he was one of

the few genuine nationalists involved in the movement, as well as provide ammunition for

Stephensen’s post-war narrative of persecution. Stephensen was released from internment in

August 1945, after accepting Evatt’s revocation of his detention order. The following month,

Clyne’s report was presented to the House, and on 5 October, the Government (through Ford)

publicly exonerated Bath, Clarence Crowley, Hooper, Masey, Matthews, Salier, Tinker-Giles

and Watts: but not Percy Stephensen.187 When the report came up for debate in Parliament in

March the following year, the Government’s opponents seized upon the opportunity to

discredit the Government, and in doing so, propagated a narrative that Stephensen would draw

on in the following decades. Capitalising on perceived links between the Labour Party and

Communism, Country Party member Sir Earle Page argued that the affair was a communist

plot, emphasising the role of police agent Thomas. Deputy Leader of the Opposition Harrison

made a link between Evatt’s office and the Communist Party, in particular Evatt’s secretary

Allan Dalziel, by referring to the list of internees that had been published by The Tribune in

184 ‘Internee Service and Casualty Form, Reginald Hartley Thiele’, 1942 – 1945, NAA: MP1103/1, S3135; ‘Cecil Murray Thiele Internee Service and Casualty Form’, n.d., NAA: MP1103/1, S3134; ‘Extract from Intelligence Report Week Ending 16 Oct 42’, 16 October 1942, NAA: D1901, S3164A; ‘World War 2 Camps’, Tatura Museum, accessed 25 August 2021, https://www.taturamuseum.com/world-war-2-camps. 185 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 174. 186 Winter, 179–85. 187 Winter, The Australia First Movement and the Publicist, 188–89; Muirden, The Puzzled Patriots, 151–66.

42

April 1942.188 These ideas of communist-led persecution and government duplicity would

feature heavily in Stephensen’s feelings about the incident for the remainder of his life.

Conclusion

Stephensen’s attraction to extreme ideologies, and the consequences that this entailed

for him, had been a hallmark of his life. As a student, first in Queensland and then in London,

he had been drawn to Communism, risking his place at Oxford University through his

participation in Communist Party activity. After his return to Australia, he made his strongest

statement on Australian nationalism with the publication of The Foundations of Culture in

Australia. This essay led him to a collaboration with the older, more conservative, much

wealthier fellow nationalist William John Miles. Together, beginning in 1936, they published

the monthly newsletter The Publicist: The Paper Loyal to Australia First, which peddled an

enthusiastic, if sometimes contradictory, anti-British, White Australian nationalist vision.

The ascension of Nazism under Hitler gave Stephensen, who had earlier criticised the

violence of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Australian New Guard, a positive example for anti-

British racial nationalism. Hitler’s anti-Semitic vision of an international Jewish-Bolshevik

conspiracy was easily compatible with Stephensen’s long-held vision of White Australia, and

Stephensen enthusiastically adopted this element of Nazi ideology. Stephensen did not only

consider the Jews as a non-white race who threatened Australia’s racial homogeneity. He

subscribed to the notion of an international Jewish conspiracy that aimed, through various tools

including Communism, to destroy national strength and thereby achieve world domination.

The Jews therefore became, in Stephensen’s mind, the ultimate threat to Australia, as he saw

them behind all other threats to the nation.

Stephensen was prepared to use violence to defend Australia from this perceived

conspiracy. In comparison to the major European fascist movements, the symbolic and

theoretical dimensions of violence were largely absent from Stephensen’s writing: although he

certainly held the fascist opinion on the necessity for a revolution against a decadent liberal-

democratic West, he did not consider violence as a virtuous expression of action, instinct,

authenticity, and power. He frequently lamented the impact of violence, in particular as it had

188 Winter, 195–97.

43

been used in Britain’s colonisation of Australia. As an anti-British Australian nationalist,

violence, for Stephensen, had been injurious to both the land and the people of the continent,

both Aboriginal and white. As such, unlike the colonial powers of Italy and Germany,

Stephensen hoped that a strong Australia would never perpetrate colonial violence.

He was prepared, however, to support the use of violence against threats to the nation.

He anticipated violent attacks on the Right from the Left, especially from Communists. He also

anticipated an influx of Jewish refugees from Europe where, he believed, Germany under Hitler

had woken up to the Jewish conspiracy that had brought down the Empire, and was driving the

Jews to other countries. Stephensen had no wish to inherit, as he saw it, Germany’s ‘Jewish

Problem’, as he believed that it would weaken the Australian nation from within. He held out

hope that, in the event of an influx of Jewish refugees, the Australian nation would be made

stronger by ridding itself of this ‘toxin’. How, precisely, this action of ridding the nation of

Jews would take place, he never outlined. Stephensen therefore left the door open to, if not

encouraged, anti-Semitic violence, in the name of defending the (racially pure) nation.

Stephensen’s early Communist activism, his strident lifelong Australian, anti-British,

racial nationalism, his increasing fixation on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and his desire to

turn The Publicist’s rhetoric into the action of the Australia First Movement, have all been

recognized by previous historians. However, they have not sufficiently conceptualized these

elements of Stephensen’s activism in relation to the transnational fascist phenomenon that was

spreading across the globe in this period. In Stephensen’s case, this spread did not take place

through organisational connections, nor did it depend on material or financial aid: rather,

Stephensen’s eventual advocacy of Hitler and formation of the Australia First Party were

influenced by his experience of interwar Europe and, particularly once he had returned to

Australia, his ideological identification and engagement with the example of Nazi Germany.

Steeped in the racial nationalist traditions that settler-colonial Australia shared with the

burgeoning fascist movement, and immersed in a political and aesthetic counter-cultural milieu

in Australia and Europe that included French and British Communists, Norman Lindsay, D. H.

Lawrence, and Aleister Crowley, Stephensen deeply identified with the fascist phenomenon.

His public support, sponsored by Miles, for Hitler’s racial-nationalist, anti-British regime and

campaign against an imagined existential threat posed by a supposed Jewish conspiracy was a

specific manifestation of the fascist phenomena, which Stephensen adopted and adapted for

inter-war Australia.

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Chapter 2: Survival and transmission: Stephensen and the post-war fascist network (1945 – 1965)

Despite the financial and emotional toll that internment had taken on Stephensen, after

his release he intended to return to political activism resembling the Australia First Movement

or The Publicist. One month after he left Tatura, Stephensen wrote to former co-owner of The

Publicist and fellow ex-AFM-internee Val Crowley that the ‘defeat’ Australia First suffered

was ‘temporary’, and that once he had paid off his debts, he would continue his advocacy for

‘Australian Nationalism’ through ‘literary or political movements’. ‘It may take me a few years

to get into a position to renew my public activities, but I’ll do it all right’, he promised.189

Stephensen’s failure to make good on this promise is one of the defining features of

Stephensen historiography. Munro’s authoritative biography of Stephensen discusses the last

twenty years of Stephensen’s life under the chapter title ‘Ghost in Exile’. He notes that

Stephensen ‘took little active part in any political movement after the war’.190 Likewise, Bird

argues that Stephensen prevaricated over a return to political activism after his release but that

such promises were ‘all wind. The political chapter of his life was closed.’191 Henderson notes

that ‘[u]nlike Australia, pre-war Nazis and fascists in the United Kingdom became post-war

leaders of the British far right’, and that Stephensen ‘might have been expected to exert more

influence over the neo-Nazi movement to evolve after the war.’192 There is a general consensus

amongst historians that Stephensen’s days of political activism were over.

At the same time, historians acknowledge Stephensen’s impact on the post-war far-

Right. Stephensen corresponded with post-war far-Right organisations, both in Australia and

overseas.193 Multiple historians position Stephensen and the Australia First Movement as the

forerunner to and inspiration for later nationalist and extreme-Right movements, in particular

Frank Browne’s Australia Party, National Alliance (who declared themselves “dedicated to the

189 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Crowley Re Unrepentance and Further Activity’, 19 September 1945, 1–2, ML MSS 1284: 1, SLNSW. 190 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 265. 191 Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 378. 192 Peter Henderson, ‘Frank Browne and the Neo-Nazis’, 76. 193 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 265.

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principle of ‘Australia First’”), and National Alliance’s successor, National Action.194 James

Saleam, who co-founded National Action in early 1982 and led an Australia First Party ‘from

the mid-to-late 2000s’, credits Stephensen with formulating an ‘idiosyncratically Australian…

native fascis[m]’.195 Stephensen’s evident impact on the post-war far-Right seems at odds with

the notion that Stephensen’s political activism ended with his internment in 1945. The above

historians have suggested the mechanisms by which this impact was enacted: through

providing a ‘model’ in the form of the Australia First Movement, as well as an ideological

blueprint that combined ‘intense nationalistic views… with his support for National

Socialism’, and through Stephensen’s relationships within the post-war extreme-Right.196 Yet

no comprehensive examination of Stephensen’s role in ensuring the survival of fascist ideology

into the post-war period exists.

Positioning Stephensen within the broader history of the transnational fascist

movement allows a re-examination of this period of Stephensen’s life with reference to the

survival of fascism after 1945. There is some debate amongst scholars about whether fascism

was confined to the interwar period, but authors such as Graham Macklin and Roger Griffin

have convincingly argued that fascism survived the Second World War. Fascist actors adopted

new aims and methods that reflected their marginalized status, and the fascist movement

assumed new forms.197 Informal, loosely-organised networks became key methods for the

circulation of ideas and material, ensuring the survival, re-enforcement, and targeted

proliferation of fascist ideology. This chapter draws on a historical network analysis approach,

emphasising Stephensen’s position as a node in just such a network, and examining the nature

and function of Stephensen’s connections within this network, to argue for his continuing

activism and influence. It also continues to portray Stephensen as a member of a transnational

movement, noting that this network of like-minded actors extended overseas. Fellow ex-

internees who, like Stephensen, remained dedicated to their various anti-Semitic, fascist-

inspired visions, turned to Stephensen for validation, assistance, and encouragement. In

194 Peter Henderson, ‘A History of the Australian Extreme Right Since 1950’, 178–79, 238–58; Andrew Moore, ‘Writing About the Extreme Right in Australia’, 6–7; Kristy Campion, ‘A “Lunatic Fringe”?’, 6. 195 Henderson, ‘A History of the Australian Extreme Right Since 1950’, 264–65; Evan Smith, ‘White Australia Alone? The International Links of the Australian Far Right in the Cold War Era’, in Global White Nationalism: From Apartheid to Trump, ed. Daniel Geary, Camilla Schofield, and Jennifer Sutton (Manchester University Press, 2020), 240; Saleam, ‘The Other Radicalism’, 50–52. 196 Henderson, ‘A History of the Australian Extreme Right Since 1950’, 160. 197 Graham Macklin, Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1st ed., Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right (London: Routledge, 2020), 8–15; Griffin, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Ism’.

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particular, those who were authors, Hardy Wilson, A. R. Mills, and Charles Willyan, sought

Stephensen’s help in editing and publishing their work. Stephensen, although he was struggling

financially and working furiously, gave his assistance freely to these fellow ex-internees

because he supported their messages and felt it important to give them a wider audience. One

fellow ex-internee, Tom Graham, whom Stephensen had bonded with at Liverpool internment

camp, tried to recruit Stephensen into an international network of National Socialists. While

Stephensen was reluctant to follow Graham’s encouragement to link up with National

Socialists in Europe and the USA, he encouraged Graham’s efforts and, through Graham,

supported publishers of far-Right literature. Likewise, he encouraged the Queensland purveyor

of far-Right literature De Wykeham de Louth in his campaign to awaken the white race to the

danger posed by the Jewish international conspiracy, and financially supported him by

purchasing some items on de Louth’s catalogue. Stephensen remained enmeshed in the

Australian far-Right milieu as a new generation of far-Right activists emerged in the late 1950s

and early 1960s. Stephensen maintained personal relationships with influential figures like

Arthur Smith and Eric Butler, and acted as a conduit for material and information between

various actors and organisations.

Stephensen did not, as is previously claimed, retire from political activism: the

marginalization of fascism that resulted from the second world war drove Stephensen to

transform his methods of activism, from public appeals to private correspondence and

relationships. As noted in the introduction to this thesis, the marginalised and stigmatised

nature of this relatively small network amplified Stephensen’s efforts. Stephensen was aware

of the shared goals of the network, and contributed to and encouraged the efforts of other

activists. He re-enforced a worldview that was shared by, and transmitted between, the

network’s members. Stephensen therefore played a significant role in the survival and

transmission of fascism in post-war Australia.

Post-war literary activism

Financially and emotionally devastated by internment, Stephensen was reluctant to

return to public activism, despite his promises. In April 1947 he wrote to Adrian Lawlor from

his ‘hermitage’ in East Warburton, ‘Nay, nay, I shall not emerge. I have no intention of putting

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my head out to have it clouted again by Demockracy.’198 Stephensen had been fighting for

social and cultural transformation for his entire adult life, however, and he was not about to

retire completely: he simply continued the fight without ‘putting his head out’ again.

The combination of literary work with cultural and political activism had been a

defining feature of Stephensen’s life, and this continued after the war. In 1945, after

Stephensen’s release from internment, his friend Hardy Wilson published a book called

Instinct.199 Wilson had escaped internment, although his house had been raided by intelligence

agents. 200 In Instinct, Wilson extolled an anti-Semitic vision of ‘a great era of new

creativeness’ in which ‘parasitical’ Jews ‘fertilized’ creative Gentiles.201 Such a vision, which

shared its language with Hitler’s writing and oratory, resonated with Stephensen’s own anti-

Semitism.202 Wilson sent copies of Instinct to Stephensen, Prime Minister Chifley, Federal

Minister Eddie Ward, the leader of the newly-formed Liberal Party Robert Menzies, and former

Treasurer Richard Casey, who in 1945 was the Governor of Bengal, India, by Churchill’s

invitation. He also sent copies overseas, to John Maynard Keynes (shortly before he died) and

to famous Chinese intellectual and ambassador to the USA Hu Shih in New York.203 Wilson

expressed his frustration to Stephensen about the lack of response for his book.204 In response,

Stephensen wrote that he was ‘flabbergasted… How any man could receive such a valuable

gift… and not have the elementary good manners to acknowledge it, is beyond my

comprehension.’205 He felt that Hardy’s works ‘should have many readers’, and commiserated

that Australians were ‘cowards, intellectually’, offering his own experience as ‘proof’.206 It

198 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Lawlor Re Persecution’, 18 June 1947, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 199 Hardy Wilson, ‘Wilson to Stephensen 11 October 1945’, 11 October 1945, ML MSS 1284: 1, SLNSW; Hardy Wilson, Instinct (H. Wilson, 1945). 200 For information about Wilson’s anti-Semitism, contact with Mussolini and Hitler, and involvement with Stephensen and the Publicist, see Bird; For general information see Simpson, ‘WILLIAM HARDY WILSON’; and Apperly, ‘Wilson, William Hardy (1881–1955)’; For a more focussed examination of Wilson’s ideology and its context see van der Plaat, ‘An Oriental Continent’. 201 Wilson, Instinct, 7–12. 202 For an example of Hitler speaking about the Jews as ‘parasite[s]’, see: Perry and Schweitzer, Antisemitic Myths, 164. 203 Hardy Wilson, ‘Wilson to Stephensen June 4 1946’, 4 June 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW; Timothy Cheek, The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 333. 09/12/2021 14:25:00204 Hardy Wilson, ‘Wilson to Stephensen Re Lack of Support for Instinct, “Australia First Victims as Fascists”, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Communism’, 6 April 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 205 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson Re Poor Reception of Instinct and Australia as a “‘cutting’ in New Soil”’, 27 April 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 206 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson’, 27 April 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW.

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was clear that Wilson’s ant-Semitic vision found little support amongst the statesmen he sent

it to, but Stephensen encouraged Wilson, validating his beliefs and his efforts to share them.

He even suggested that Wilson send a copy to India’s high Commissioner in Canberra, Sir

Ragunath Paranjepye, with the hope that he could send it on to Gandhi.207 Wilson’s book was

not without some sympathetic reception: he claimed that ‘letters from foreigners in Australia

come promptly and are kindly and understanding.’208 Stephensen encouraged Wilson, with

whom he had shared his own Nazi inspired anti-Semitic beliefs in the interwar period, to

propagate a shared ideology in a hostile environment.

Stephensen not only encouraged like-minded actors to share their ideas, but in some

cases, helped craft their message. In 1948 another ex-internee, Charles Willyan, published an

account of his internment called Behind Barbed Wire in Australia: the amazing experience of

an Australian citizen.209 Stephensen, who was not credited in the publication, had helped to

edit and type the book. 210 Stephensen accepted remittance for ‘typing expenses’, but

performed the ‘editorial’ work for free. Stephensen could ill afford to work for free, but he told

Willyan, ‘it was a pleasure to me to be able to do anything that might be helpful to you in

publicising your experiences’, and promised to buy copies and help distribute them. His

motives were not solely philanthropic: he believed that publication and distribution of Behind

Barbed Wire would help to uncover the ‘dictatorial ambitions’ of Evatt and Chifley, linking

the Labour Government to ‘Modern Communism’. The assistance that Stephensen provided to

Willyan was a piece of political activism on Stephensen’s part; another avenue through which

he could fight the Communist conspiracy that threatened Australia.211

Encouraging National Socialists: Graham and de Louth

Literature was not the only way Stephensen remained connected to fellow Nazi-

supporters after the war. The friendship that Stephensen had developed with Tom Graham

207 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson’, 27 April 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 208 Wilson, ‘Wilson to Stephensen June 4 1946’, 4 June 1946, 1, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 209 Charles Willyan, Behind Barbed Wire in Australia: The Amazing Experience of an Australian Citizen (Murchison, Vic: Author, 1948). 210 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Willyan Re: Receipt of Money Order from Internment in Australia’, 18 August 1948, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 211 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Willyan’, 18 August 1948, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW.

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during internment endured after their release. Years after his release, Stephensen wrote to

Graham thanking him for taking care of Stephensen’s wife, Winifred, perhaps during

Stephensen’s final years in internment, and in November 1953, Stephensen warmly invited

Graham to stay with him and Winifred in Melbourne.212

Graham was a significant connection between Stephensen and the post-war fascist

movement. Graham had not given up on National Socialism: he believed that the failure of the

movement was due to a lack of international co-operation, and was trying to build a strong

post-war National Socialist movement by promoting that co-operation. In August 1950,

Graham wrote to Stephensen about the ‘looming struggle… against the Jew the Dark Forces

of Evil’. He believed that the time for action was at hand, and told Stephensen, ‘when one

patriot hears from another it gives them moral support and a new link is formed in the

connecting chain from one country to another, this was one of the big mistakes before no strong

enough link.’ 213 Stephensen was one of the ‘patriots’ that Graham had in mind, and he hoped

that Stephensen would help make these new links.

On the other end of the chain were fellow fascists in England, the United States, and

Australia, with their own links to yet more post-war fascists. Graham encouraged Stephensen

to keep in touch with Arnold Leese, the leader of the pre-war Imperial Fascist League in the

UK who remained an influential figure in the post-war British far right scene. Graham gave

the impression that he had visited Leese during a trip back to his home country sometime in

1952-53. 214 Graham was in touch with James Battersby, a former District Leader for Oswald

Mosley’s British Union, who had been interned along with other BU members.215 Graham

considered Battersby ‘about the only one’ doing National Socialist Work in England. 216

Graham also corresponded with George Frederick Green, another former BU District Leader,

who had been in touch with Göring’s defence team while Göring was on trial at Nuremberg,

212 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen’, 30 August 1950, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. Stephensen’s gratitude in a previous letter to Graham is inferred from Graham’s remarks in this letter. Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Greetings, Murray Thiele, The Cross and the Flag’, 23 November 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 213 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen’, 30 August 1950, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 214 Graham; Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, 32; Mulhall, ‘From Apathy to Obsession’, 463; Jackson, ‘Accumulative Extremism’, 11; Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 16 August 1953’, 16 August 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57. 215 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 14–15. 216 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 16 August 1953’, 16 August 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW, 2.

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and claimed to possess a letter that Göring wrote Churchill in the days before his suicide.217

After the war Green edited a magazine called the Independent Nationalist and had contacts in

Scandinavia, Rhodesia, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, and Germany.218 Graham subscribed

to two major post-war American far-Right publications, Women’s Voice and The Cross and

the Flag. Graham wrote to the editors of both papers, Lyrl Clark Van Hyning and Gerald K.

Smith respectively. 219 Smith is considered ‘the spiritual godfather of the modern American

anti-Semitic, white supremacist movement.’220 Hyning seems to have reciprocated, writing to

Graham to ask the whereabouts of Green, after he failed to appear in America where he was

supposed to be helping her with the Women’s Voice.221 In Australia, Graham was close to the

Thiele brothers, Reg and Murray, with whom Stephensen had been close associates at Loveday

and Tatura. Murray paid for Graham’s trip back to Australia in 1953, after which Graham

stayed and worked at Murray’s farm in Loxton, South Australia.222 Graham also claimed to

have personally met delegates from the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine when he was in

Cairo in 1953, probably on his return trip from England, and received personal greetings

through them from the Grand Mufti, the leader of the Arab World. The AHC was a ‘national-

unity government of Palestinian Arabs’ that had been outlawed in 1937, but was back in

operation by 1948, and whose headquarters were in Cairo.223 He gave them some pamphlets

(‘needless to say the pamphlet was anti-Jewish’), along with phone books for ‘all of Australia

and parts of’ Great Britain, and asked them to ‘flood’ Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania and

Great Britain with the pamphlets.224 Graham was a point of contact between Stephensen and a

much broader post-war fascist movement.

217 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen’, 30 August 1950, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black, 106, 184. 218 Macklin, 106; John Roy Carlson, Cairo to Damascus, 1st ed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), 38. 219 Thomas Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 3 December 1953’, 3 December 1953, 12, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 220 Stephen E. Atkins, Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History (Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 44, 46. 221 Thomas Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen Re Green’s Disappearance, ’Arab’s.’, 24 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 222 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 3 December 1953’, 3 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen Re Green’s Disappearance, ’Arab’s.’, 24 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 223 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the Mandate, 1st American ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 368, 426, 503, 510. 224 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 3 December 1953’, 3 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW.

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Graham, who saw Stephensen as a potential leader of the National Socialist revival,

sought and encouraged Stephensen’s participation in a number of ways. 225 He asked

Stephensen to source a copy of the Talmud and copies of the Jewish Herald for the Arab

Committee, although it is unclear why the Arab Committee needed this material from

Melbourne, a question raised by Stephensen.226 Graham forwarded his subscriptions of the

Cross and the Flag and the Women’s Voice to Stephensen before his 1952 – 1953 trip to

London.227 He passed money and pamphlets between Stephensen and his English contacts

Green and Battersby.228 Graham asked for Stephensen’s help in translating pamphlets from

German (the pamphlets, and their contents, remain missing and unknown) and encouraged

Stephensens’s relationship with Reg and Murray Thiele.229 In April 1952 Graham supplied

Stephensen with addresses for Kurt Mertig at the National Renaissance Bulletin in New York,

which was published by ‘the most important post-war [American] neo-Nazi organisation’,

National Renaissance Party;230 Gerald Smith at the Cross and the Flag; the Women’s Voice;

James Battersby; Eustance Mullin, who was associated with the KKK; and Leslie Leisemann

of Brisbane, who was involved in the Australian National Socialist Party, amongst others.231

In keeping with Graham’s conviction that the post-war National Socialist movement would

only succeed with international co-operation, he entreated Stephensen to contact others

overseas. In 1953, he wrote him: ‘Why don’t you have a go in USA the connections are all

there’, and in the same letter, ‘If I was you I’d keep in touch with Leese’.232 Graham was trying

to include Stephensen as a link in a stronger post-war National Socialist movement. In the

process, he was encouraging Stephensen’s own commitment to extreme-Right causes,

demonstrating to Stephensen that there were others who maintained the fascist movement after

1945 and exposing him to material that reflected and validated Stephensen’s own ideas.

225 Thomas Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 20 February 1951’, 20 February 1951, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 226 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 3 December 1953’, 3 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham 13 December 1953’, 13 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 227 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 3 December 1953’, 3 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Luxon Re: Forwarding Copies of The Cross and the Flag, and The Women’s Voice, to His New Address’, 18 May 1959, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW. 228 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen’, 30 August 1950, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 20 February 1951’, 20 February 1951, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW., 20. 229 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 20 February 1951’, 20 February 1951, ML MSS 1284: 57; Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 3 December 1953’, 3 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 230 Atkins, Encyclopedia of Right-Wing Extremism in Modern American History, 89. 231 Saleam, ‘The Other Radicalism, 85; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Addresses from T.G. 14/4/52’, 14 April 1952, ML MSS 1284: 112, SLNSW. This note seems to have been written by Stephensen. Some names are misspelled, and he makes the connection between Mullin and the KKK. 232 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 16 August 1953’, 16 August 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW.

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Stephensen’s reaction to Graham was typically supportive, but non-committal. In 1953

he wrote to Graham, care of Murray Thiele, ‘I hold myself in readiness for any genuine

opportunity to be of service for the cause for which I have suffered in the past, but I am not

going to be associated with any premature or ill-considered efforts, which would be doomed

to failure.’ 233 In the meantime, he made smaller contributions to Graham’s efforts. He

translated the German pamphlets that Graham had requested.234 He exchanged information

with Graham about German immigration to Australia.235 He sourced the copy of the Talmud

and the copies of the Jewish Herald that Graham had requested on behalf of the Arab Higher

Committee, and promised to send them on to that group, contributing five pounds for the

purchase of the Talmud while proposing that Reg and Murray Thiele bore the majority of the

costs.236 He sent one pound to Graham to forward on to Green, possibly for a copy of The

International Jew, although Graham did not stipulate.237 After Mills returned from a trip to

Europe sometime in 1955, Stephensen passed information to Graham regarding their mutual

contacts there, noting that Mills visited Arnold Leese in England, but did not see Mosley,

Battersby, or Green. 238 Ideologically, Stephensen commiserated with Graham about

Germany’s downfall, the international Jewish Conspiracy, Communism, and the decline of the

white race.239 Stephensen didn’t respond to Graham’s efforts to make him a proactive member

of the international National Socialist movement. Stephensen stressed to Graham that his

‘concern remain[ed] with Australia First’ and with ‘maintaining the White Australia Policy’.240

Stephensen’s limited involvement with Graham’s cause nevertheless carried significance for

the survival of post-war fascism. Stephensen re-enforced Graham’s National Socialist ideology

and encouraged his efforts to revive the National Socialist movement. He assisted Graham in

233 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Greetings, Murray Thiele, The Cross and the Flag’, 23 November 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 234 Thomas Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen April 1 1951’, 1 April 1951, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW. 235 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen 20 February 1951’, 20 February 1951, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 236 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham 13 December 1953’, 13 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW, 13; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Talmud’, 19 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 237 Graham, ‘Graham to Stephensen’, 30 August 1950, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 238 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Rud Mills’ Trip to Europe’, 20 January 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 239 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham 13 December 1953’, 13 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW, 13; Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Greetings, Murray Thiele, The Cross and the Flag’, 23 November 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 240 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Greetings, Murray Thiele, The Cross and the Flag’, 23 November 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW, 3; Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham 13 December 1953’, 13 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW, 5.

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the circulation of information and material. Graham, in turn, conducted a concerted campaign

to co-ordinate an international National Socialist revolution through his connections to

significant post-war extreme-Right actors in Australia, England, and the USA. Through these

connections, and in service of this hoped-for revolution, Graham circulated finance,

information, and material. The structure of the post-war far-Right network amplified

Stephensen’s efforts to keep fascism alive though the support he provided for Tom Graham.

Stephensen’s connection to De Wykeham de Louth, who operated a one-man

distribution service for far-right literature from his house in Innesplain, near Beudesert in

Queensland, operated in a similar way.241 The literature that de Louth offered consisted of pre-

and post-war publications, much of it sourced from the United States and England, as well as

de Louth’s own pamphlets which were largely recycled versions of his source material. 242 De

Louth was a significant figure in the post-war Australian far-Right because he, along with Eric

Butler and the League of Rights, was an early proponent of Holocaust denial in Australia, and

because he provided ‘neo-Nazi literature that may otherwise have been unavailable’, although

Stephensen would have been familiar with some of his sources through Tom Graham.243 De

Louth appears to have reached out to Stephensen sometime before 27 April 1954, sending him

two catalogues of books and pamphlets, a subscription form for The Protocols of the Elders of

Zion, and several of de Louth’s own pamphlets. In return, Stephensen encouraged De Louth’s

efforts, replying: ‘I encourage you on your efforts to enlighten public opinion on the dangers

of the hidden conspiracy of “super-national” influences, which are operating in Australia to

weaken the White Australia Policy’, and ‘I hope that your work in enlightening public opinion

will meet with an encouraging response.’244 Given the dominant presence of The Protocols of

241 Moore, The Right Road?, 86; Saleam, ‘The Other Radicalism’, 85; Henderson, ‘Frank Browne and the Neo-Nazis’, 76. 242 D. W. de Louth, ‘Catalogue of Books and Pamphlets’, January 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; D. W. de Louth, ‘Wholesale Price List of Shilling and Less Print’, April 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; D. W. de Louth, ‘Protocols Subscription Form’, n. d., ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; D. W. de Louth, ‘God Save the Queen’, January 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; D. W. de Louth, ‘God Save the Queen 2’, February 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; D. W. de Louth, ‘God Save the Queen: Excerpts Taken From “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”’, January 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; D. W. de Louth, ‘United Nations Conspiracy: UNO Moving towards World Dictatorship’, February 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; D. W. de Louth, ‘United Nations Organization’, January 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Hilary L. Rubinstein, ‘Early Manifestations of Holocaust Denial in Australia’, Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal XIV (November 1997), 98–99. 243 Rubinstein, ‘Early Manifestations of Holocaust Denial in Australia’, 98–99; Henderson, ‘Frank Browne and the Neo-Nazis’, 76. 244 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to de Louth Re The Jewish Herald and Receipt of Leaflets’, 27 April 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW.

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the Elders of Zion in De Louth’s material, as well as Stephensen’s own beliefs, this ‘hidden

conspiracy’ was almost certainly a reference to ‘the Jews’. Stephensen also promised to order

some of the material De Louth was offering, but this order does not exist in the archives, and

it’s possible that Stephensen never sent it. Their correspondence, which also included de

Louth’s entreaties for Stephensen’s help in filling an order from the Women’s Voice which

appears to have been in vain, was brief, although it does not indicate the full extent of their

relationship. Both Stephensen and De Louth corresponded with Graham, and there are reports

that Stephensen and De Louth were both present at a meeting of the Australian National

Socialist Party, along with Eric Butler, at the beginning of 1960.245 Stephensen performed the

same function with de Louth as he did with Graham: Stephensen encouraged de Louth’s far-

Right worldview and his efforts to propagate that worldview more widely. In a small and

marginalized network, the impact of such support should not be underestimated.

Appealing to the mainstream

Stephensen did not limit his attempts to influence post-war opinion to fellow members

of the marginalised far-Right. Despite his reluctance to publicly advocate for the causes that

had resulted in his internment, he attempted to disseminate his message to a broader

mainstream audience through several channels. In May 1954, the Royal Commission into

Espionage began investigating claims of Soviet espionage in Australia following the high-

profile defection of Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary and Consul in the Soviet Embassy and

alleged Soviet spy. 246 In September, Stephensen wrote to ASIO’s representative in the

Commission, Sir Garfield Barwick Q.C., outlining his thoughts on the Commission and

suggesting lines of questioning and avenues of investigation for Barwick to pursue in

uncovering the ‘Communist Espionage “cell” in Evatt’s Secretariat.’ 247 He offered the

245 D. W. de Louth, ‘De Louth to Graham Re Article in Jewish Paper’, 21 April 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; D. W. de Louth, ‘De Louth to Stephensen Re Help Distributing Leaflets to The Women’s Voice’, 11 August 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; ‘Resurgence of Neo-Nazi Activities, Sydney’, 16 March 1960, NAA: A6119, 557. 246 Allan Dalziel, Evatt the Enigma (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1967), 76, 89; Geoffrey Bolton, The Middle Way: 1942 - 1995, Second Edition, The Oxford History of Australia 5 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), 140–41. 247 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Barwick re Royal Commission on Espionage’, 3 September 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Barwick Re Royal Commission on Espionage’ , 5 September 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW.

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Australia First internments as evidence of this Communist cell. 248 There is no indication in

the Commission’s final report that Stephensen’s letters had any impact on the Commission’s

findings, but this episode does indicate that Stephensen was willing to reach out to those in

positions of power when he felt that they might further his own aims.249 He may have had more

luck with the article he wrote in Calwell’s name, ‘Forty Million Australians’, defending the

White Australia Policy: after being rejected by the Melbourne Herald, Calwell sent it to Ezra

Norton, the proprietor of Sydney’s Daily Mirror and Truth.250 When reaching out to public

figures, Stephensen edited his message, omitting explicit references to his anti-Semitic

conspiracy theories. However, Stephensen’s anti-Communism and support for White Australia

were components of this worldview. Reaching out to actors in positions of power to influence

mainstream opinion was part of Stephensen’s attempt to ensure the survival and transmission

of his fascist ideology in post-war Australia.

Literary activism continued: Willyan and Borin

In 1954, Stephensen collaborated on another book with Charles Willyan, entitled Can

the White Race Survive? Willyan had earlier hinted at a work along these lines, following the

publication of Behind Barbed Wire in 1948, writing to Stephensen:

I would appreciate meeting you sometimes for your opinion on my pet obsession,

“white race unity”. Candidly I don’t think there will always be room for both colored

and white on the little speck of earth we have of the universe. It doesn’t yield enough

for both.251

248 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Barwick Re Royal Commission on Espionage’, 3 September 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Barwick Re Royal Commission on Espionage, 5 September 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 249 The Hon Mr Justice W. F. L. Owen, The Hon Mr Justice R. F. B. Philp, and The Hon Mr Justice G. C. Ligertwood, ‘Report of the Royal Commission on Espionage’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 22 August 1955), NAA: A6235, 1. 250 Arthur Calwell, ‘Calwell to Stephensen’, 16 March 1955, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Valerie Lawson, ‘Norton, Ezra (1897–1967)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, 18 vols (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, n.d.), accessed 15 August 2021. I have not been able to locate online copies of the relevant papers for this period. 251 Charles Willyan, ‘Willyan to Stephensen Re: Printing of Internment in Australia plus “White Race Unity”’, 17 December 1948, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW.

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Stephensen remained supportive of Willyan’s work on Can the White Race Survive?.

He wrote: ‘… I cordially approve of the main trend of your work, and will help you in every

way to get it published…’.252 Ever wary of publicly associating himself with controversial

causes, he was also cautious. He took pains to remind Willyan that ‘[his] status in this matter

is only that of a Professional Literary Agent… [whose] advise [was] only on technical aspects’

of the work, and that he ‘must remain as an agent or functionary strictly on a business basis.’253

He also advised Willyan to ‘avoid any too violent expression of provocative ideas’ in order to

make the book a success, and that he should emphasise the role of ‘Communism as the

subverter of white race survival’, in order to present the book as ‘a contribution to

contemporary political thinking’, rather than ‘merely an attack on Christianity.’254 He also took

pains to distance himself publicly from the book, if it was published: ‘My name will not appear

as “editor”, and I do not want any acknowledgment in the Preface’(although he still insisted on

his share of royalties and copyright earnings).255 Despite Stephensen’s caution, he encouraged

Willyan’s work on the survival of the white race, an ‘obsession’ which they shared, and advised

him on how to moderate his views for a better chance at success in the Cold War climate.

In 1956 Stephensen and his wife Winifred returned to Sydney, the city in which

Stephensen had made so much trouble in the interwar years, and Stephensen set himself up as

a literary agent for a small corral of authors.256 One of these, Vladimir Lezak Borin, alternately

Vladimir Lezak or V. L. Borin (and later Ian Debor), was of particular significance owing to

his history and the position he came to occupy amongst the post-war Australian far-Right.

Borin was an ex-journalist for the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, who became an

opponent of Stalin and the Czechoslovakian government of Edvard Beneš, allying himself with

the leader of the Agrarian Party and former Czech Prime Minister Milan Hodza. 257 When the

Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939 he fled to Paris, and from there to London. He was

interned on the Isle of Wight in 1940. Explanations for his internment differ: it was possibly a

result of his support of Hodza, simply because he came from occupied Europe as an alien, or

252 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Willyan Re Can the White Race Survive’, 24 October 1958, ML MSS 1284: 104, SLNSW. 253 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Willyan’, 24 October 1958, ML MSS 1284: 104, SLNSW. 254 Ibid. 255 Ibid. 256 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 263. 257 ‘Assessment Folder, Applicant for Naturalisation (Vladimir Lezak) Regional File No. 8338’, c. 1957, NAA: A6119, 6715, Vladimir Lezak-Borin, ‘CV Copy’, c. 1955, NAA: A6119, 6715.

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as a result of Emergency Regulation 18B, which was designed largely for members of the

British Union of Fascists.258 Borin’s own explanation was that Benes had denounced him as

pro-Nazi.259 He continued his involvement in Czech politics, opposing Beneš’ Government-

in-Exile in London as a member of the Czech National Committee. His application for British

citizenship was denied, and after some time spent in Ireland and Germany, he travelled to

Australia with his daughter, apparently a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in

1952. He also claimed that his son was killed by the Nazis.260 It should be noted that British

and American intelligence agencies were sceptical of this account of Borin’s past: he was

suspected of having been a Nazi collaborator in Czechoslovakia, a Nazi agent in Paris, a Soviet

spy, or simply an opportunistic and unreliable person prone to switching sides or belonging to

both sides at once.261 Borin himself attributed such information to denunciations from his

political foes.262

ASIO and Commonwealth Security Services kept track of Borin throughout his time in

Australia, developing a hefty, multi-volume record which survives at the National Archives

and was only recently made available. 263 Borin remained politically active in Australia,

particularly in anti-Communist causes and amongst New Australians. He worked to combat

Communist influence amongst New Australians in trade unions. This activity was sponsored

by Santamaria’s Movement, and brought Borin into contact with anti-Communist elements of

the trade unions and the Labour Party. Borin continued to publish, sometimes under his own

name, in self-published newsletters as well as material published by Eric Butler’s League of

Rights. He gained some recognition for his opposition to a visit by Dr. Josef Hromadka, a

Czech Lutheran leader and founding member of the World Council of Churches, who spoke in

Melbourne in 1954 as part of a peace forum. These visits were perceived to be deliberate

258 Jayne Persian, ‘Vladimír Ležák-Borin: Cold War Warrior’, in Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives, ed. Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien, Nike Sulway (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2017), 80; Stephen Holt, ‘Nothing If Not a Survivor: Vladimir Lezak Borin’, National Library of Australia News XI, no. 10 (July 2001), 11; ‘A Chequered Career’, Outlook, February 1969, NAA: A6119, 6716. 259 Lezak-Borin, ‘CV Copy’, c. 1955, NAA: A6119, 6715. 260 This biography is pieced together from Persian, ‘Vladimír Ležák-Borin: Cold War Warrior’; Holt, ‘Nothing If Not a Survivor’; and ‘A Chequered Career’; Where it has been necessary to clarify points I have referred to Borin’s own words in Lezak-Borin, ‘CV Copy’, c. 1955, NAA: A6119, 6715. 261 Persian, ‘Vladimír Ležák-Borin: Cold War Warrior’, 79–81. 262 Lezak-Borin, ‘CV Copy’, c. 1955, NAA: A6119, 6715. 263 ‘LEZAC, Vladimir ( LEZAK Aka BORIN Aka LEZAK-BORIN ) Volume 1’, NAA: A6119, 6715; ‘LEZAC, Vladimir ( LEZAK Aka BORIN Aka LEZAK-BORIN ) Volume 2’, (Canberra: 1975 – 1995), NAA: A6119, 6716.

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propaganda offensives by the USSR, and thus strongly opposed by anti-Communists.264 He is

also remembered as the author of the first novel by a New Australian, The Uprooted Survive:

A Tale of Two Continents, published in 1959.265

Later correspondence from Stephensen indicates that Stephensen viewed the novel and

its author as potentially powerful anti-Communist weapons.266 Stephensen’s work on The

Uprooted Survive was therefore another instance of Stephensen combining his literary vocation

with his political activism. Correspondence between Stephensen and Borin indicates that

Stephensen contributed to the publication of The Uprooted Survive, if not the writing itself. In

a letter from 24 April 1958, the year prior to the book’s publication, Borin addressed

Stephensen as ‘My Dear Literary Advisor, Authors Agent, Pulblisher [sic] and Editor

Percy!’267 At the same time he wrote to Stephensen about an idea for a film script, entitled

‘FOUR FIVERS, New Australian story of two Continents’. 268 Stephensen replied

enthusiastically that he would ‘give one week or even more to the film of the FOUR FIVERS

or anything else you like.’269 Such exchanges indicate that Stephensen may have had a degree

of input as literary advisor and editor of The Uprooted Survive. He certainly played a key role

in its publication, handling contracts between Heinemann, the book’s London-based publisher,

and Borin, via Laurence Pollinger, a London author’s agent who Stephensen had known from

his time in London in the 1920s.270

At around the same time as Stephensen was handling the publication of The Uprooted

Survive, he was trying to find a publisher for Charles Willyan’s new book, We of the White

Race. This may have been Can the White Race Survive?, on which they had previously

collaborated, under a new name. The book was of great interest to the Australian extreme-right.

In February 1960 Graeme Royce, leader of the Workers’ Nationalist Party and one of the most

influential extreme-Rights activists of the post-war era, assured Stephensen that the wealthy

264 Persian, ‘Vladimír Ležák-Borin: Cold War Warrior’, 81. 265 Information on Borin’s time in Australia is provided in Persian, ‘Vladimír Ležák-Borin: Cold War Warrior’; Holt, ‘Nothing If Not a Survivor’; and ‘A Chequered Career’, and appears to correspond to government records. 266 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to McDowell, Council Against Communist Aggression’, 3 July 1961, ML MSS 1284: 92, SLNSW. 267 Vladimir Lezak Borin, ‘Borin to Stephensen 24 April 1958’, 24 April 1958, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW. 268 Borin, ‘Borin to Stephensen’, 21 April 1958, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW. 269 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Borin 22 April 1958’, 22 April 1958, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW. 270 Laurence Pollinger, ‘Laurence Pollinger Ltd to Stephensen Re The Uprooted Survive Contract with Heinemann’, 25 March 1959, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Pollinger Re Borin Contract with Heinemann’, 7 May 1959, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW; Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 263.

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Thiele brothers, who were apparently in the habit of funding Right-wing causes, would finance

the publication of the book.271 Royce, who believed that ‘the publication of Willyan’s book is

a first rate priority’, assured Stephensen that ‘the book is as good as published.’272 Evidently

Stephensen did not share Royce’s confidence, because he contacted ‘White Race Preservation

Groups’ around the world to ask for their help in publishing the book. He received some

literature in response, but no assistance. He gave multigraph editions to Eric Butler and the

leader of The League of Empire Loyalists, A. K. Chesterton, with the hope that they might

help, and procured a license to export 1,500 copies to the U.S.A. duty-free, which he hoped to

use in getting Charles Smith ‘of the “Truth Seeker”’ to distribute the book there.273 By April,

none of these hopes had born fruit. Stephensen, who believe that the book was ‘the most

important statement of White Race Preservation Policy’ of the twentieth century, planned to

take matters into his own hands.274 Stephensen’s intention was to print 5,000 copies, and to

create a distribution mechanism that sidestepped the Australian commercial publishers who

were ‘all in the Jews’ bag.’275 The publisher for We of the White Race was to be a new

organisation, the White Australia League, which Stephensen hoped to form if he could find

‘helpers.’ For Stephensen still believed in Willyan’s cause, and signed off his letter, ‘The White

Race is invincible.’276 Moore gives the impression that the White Australia League got off the

ground, but there is no record of it.277 Regardless, Stephensen’s efforts to publish We of the

White Race provided another point of contact between Stephensen and the post-war far-Right

in Australia and overseas. Stephensen became a conduit for far-Right ideology, distributing the

book across the globe and receiving literature in return, some of which he passed on to

Willyan.278

Stephensen’s handling of Borin’s more successful book The Uprooted Survive likewise

gave Stephensen an opportunity to reach out to like-minded actors, in this case, on the issue of

Communism. Stephensen wrote a review of the book for the March issue of Homeland, the

271 Graeme Royce, ‘Royce to Stephensen Re We of the White Race Funding, Eric Butler, Tom Graham, Reg and Murray Thiele, Homeland’, 6 February 1960, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW. 272 Royce, ‘Royce to Stephensen’, 6 February 1960, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW. 273 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Willyan Re Printing of WOTWR by White Race Preservation Groups’, 31 March 1960, ML MSS 1284: 53, SLNSW. 274 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Willyan’, 31 March 1960, ML MSS 1284: 53, SLNSW, 2. 275 Ibid. 276 Ibid. 277 Moore, The Right Road?, 56. 278 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Willyan’, 31 March 1960, ML MSS 1284: 53, SLNSW, 1.

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publication of the Australian Nationalist Workers’ Party, who, Stephensen noted in a letter to

Eric Butler, were ‘for white Australia’ and ‘strongly against Communism’, but ‘timid as yet on

the Jewish question’.279 By April, Borin was sharing an office with the editor of Homeland.280

Stephensen also offered Butler an article on The Uprooted Survive for publication in the New

Times. 281 As he had for Willyan’s book, Stephensen also directed his publishing efforts

overseas, contacting the Council Against Communist Aggression in Pennsylvania, U.S.A.,

whose address Borin had given him, about printing and distributing Borin’s book.282 He also

wanted to ‘establish contact with [the Council] for future working on the broad political issue’

of Communism, and requested material which he promised to ‘put to good use by distributing

them to editors of newspapers, members of parliament, and others in Australia, in the hope of

eventually organizing something of the same kind here, or of forming a branch or affiliate of

your committee here.’283 The Council’s Executive Secretary-Treasurer declined Stephensen’s

offer, but sent him some of their material.284 Once again, Stephensen’s roles as authors’ agent

and political activist had intersected: Stephensen’s anti-Communism and his efforts to find

publishers and distributors for Borin’s book were one and the same mission, which enmeshed

him in an international network of like-minded actors. Stephensen acted as a conduit for ideas

and materials in this network, sending copies of Borin’s book, and receiving material in return.

In the process, he was also validating the anti-Communist position of these actors by providing

encouragement and solidarity.

Contact with a new generation

It was no co-incidence that Stephensen’s work with Borin and Willyan in the late 1950s

and early 1960s involved contact with a number of far-Right actors in Australia. This period

saw significant developments in the Australian far-Right scene. In 1958, several former

279 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Butler Re Copies of We of the White Race and HOMELAND’, 7 April 1960, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Borin Re Homeland Review’, 14 February 1960, ML MSS 1284: 92, SLNSW, 2. 280 Vladimir Lezak Borin, ‘Borin to Stephensen Re Sharing an Office with Homeland’, 9 April 1960, 1, ML MSS 1284: 92, SLNSW. 281 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Butler’, 7 April 1960, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW. 282 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to McDowell, Council Against Communist Aggression’, 3 July 1961, ML MSS 1284: 92, SLNSW. 283 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to McDowell’, 3 July 1961, ML MSS 1284: 92, SLNSW, 2. 284 Arthur G. McDowell, ‘McDowell Reply to Stephensen’, 10 July 1961, ML MSS 1284: 92, SLNSW.

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members of Frank Browne’s Australia Party, including Arthur Smith, Graeme Royce, and

Brian Raven, formed what is considered to be the first Australian neo-Nazi organisation, the

Australian Nationalist Workers’ Party. The ANWP, through their ambitious Secretary Graeme

Royce, were in touch with major extreme-right organisations in Britain and the UK, including

various members of the Ku Klux Klan, the leader of the American Nazi Party George Rockwell,

the National Labour Party in England, and Colin Jordan. Royce invited Rockwell to visit

Australia in 1960 (which never eventuated), and Rockwell was so impressed by Royce’s

activism that he bestowed upon him the ‘Order of Adolf Hitler’.285 Also in 1960, the Australian

League of Rights was founded, under the leadership of Eric Butler, who had been running state

branches of the League and publishing anti-Semitic literature since 1946. 286

Stephensen’s involvement with these figures went beyond his work with Willyan and

Borin. He held the key to the Australian Nationalist Workers’ Party post box in Sydney, having

been approached by the ANWP secretary, Graeme Royce, about forwarding ANWP material

to Melbourne sometime in late 1959 or early 1960.287 Stephensen considered Royce ‘unreliable

and irresponsible’, and told Mills that he was ‘not associated with Graeme Royce politically,

financially, and morally’. He did, however, forward Royce’s mail to him, and held on to

‘printed matter from overseas’.288 Stephensen was enthusiastic about the ANWP’s Homeland

publication, although he considered the ANWP ‘politically “infantile”’, and forwarded a copy

on to Eric Butler in April 1960.289 Stephensen promised an article to A. K. Chesterton, the

leader of the League of Empire Loyalists, after meeting him and Butler, who was the League’s

Australian representative, in Sydney in early 1960.290 It may have been for the League’s

newsletter, Candour. Regarding the White Australia League that Stephensen promised Willyan

he would found to distribute 5,000 copies of We of the White Race, an extract from the January-

March 1960 issue of Combat, the publication of the National Labour Party in Britain, that

remains in Stephensen’s ASIO file, reported: ‘Another group to be formed in January is the

285 Henderson, ‘Frank Browne and the Neo-Nazis’; David Harcourt, Everyone Wants to Be Fuehrer: National Socialism in Australia and New Zealand (NSW; Melbourne; Brisbane; Singapore; London: Angus and Robertson Publishers, 1972); Moore, The Right Road? 286 Moore, The Right Road?; Kristy Campion, ‘A “Lunatic Fringe”?, 2–20. 287 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mills Re Graeme Royce and Willyan’s WOTWR’, 31 March 1960, ML MSS 1284: 53, SLNSW. 288 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mills’, 31 March 1960, ML MSS 1284: 53, SLNSW, 1. 289 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mills Re Graeme Royce and Willyan’s WOTWR’, 31 March 1960, ML MSS 1284: 53, SLNSW, 1; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Butler Re Copies of We of the White Race and HOMELAND’, 7 April 1960, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW. 290 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Butler’, 7 April 1960, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW.

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White Australia League… The W.A.L. although nominally a separate and autonomous body,

will co-ordinate its campaign closely with the W. N. P. [the ANWP went by numerous names,

including the Workers Nationalist Party]291 and other Nationalist groups…’.292 The Jewish

Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism kept an eye on Stephensen: they were the

source of reports that Stephensen had been present at a meeting of the Australian National

Socialist Party in Adelaide in 1960, along with Butler and De Louth, that was aimed at co-

ordinating the efforts of Australia’s various anti-Semitic organisations.293 The Council were

also the source of reports that Stephensen, along with other AFM members and Eric Butler,

were the leaders of the ANWP, though this is not supported by either contemporaneous

accounts or later scholarship.294 Sometime before March 1960 Arthur Smith, who was a

member of Frank Browne’s Australia Party and the ANWP before becoming leader of the

Australian National Socialist Party in 1963, was introduced to Charles Willyan at Stephensen’s

house.295 Stephensen was personally involved with many of the key players of the post-war

Australian far-Right. He played a role in assisting their efforts, acting as a conduit for

information, contacts, and material. He likely also encouraged the beliefs of those who shared

his Nazi-inspired vision.

Conclusion

Stephensen died in May 1965, after receiving a standing ovation for a speech he gave

about book censorship and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.296 Financially and emotionally devastated

by internment, he never gave up on the fascist movement that had led him into Australia’s

wartime internment camps. He emerged from internment both desiring to resume the fight, and

struggling to stay afloat. He did resume the fight, but in a form that was appropriate to both

Stephensen’s personal experience, and to mainstream hostility towards fascism and Nazi

ideology. Rather than resurrect the AFM or The Publicist, Stephensen encouraged those who

were making efforts in the fight against the Jewish-Communist conspiracy that interned

291 Henderson, ‘Frank Browne and the Neo-Nazis’, 80–81. 292 ‘Extract from “Combat” No. 5. 1960’, March 1960, NAA: A6119, 557. 293 ‘Resurgence of Neo-Nazi Activities, Sydney’, 16 March 1960, NAA: A6119, 557. 294 ‘Resurgence of Nazism and Anti-Semitism, Australian Workers’ Nationalist Party’, 26 February 1960, NAA: A6119, 557. 295 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Willyan Re Printing of WOTWR by White Race Preservation Groups’, 31 March 1960, ML MSS 1284: 53, SLNSW; Harcourt, Everyone Wants to Be Fuehrer, 2. 296 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 270.

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Stephensen, and was threatening Australia’s status as a racially homogenous white nation,

when few others gave them that encouragement. He took opportunities to spread his message

publicly, being careful to censor that message for mainstream audiences. In a continuation of

his lifelong work combining political activism with literary work, he championed the visions

of those authors who he agreed with, and worked with them to spread their message. Partially

through his work with these authors, and partially through gravitating towards like-minded

actors, Stephensen became enmeshed in the far-Right scene as new organisations appeared in

the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a part of this network, Stephensen acted as a conduit for

information and material, receiving and sending correspondence, books, and pamphlets

between actors in Australia, as well as overseas. Stephensen and others who shared his vision

were drawn together in an informal, non-hierarchical network of actors who, by their combined

actions, carried fascism through the post-war period, transmitting fascist ideology to younger

generations.

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Chapter 3: Stephensen’s post-war ideology (1945 – 1965)

Stephensen emerged from internment on 17 August 1945 into a world, and a nation,

devastated by war.297 While Stephensen had been interned, the war had killed between 50 – 60

million people, including 27,073 Australians who died fighting or as prisoners of war.298 The

forces of Nazi Germany had torn through eastern Europe, killing millions, and had perpetrated

an extermination campaign that killed six million Jews.299 For the first time, the shores of the

Australian nation had been bombed, by a Japanese army whose southward advance had been

effectively unchallenged by the British Empire, causing Australia to turn towards the United

States of America’s military power.300 When the war ended, with Japan’s surrender on 14

August 1945, Hitler was dead, and the Allied powers, including Soviet Russia, had defeated

the major European fascist regimes of Italy and Germany.

The events of the war, and the subsequent political and cultural climate, held

implications for the beliefs and worldview with which Stephensen had entered internment. The

supposedly strong fascist powers led by Hitler and Mussolini had been defeated by nations that

Stephensen considered weak and decadent, in particular Britain. Hitler himself, who

Stephensen had seen as a beacon of national resurgence and a strong leader, was dead. Hitler

and Nazi Germany were seen as the aggressors in a devastating war, with which the ideologies

of ultra-nationalism and fascism were now associated. 301 Before Stephensen left Tatura

internment camp, Australian newspapers carried images from German concentration camps as

they were liberated by British and American forces, and footage of the camps appeared in

picture theatre newsreels. Further evidence of Nazi war crimes was given widespread publicity

after Stephensen was released, in September 1945 – December 1946, as a result of the war

crimes tribunal. 302 These revelations fed an international anti-racism movement that, along

with changes in Australian immigration demographics, eroded support for the White Australia

297 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 247. 298 Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens, 1st ed (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1997), 7; Mark Peel and Christina Twomey, A History of Australia, Second Edition, Palgrave Essential Histories (London: Palgrave, 2018), 202. 299 Tony Barta, ‘After the Holocaust: Consciousness of Genocide in Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 31, no. 1 (1985), 155. 300 Bolton, The Middle Way: 1942 - 1995, 7–10. 301 Lee, The Beast Reawakens, 7; Griffin, ‘Interregnum or Endgame?’, 165. 302 Andrew Markus, ‘Jewish Migration to Australia 1938–49’, Journal of Australian Studies 7, no. 13 (1 November 1983), 26.

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Policy in the 1950s and 1960s.303 On the other hand, not all elements of the post-war world

challenged Stephensen’s worldview: there were vocal defenders of the Policy, and the looming

threat of Communism during the Cold War gave fascists an avenue of appeal to anti-

Communist politicians and the public.304

How did Stephensen react to these changes? Did he re-assess his support for National Socialism

and Hitler? Did he re-appraise his belief in, and advocacy against, the supposed Jewish-

Communist conspiracy that was aiming to bring down white nations? Did his understanding of

nations as racially-defined, organic entities change? Did the challenges to the White Australia

Policy have any bearing on Stephensen’s support for the Policy?

In answering these questions, this chapter adds Stephensen to the existing case studies

of reactions by fascist actors to this pivotal point in the history of the movement and ideology.

The massive rupture that occurred in fascism in 1945 is belied by the various attempts to

differentiate two eras by name: some use the term ‘neo-fascism’, some speak of the ‘post-

fascist era’, and some have argued that fascism ended at that point.305 At first glance, there is

much merit in creating a term that encompasses such a seismic shift in the history of the

extreme-Right. The defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany marked the end of an era in which

fascist movements were able to mobilize large portions of the population, and in which fascism

was unencumbered by associations with the Holocaust and a massively destructive war.306 It is

also useful to identify this moment as a crucial turning point at which fascist actors were forced

to work within the legacy of fascism’s rise and defeat. In short, fascism never looked the same

again, both from the outside and from within.

The reactions to this seismic shift from those who were engaged in, or sympathetic to,

fascist causes were, of course, myriad and heterogenous, and scholars stress the ideological

303 Meaney, ‘The End of “White Australia”’, 177–79; Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and Jan Gothard, ‘Introduction’, in Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, ed. Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and Jan Gothard (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), 1–7; Gavin W. Jones, ‘White Australia, National Identity and Population Change’, in Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, ed. Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and Jan Gothard (Crawley, Western Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), 110–28. 304 Aarons, Sanctuary; Moore, The Right Road?, 53–65; Drew Cottle and Angela Keys, ‘Douglas Evelyn Darby, MP: Anti-Communist Internationalist in the Antipodes’, Labour History 89 (November 2005). 305 Macklin, Failed Führers, 8–11; Griffin, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Ism’, 3–8. 306 Lee, The Beast Reawakens, 7; Griffin, ‘Interregnum or Endgame?’, 165.

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and organizational heterogeneity that defined the post-war extreme-Right.307 Existing case

studies demonstrate the variety in these reactions. Oswald Mosley, Britain’s most successful

interwar fascist, continued to nurture his Union movement while interned, and emerged from

internment proclaiming that parochial nationalism had led to the movement’s failure, offering

instead the idea of ‘Europe-as-a-Nation.’308 For Italian Fascists, Mussolini became a reference

point for a post-war Fascism that continued to look to the pre-war regime for its shape, while

at the same time, new generations injected new ideas into the scene, and the survival of the

movement’s members became a focal point. 309 In America, France, and Germany, those

sympathetic to Hitler and/or Germany almost immediately began challenging the revelations

of the Holocaust, hoping to preserve the reputation of their subjects.310 As the years went on,

others in America, Britain, and Australia clung to the iconography of the interwar fascist

movements, and elevated Hitler and the Nazis as objects of veneration, and/or useful political

symbols.311 The defeat of Nazi Germany became subsumed into the very ideological narrative

that it had spread, in which the Jews were waging war on other races, and had not only

hoodwinked the Allies into fighting Hitler because he stood against them, but, in some

versions, were now using the spectre of Nazi Germany towards their own ends.312 It is this

continuity in fascist thought that has led some to reject labels such as ‘neo-fascism’, arguing

that it implies that fascist actors, and their cause, didn’t carry on after the war, when in fact it

is important to recognise that they did.313 Meanwhile, although some general trends and

frameworks are identifiable, there could exist as many reactions to this turning point as there

were case studies.

This chapter examines Stephensen’s reaction to three major developments in the post-

war era: the erosion of popular and political support for the White Australia Policy in the 1950s

and 1960s; the Cold War and Australian anti-Communism; and revelations about the

307 Kevin Coogan, ‘Lost Imperium: The European Liberation Front (1949 - 54)’, Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 3 (2002); Griffin, ‘The Incredible Shrinking Ism’; Macklin, Failed Führers. 308 Macklin, Failed Führers; Coogan, ‘Lost Imperium’. 309 Albanese and del Hierro, Transnational Fascism in the Twentieth Century. 310 Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York, Toronto, New York: Free Press, 1993); Michael Shermer, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Coogan, Dreamer of the Day, 154–55. 311 Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun; Jackson, ‘Accumulative Extremism’, 9–11; Harcourt, Everyone Wants to Be Fuehrer. 312 Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun; Jackson, ‘Accumulative Extremism’; Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust. 313 Macklin, Failed Führers.

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Holocaust. As outlined in chapter one, these three areas formed major components of

Stephensen’s identification with fascism. This chapter departs from the chronological model

of the previous chapter for several reasons. Firstly, as will be demonstrated, Stephensen’s post-

war worldview was defined by a remarkable level of continuity, both prior to and after

internment, and for the final two decades of his life, 1945 – 1965. There is therefore little point

in tracing chronological developments. Additionally, capturing the full dimensions of

Stephensen’s belief system necessitates the piecing together of statements across multiple

pieces of correspondence. This textual analysis approach is dependent on the material

available, which sometimes spans several years and was written in different contexts.

Nevertheless, by situating this material in its broad historical context, I have tried to avoid

ahistoricism.

Despite the challenges that the post-war climate posed to Stephensen’s vision of a

racially homogenous white Australia, his support for Nazi Germany, and his belief in an

international Jewish Communist conspiracy, Stephensen remained unrepentant and committed

to his National Socialist vision. As discussed in the previous chapter, Stephensen’s worldview

was re-enforced and encouraged by contact with like-minded actors. Bolstered by his position

in this network, Stephensen remained a champion of the White Australia Policy and dedicated

to the idea of a racially-constituted nation. His understanding of white Australia, however,

underwent a significant change, as he abandoned the notion of a racially distinct Australian

nation in favour of a transnational white race, while he continued to imagine ‘the Jews’ as a

racial other.

The widespread and fervent anti-Communism of the Cold War reinforced Stephensen’s

belief in the Communist enemy that he blamed for his internment, and allowed him to recast

himself not as a traitor to his nation but as a victim of ‘international’ forces. It provided

Stephensen the opportunity to pursue revenge against the man he blamed for his internment,

H. V. Evatt, and to envision himself as an important actor in a national struggle for survival.

The revelations of the Holocaust did little to erode Stephensen’s belief in the necessity

of fighting a global Jewish conspiracy. The racial nationalism that underpinned Stephensen’s

belief in white Australia, as well as his opposition to the perceived menace of Communism,

were components of this anti-Semitic worldview. Historian Jeffrey Herf has called the anti-

Semitism of the Nazis an ‘explanatory framework’, and it remained so for Stephensen, who

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interpreted his own experiences, as well as world-events, through this fundamental belief.314

Stephensen was fully aware of the atrocities committed by the Nazis: as well as news reports,

he was exposed to the stories of close personal friends whose loved ones had been killed by

the Nazis. Despite this, he maintained his support for Hitler’s “war against the Jews”, to borrow

a phrase from Lucy Dawidowicz, or, to use Hitler’s own language, “der jüdische Krieg”.315

Munro argues that if Stephensen had believed or accepted reports of the six million Jews killed

in the Holocaust, he would have had to re-appraise his support for Hitler and the Nazi regime.316

Stephensen may not have believed the reports in their entirety, but he was at least aware of the

deadly implications of Hitler’s anti-Semitism; and it did not lead to a re-assessment of his

support for Hitler’s ‘war against the Jews’. He maintained a belief in the necessity of fighting

an international Jewish conspiracy in Australia, and, to those who supported him, he continued

to speak in vague terms about that fight which did little to downplay the possibility of, and

necessity for, anti-Semitic violence.

Understanding Stephensen’s post-war ideology as a continuation of his interwar fascist

worldview demonstrates that fascism in Australia survived the second world war and the

resulting challenges to a phenomenon built on stigmatized and increasingly marginalized ideas

and values. Stephensen’s efforts to combat Communism and the erosion of the White Australia

Policy by connecting to mainstream audiences also demonstrates how fascist actors attempt to

disseminate a more palatable version of their marginalized beliefs, without compromising any

part of their fascist worldview. In conjunction with the previous chapter’s discussion of the

role networks play in re-enforcing ideas amongst the marginalized far-Right, this chapter

highlights the power of these mechanisms to keep fascist ideology alive after 1945.

‘I am quite unrepentant!’317

When Stephensen was released from Tatura internment camp, he re-united with his wife

Winifred, and together they spent a few weeks at Winifred’s sister’s house in Melbourne. From

314 Herf, ‘The “Jewish War”, 52. 315 Herf, 51. 316 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 198. 317 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Hooper Re Publicist Reprint, Unrepentance, and Jewish and Communist Conspiracy’, 18 August 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW.

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there, they moved to an isolated rural property in East Warburton, at the foot of the Yarra

Ranges to the east of Melbourne.318 Internment had devastated Stephensen financially and

emotionally, but it had not fully extinguished his political ambitions. Three months after his

release he wrote to Sydney Hooper, a former AFM-internee who was amongst those released

after Evatt’s enquiry:

You ask what are my plans! I have become a “hermit”, living on this farm, 55 miles

from Melbourne. It will take me three or four years to pay off my debts, including a

very stiff lawyer’s bill, and arrears of 31/2 years of friendless incarceration. After that

I might return to politics and fine literature; but at present I regard myself as having

been effectively “Gestapo’s out of circulation”… My only “plan” now is to work

commercially to make enough cash to get a new home and pay my lawyer’s bill, then

beyond that to start again, doing some more track-blazing, perhaps in about five years’

time.319

To his friend Ian Mudie, he was more candid about his emotional state, and pessimistic

about any such return to politics. In March 1946 he wrote, ‘Virtually, I am extinguished,

suppressed, silenced and quite put out of business as a public critic.’320 The Publicist made a

very brief comeback, when Sydney Hooper reprinted the January – March 1942 issues in

August 1946, but was otherwise finished, as was the Australia First Movement. 321 If the

Government’s aim in interning Stephensen was to silence him as a public voice, then it had

effectively succeeded.

Stephensen may have been silenced, but he was not repentant. He was ‘pleased to have

[his] articles on Conscription-for Service-Abroad and on “Communism and Chaos” again put

into circulation’ in The Publicist reprint, and told Hooper that ‘we of “The Publicist” have

nothing to recant. 322 Demonstrating that the war had done little to change his beliefs,

Stephensen told Hooper, ‘Your little reprint will do some good; but not much, I fear, to expose

318 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 252. 319 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Hooper Re Being Right and Starting Again’, 13 November 1945, ML MSS 1284: 112, SLNSW. 320 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mudie Re Hermitage and “Being Right”’, 17 March 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 321 ‘“The Publicist” Appears Again’, Daily Telegraph, 24 August 1946. 322 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Hooper Re Publicist Reprint, Unrepentance, and Jewish and Communist Conspiracy’, 18 August 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW.

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the Communist and Jewish “plot” against us, which was the real atrocity’. He expressed his

hope that ‘resentment against [Jews and Communists] will grow steadily’, as they were ‘more

openly… anti-British’ than in 1942. He signed off with: ‘I am quite unrepentant! Kindest

wishes, yours for Australia First’.323 Now released into a much-changed post-war world,

Stephensen felt he had nothing to recant from his pre-war activism, and that the Jewish

Communist conspiracy that he had been fighting had won the battle against Australia First, but

not the war against Australia.

It was an imaginary war that Stephensen would continue fighting for the rest of his life.

Challenges to the White Australia Policy

As demonstrated in chapter one, the White Australia Policy was central to Stephensen’s

conception of the nation. Stephensen believed in a world composed of racially-defined nations

that sprang from distinct geographic environments, and that Australia was a white nation that

shared a common ancestry with other white European nations, including Germany. In

Stephensen’s view, white Australia was something to be defended from racial heterogeneity,

in particular in the form of, and at the behest of, a supposed ‘Jewish race’.

This worldview, and the White Australia Policy that depended on it, came under attack

in the post-war era; but not immediately. In the immediate aftermath of the war, wartime fear

of Japanese invasion resonated with racial anxieties, particularly about Asia, that formed the

core of the White Australia Policy. There was a strong focus, particularly from Minister for

Immigration Arthur Calwell, on preserving the White Australia Policy while building

Australia’s population with British and European immigrants. Over the coming decades,

however, multiple factors challenged the White Australia Policy and its ideological foundations

of race, exclusivity, and supremacy. Japan’s successful military push through Asia during the

war, the horrors of Nazi genocide, and post-war anti-colonial nationalist movements were

important factors in the domestic and international condemnation of racial discrimination that

323 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Hooper Re Publicist Reprint, Unrepentance, and Jewish and Communist Conspiracy’, 18 August 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW.

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gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s.324 Demographic changes challenged both the notion

that Australia was a homogenous British nation and the idea that the presence of people with

non-British language and culture threatened Australia’s social harmony.325 The desire for

population increase outstripped the supply of British and North West European immigrants,

forcing the Australian Government to widen the net to include immigrants from Southern

Europe, as well as from Egypt, Lebanon, and Turkey. 326 The immigration of 170,000

‘Displaced Persons’ from Europe, which began in 1947 with refugees from Hungary,

Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic states, also added to the number

of non-British post-war migrants.327 There were those who defended the White Australia

policy, abandoning the language of race in favour of arguments about national identity, social

harmony, economy, and culture.328 Ultimately, the White Australia Policy was declared “dead”

by Immigration Minister Al Grassby in 1973, although its longevity and ongoing influence

should not be dismissed.329

These broader changes did little to disturb Stephensen’s support for the White Australia

Policy. In 1959, Stephensen embarked on a lecture tour to South Australia sponsored by the

Commonwealth Literary Fund. 330 To his audience at the University of Adelaide on 30

September, Stephensen defended Australian nationalism against the challenges it was now

facing. ‘We could scarcely fail to notice’, he said, ‘that there are many people in the world

today who dislike the word, or the concept, of “Nationalism”.’331 These people, he argued,

preferred the word “Inter-National”, by which they meant “Supra-National”, and envisioned

the organisation of ‘the entire human species’ into a ‘”One-World” entity’, abolishing ‘all

National organisations’ and racial distinctions. 332 Stephensen rejected this idea as an

abstraction which denied the basic reality that human beings had evolved over millennia into

324 Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and Jan Gothard, ‘Introduction’, in Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, 1–2; Meaney, ‘The End of “White Australia”’, 175–79; Andrew Markus, ‘Of Continuities and Discontinuities’, 179–82. 325 Gavin W. Jones, ‘White Australia, National Identity and Population Change’, 115. 326 Jones, ‘White Australia, National Identity and Population Change’, 114. 327 Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera, 12; Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 49. 328 Markus, ‘Of Continuities and Discontinuities’, 181; Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera, 9; Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 43. 329 Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, 1–5. 330 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 267. 331 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Nationalism in Australian Literature: Commonwealth Literary Fund Lecture at the University of Adelaide’, 30 September 1959, ML MSS 1284: 23, SLNSW, 2. 332 Stephensen, ‘Nationalism in Australian Literature’, 30 September 1959, ML MSS 1284: 23, SLNSW, 2.

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distinct national and racial communities, each with their own ‘soul’ or ‘Spirit’. It was his dream

that Australia would develop its own spirit, providing a community of belonging even for the

“New Australians” that were arriving from Europe, through rejecting the cultural and political

influence of other nations and fostering its own unique culture. This was essentially the same

argument that Stephensen had put forth in Foundations over two decades earlier. Stephensen

even ended the speech by quoting the poem he had used in Foundations, Wentworth’s 1823

Australasia, proclaiming Australia as “A NEW BRITANNIA IN ANOTHER WORLD!” in

the event of the British Empire’s decline. Foundations’ emphasis on ‘Race and Place’, or the

uniqueness of Australia that arose from its environmental distinctiveness, was still present in

this speech: Stephensen spoke of ‘the mental adjustment of Australians to… the Australian

physical and social environment’.333 But his focus had shifted from emphasising Australians’

racial uniqueness, to emphasising Australians’ belonging to a global white race and

civilisation: he spoke of ‘the ideal of building up in this continent a stronghold of the white

race, and of making here a distinctive addition to ten thousand years of white race civilization

in other places.’334 In 1958 Stephensen corresponded with the Editor of Northern World: A

Journal of North European Friendship, who had been informed by Tom Graham that

Stephensen would be both interested in the journal, and capable of spreading its influence in

Australia.335 Stephensen promised to subscribe and to share the journal, as well as information

about an associated society, the Northern League, with ‘some younger men here [in Australia]

who have the right attitude to the common enemy.’ He was likely referring to those behind

Homeland. He reassured the Editor, Roger Pearson, that he shared Pearson and Graham’s

‘opinions on the need for action to preserve the Northern European race…’.336 The idea of

Australia as a homogenous white nation accommodated both Stephenson’s earlier

understanding of Australians as racially unique, as well as this later focus on transnational

racial solidarity. Stephensen’s defence of Australian nationalism illustrated how little

Stephensen had otherwise moved from his conception of the nation in 1936: Australia was a

naturally-formed, white, racially homogenous community with a distinct soul.

333 Stephensen, ‘Nationalism in Australian Literature’, 30 September 1959, ML MSS 1284: 23, SLNSW, 9. 334 Stephensen, ‘Nationalism in Australian Literature’, 30 September 1959, ML MSS 1284: 23, SLNSW, 8. 335 Roger Pearson, ‘Pearson to Stephensen Re Graham and Northern World’, 27 April 1958, ML MSS 1284: 58, SLNSW; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Pearson Re Northern League’, 12 May 1958, ML MSS 1284: 58, SLNSW. 336 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Pearson Re Northern League’, 12 May 1958, ML MSS 1284: 58, SLNSW.

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Stephensen stopped short of claiming white racial superiority in his lecture. Just as he

was aware of the challenges confronting his notion of Australian nationalism, he was also

sensitive to criticism of the White Australia Policy on the grounds of racial prejudice or

superiority. In 1955 Stephensen authored an article under the name of Arthur Calwell, Deputy

Leader of the Australian Labor Party, defending the White Australia Policy, and sent it to

Calwell with suggestions of when and where to have it published.337 Stephensen advocated for

the Policy on the grounds that prejudice and strife would result from the co-existence of

‘profoundly different’ races, even if those races had ‘good qualities of their own’. ‘The

emphasis [of the White Australia Policy]’, he wrote, ‘is not on the false claim of superiority,

but on the commonsense recognition of differences.’338 At the same time, Stephensen reminded

readers that it was only the white race, not the “teeming millions of Asia”, and, by implication,

not the continent’s indigenous population, that developed and populated Australia.339 This

white triumphalism sat awkwardly with Stephensen’s claims for racial equality. He resolved

the impasse on the side of white superiority in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald for years

later, writing: ‘… the white race is, and always has been, superior to all colored races in

technical and scientific achievement, and also in social and political organisation.’ 340

Stephensen believed not only that racial homogeneity was essential for Australian nationhood,

but that Australia’s status as a white nation gave it specific value.

Stephensen continued to imagine threats posed to the nation in racial terms. Changes to

migration patterns after the war did not always lead to a re-assessment of racial nationalism:

Graham Macklin has written about the focus on migration amongst post-war British fascists as

a continuation of their interwar ideas on race. 341 As indicated by his exchange with the Editor

of Northern World, Stephensen wanted Australia to join with other white nations in defence of

white civilisation. In 1952 Stephensen proposed to Manning Clark that Australia become part

of a ‘tight union’ of ‘the North Sea and Baltic Strand peoples’ against the encroachment of

Jews, Negroes, Slavs, Asians u.s.w.’. 342 In the same year, Stephensen wrote to Mudie,

337 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Forty Million Australians? The Land and the People’, 1 March 1955, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 338 Stephensen, ‘Forty Million Australians? The Land and the People’, 1 March 1955, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 339 Ibid. 340 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to The Editor, SMH: “White Race Superiority”’, 16 September 1959, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW. 341 Macklin, Failed Führers, 12–13. 342 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Prof. and Mrs. Clark Re White Australia Race Purity and Jewish Council Against Fascism and Antisemitism’, 19 August 1952, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW.

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including a passage that is worth including in full for the complete picture it paints of

Stephensen’s vision of white Australia, its necessity, and the threats that it faced:

I am working on the thoughts that the genuine White Races – principally the Germans,

Scandinavians, Dutch and British, will have to unite and stake out certain living-areas,

in North and Western Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New

Zealand, and let the rest of the world go to the Asians, Africans, Jews, Dagoes, Arabs

etc. If this doctrine is not soon proclaimed and adopted, Australia might become

mongrelized like the U.S.A., and would have a cosmopolitan, not a National, culture.

In other words, unless Nationalism in Australia is linked with Racialism of some kind,

the prevailing confusion will get worse. I mean, Australia should be staked out as one

of the permanent homes of the White Race, equal in status culturally, as well as

politically, with the others, and viewed as an alternative place for the survival of the

White Race, if the White Race becomes submerged say in Europe or North America.343

As demonstrated in chapter one, Stephensen’s belief in white Australia, and his support

for the White Australia Policy, were key components of his support for Hitler and his adoption

of National Socialist ideas. He shared Hitler’s notion that nations were naturally-occurring

spiritual entities, his belief in white race supremacy, and his conception of national threats on

racial terms. It was precisely Hitler’s ultra-nationalism and portrayal as the saviour of the white

race in a racial war that attracted Stephensen, and led him to adopt the notion of Judeo-

Bolshevism, with all that entailed. Despite the challenges posed to the White Australia Policy

and its underlying ideological foundations after 1945, Stephensen retained his belief in those

foundations, and his support for the White Australia Policy. The maintenance of these beliefs

also played a crucial role in Stephensen’s reaction to the Holocaust.

Reaction to the Holocaust

As part of Stephensen’s ongoing racial nationalism, he continued to consider the Jews

an inferior, non-white race.344 In comparison with his public displays of anti-Semitism in the

343 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mudie Re the Survival of the White Races, Apartheid, Segregation, “German” (Nazi) Jewish Policy, and Australian Aboriginal Aryanism’, 24 August 1952, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW. 344 For example, see: Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham 13 December 1953’, 13 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW.

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pre-war period, in the pages of The Publicist and in his Quadrant article, ‘A Reasoned Case

Against Semitism’, Stephensen was publicly reticent on this theme: the Jews appeared as a

non-white race amongst others in Stephensen’s lecture at the University of Adelaide and in the

article he authored for Calwell, discussed above, but were not singled out for special treatment.

That is not to say that Stephensen’s attitude towards the Jews had softened.

Stephensen’s contemporaries, as well as later historians, remarked upon Stephensen’s

continued belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In an article on Stephensen in a February

1959 issue of Nation, the author wrote that Stephensen still appeared to hold the views that he

had expressed in ‘A Reasoned Case Against Semitism’.345 Munro labelled Stephensen in the

post-war era ‘an unrepentant anti-Semite’ who continued to believe in ‘bizarre and sinister

conspiracy theories’, and Bird paints much the same picture.346

These commentators have sometimes attempted to explain Stephensen’s ongoing anti-

Semitism in an environment where such theories faced enormous challenges. The author of the

Nation article, after describing such anti-Semitic theories ‘the vilest and most traumatic

perversion in the history of Western civilisation [because of] the condonation they gave to

massacres of some five million men, women and children’, argued that Stephensen ‘ignore[d]

the post-war evidence of Nazi atrocities and… dismiss[ed] the reports as unbelievable’ because

of a ‘distrust of war-crimes propaganda’ engendered in Stephensen during the first world

war.347 Munro likewise attributes Stephensen’s denial to a ‘deeply ingrained suspicion of war

propaganda’. He goes further than the author of the Nation article and argues that Stephensen

‘seriously and tragically underestimated the Nazi capacity for transforming a political

metaphor into mass murder’, implying that if he had fully appreciated the consequences of his

rhetoric, he would have re-appraised it.348 Both assessments are somewhat sympathetic to

Stephensen, assuming that had he believed that six million Jews had been murdered by the

Nazis, he would have reassessed his beliefs. Bird attempts no such rationalisation, merely

demonstrating Stephensen’s rampant anti-Semitism. A respondent to the Nation article, Judah

Waten, was far less forgiving, particularly of the claim that Stephensen opposed anti-Semitic

violence, and instead supported banishment: ‘Well, Hitler never admitted he favoured the

345 ‘The Culturist: P. R. Stephensen’s Bright Noon and Sombre Afternoon’, Nation, 14 February 1959, 10. 346 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 265, 268; Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 373–76. 347 ‘The Culturist: P. R. Stephensen’s Bright Noon and Sombre Afternoon’, Nation, 14 February 1959, 10. 348 Munro, Wild Man of Letters, 198.

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physical extermination of the Jews but only their banishment to Poland. To this day the ex-

Nazis in West Germany deny that they murdered 6 million Jews in Europe.’349 Waten was

more prepared than the Nation author and Munro to grant Stephensen the sincerity of his

beliefs.350

Whether or not he believed them, Stephensen was no doubt aware of reports of the

Nazis’ mass murder of Jews leading up to the end of the war. While he was still in internment

as initial reports about German concentration camps appeared in the Australian press, the

International Military Tribunal conducted at Nuremberg from November 1945 until October

1946 presented, along with evidence of Nazi war crimes and crimes against the peace, evidence

of the murder of six million Jews, including the use of death camps and mass shootings by

Einsatzgruppen.351 Stephensen had always followed current affairs, and was, at least in 1947,

a subscriber to the Age, whose coverage of the trials resulted in headlines like ‘Mass Executions

of Jews’.352 Stephensen’s scepticism about the Nuremberg trials was evident in a letter he wrote

to Hooper in the same month that the abovementioned article was published. ‘Use of juridical

forms for political ends is fashionable just now’, he wrote, tying together his own internment

with the Nuremberg trials. ‘It began with the farcical “Trotsky Trials” in Russia, and is being

continued now with the “trials” of ex-enemy nationals, at Nurenberg [sic] and elsewhere –

described as “War Criminals”, the victors putting the vanquished in the dock.’353 Press reports

did nothing to convince Stephensen that Hitler’s anti-Semitic campaign had resulted in

genocide.

The press was not Stephensen’s only source of information about German

concentration camps. Stephensen’s friends and acquaintances shared with him their personal

stories of loss. In February 1946, less than a year after his release from internment, he heard

349 Judah Waten, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Nation, 28 February 1959, 18. 350 ‘The Sincerity of Fanaticism’ is the Preface title in Bird, Nazi Dreamtime, 10–18. 351 Herbert R. Reginbogin and Christoph J. M. Safferling, ‘Introduction - Lessons of Nuremberg: Returning to Courtroom 600 on the 60th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trial against the Major German War Criminals’, in The Nuremberg Trials: International Criminal Law since 1945, ed. Herbert R. Reginbogin and Christoph J. M. Safferling (München: K. G. Saur, 2006), 11–12; Michael R. Marrus, ‘A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Insitute of Jewish Affairs, 1945-6’, in The Nuremberg Trials: International Criminal Law since 1945, ed. Herbert R. Reginbogin and Christoph J. M. Safferling (München: K. G. Saur, 2006), 63. 352 ‘Bill for The Age for Stephensen’, 9 August 1947, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW; ‘Mass Executions of Jews’, Age, 4 January 1946. 353 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Hooper Re Nuremberg Trials and a “possible” Comeback’, 31 January 1946, ML MSS 1284: 112, SLNSW.

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from Sydney Hooper that a mutual acquaintance, a ‘Miss Gladys Coletti from Italy’, had lost

two nephews, ‘one executed in Florence, the other dragged across Russia by the Germans and

back and finally died in a concentration camp in Germany.’354 He was also friends with Karel

Jan Zoubek, a musician who had been detained in Iran and shipped back to South Australia for

internment aboard the s.s. Rangitiki, and who was interned at Tatura from November 1941 to

June 1945.355 In August 1946 Karel-Zoubek informed Stephensen of ‘the inevitable sad news’

that his father and younger brother had died, and that his brother-in law had died shortly after

liberation from a German concentration camp, as a result of moving ‘from one camp to the

other in the panic time in Germany’ as an internee.356 These stories were evidently not enough

to support the press reports about Nazi genocide in Stephensen’s mind.

These reports, from both the press and Stephensen’s friends, did not dissuade

Stephensen from pursuing the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that he had adopted in the

interwar period. Stephensen believed in an international conspiracy of Jews whose goal was

total world domination. Stephensen frequently shared this idea with other anti-Semites,

including Hardy Wilson, Tom Graham, and A. R. Mills.357 He viewed the threats to racial

nationalism that emerged in the post-war period as deliberate attempts by these conspirators to

weaken the white nations of the world, and thereby better control them. The ‘“One-World”

[political, economic, and cultural] entity’ that he warned his audience about at the University

of Adelaide in 1959 was, he had earlier indicated in a letter to Mills, part of a secret plan of

control by a Jewish “One World” Government. 358 The United Nations Organisation was also,

354 S. B. Hooper, ‘Hooper to Stephensen Re News from Miss Gladys Coletti to Friends of 209 Elizabeth Street’, 13 February 1946, ML MSS 1284: 112, SLNSW. 355 ‘Prisoner of War/Internee; Zoubek, Karel Jan; Year of Birth - 1902; Nationality - Czeckoslovakian’, NAA: MP1103/2, R36361; ‘Prisoner of War/Internee: Zoubek, Karel Jan; Date of Birth - 19 Janaury 1902; Nationality - Czechoslovakian’, NAA: MP1103/1, R36361; ‘ZOUBEK Karel-Jan - Nationality: Czechoslovakian - Arrived Adelaide per Rangitiki 20 November 1941’, NAA: B78, 1949/ZOUBEK K-J. 356 Karel Zoubek, ‘Karel Zoubek to Stephensen Re His Visit and the Death of His Famiy Members in Internment in Germany’, 9 August 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 357 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson Re ‘Communism Is Inevitable’, Mussolini and Hitler’s New Civilisation, Various Anti-Semitic Statement, and the New White Australia’, 21 June 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Greetings, Murray Thiele, The Cross and the Flag’, 23 November 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Alexander Rud Mills, ‘Mills to Stephensen Re Kirtley Affair and Socratic Idealism’, 27 November 1947, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 358 Stephensen, ‘Nationalism in Australian Literature’, 30 September 1959, ML MSS 1284: 23, SLNSW, 2; Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mills Re Kirtley Affair and Socratic Idealism’, 1 December 1947, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW.

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according to Stephensen, ‘part of the “great” plan of world-control by the Jews’. 359 This

conspiracy was even responsible for the erosion of support for the White Australia Policy. He

wrote to Ian Mudie in 1952, ‘[e]vidently the present trend of Jewish policy in Australia is to

break down the “White Australia” policy, as they have a better chance of managing a mixed

community than one united by blood’, and to Mills in 1958, ‘The Sanhedrin[‘s]… tactics at

present are to obliterate the white race by miscegenation, and to destroy the British Empire in

this way, as the Greek, Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Empires were destroyed.’360 This was

essentially the view that Hitler had laid out in Mein Kampf, that the Jews achieve domination

by ‘destroy[ing] the racial foundations of the people [they] want to subjugate.’361 Rather than

re-appraising his support for Hitler’s vision of a Jewish conspiracy after 1945, Stephensen

viewed the challenges posed to this vision as products of the Jewish conspiracy.

This was the lens through which Stephensen interpreted his own internment. A year

after his release, he wrote to Hooper that the reprint of The Publicist would do little ‘to expose

the Communist and Jewish “plot” against [them]’.362 He entertained the notion that Justice

Clyne, the judge who conducted the inquiry into the AFM internments and concluded that

Stephensen’s internment was justified, was a Jew, claiming that Clyne’s surname was similar

to a supposedly common Jewish surname, “Klein”.363 Stephensen admitted that he didn’t know

the ‘racial origin’ of the other man who had failed to exonerate him, H. V. Evatt, but

complained that Evatt, ‘the man mainly responsible for having me locked up under the absurd

faked “conspiracy”’, was ‘acting like a front-line fighter for international Jewish and

Communist control of the world.’364 Stephensen’s continued belief in a Jewish conspiracy that

was pitted against the forces of nationalism, particularly in white nations, allowed him to recast

359 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Greetings, Murray Thiele, The Cross and the Flag’, 23 November 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson Re ‘Communism Is Inevitable’, Mussolini and Hitler’s New Civilisation, Various Anti-Semitic Statement, and the New White Australia’, 21 June 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 360 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mudie Re the Survival of the White Races, Apartheid, Segregation, “German” (Nazi) Jewish Policy, and Australian Aboriginal Aryanism.’, 24 August 1952, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW; Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mills Re Sanhedrin, Miscegenation, “Sieg Heil”’, 18 December 1958, ML MSS 1284: 1 CY Reel 3731 Frame 0327, SLNSW. 361 Perry and Schweitzer, Antisemitic Myths, 171. 362 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Hooper Re Publicist Reprint, Unrepentance, and Jewish and Communist Conspiracy’, 18 August 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW, 2. 363 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson Re ‘Communism Is Inevitable’, 21 June 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW. 364 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson Re ‘Communism Is Inevitable’, 21 June 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW, 5.

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himself not on Evatt and Clyne’s terms as a threat to the nation, but as a martyr against this

perceived enemy.

Accordingly, Stephensen did not re-appraise his support for Hitler’s self-declared war

against the Jews. Instead, he regretted that ‘following a Jewish policy has brought England to

ruin’, and that ‘[i]t would have been far better for Britain to have made an alliance with

Germany, in the days of Bismarck… The result of the wrong policy has been that both Britain

and Germany have been brought to the verge of destruction, in two fratricidal wars’.365 It was

Germany, Stephensen wrote to Mudie, who had been ‘inspired’ by the ‘instinct’ of white race

preservation to enact an ‘anti-Jew policy’; the same instinct, Stephensen claimed, that lay

behind the White Australia Policy.366 Stephensen looked forward to the day when the white

races, following Hitler’s example, fought back against the Jews, writing to Graham in 1953:

‘If the Americans and the British peoples take effective steps to rid themselves of the Jewish

incubus, Australians would be quick to follow suit… I am sure that Germany will rise again,

perhaps in alliance with Britain, as Hitler wished.367 This was not the vision of a man who had

rethought his commitment to Nazi anti-Semitism, but of one who maintained his support for

Hitler’s anti-Semitic campaign against an imaginary Jewish foe.

Stephensen’s denial of the Holocaust, and his ongoing belief in anti-Semitic conspiracy

theories, cannot be dismissed as merely self-delusion, mistrust of the press, or the bitter

paranoia of an isolated man. These were elements of an altogether more sinister anti-Semitism.

Holocaust denial is not simply a denial of facts: it is a political act that can be built upon, and

perpetuate, anti-Semitic stereotypes.368 Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel argued that denial is

part of the process of genocide: it performs a second killing of the dead by erasing the memory

of their murder, absolves the perpetrators of those murders, and insults the survivors.369

Stephensen was amongst the many Nazi supporters who sought to rescue Hitler’s reputation,

365 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham 13 December 1953’, 13 December 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW, 1. 366 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mudie Re the Survival of the White Races, Apartheid, Segregation, “German” (Nazi) Jewish Policy, and Australian Aboriginal Aryanism.’, 24 August 1952, ML MSS 1284: 51, SLNSW. 367 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Greetings, Murray Thiele, The Cross and the Flag’, 23 November 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 368 Lawrence Douglas and Hans Rauscher in Michael Bazyler, Holocaust, Genocide, and the Law: A Quest for Justice in a Post-Holocaust World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 197–98. 369 In Bazyler, Holocaust, Genocide, and the Law, 199.

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and fascism itself, through denying the horrors of the Holocaust.370 As Judah Waten hinted at

in his letter to Nation in 1959, Stephensen’s vague language about white nations getting ‘rid’

of the Jews, even after the war, casts Munro’s contention that Stephensen would have re-

appraised his ideas if he had recognised the reality of Nazi genocide into doubt. There is little

evidence to indicate that Stephensen would not have supported Hitler’s campaign even had he

acknowledged reality. Furthermore, Stephensen’s Holocaust denial did not occur in isolation,

but as part of a mutually-re-enforcing network of other Nazi sympathisers. It therefore needs

to be recognized as a significant contribution to the post-war far-Right milieu, where it may

easily have assumed even more dangerous forms by encouraging anti-Semitic violence.

Cold War anti-Communism

Amongst the weapons of the international Jewish conspiracy, Stephensen addressed

none so vehemently and often as he did the cause for which he was almost expelled from

Oxford University decades earlier: Communism. Stephensen’s journey from active Communist

Party member to anti-Communist has been one of the defining issues of his life. By the time

Stephensen was interned, his anti-Communist position was cemented, and it, like much of the

rest of his worldview, went unchanged after his release.

While his anti-Semitism was out of kilter with a post-war world, his stance on

Communism brought him closer in line with Australian society in the midst of the Cold War.

The perception in liberal democratic countries of Communism as a dangerous existential threat

was crucial to the fate of fascism in the second half of the twentieth century. It not only served

as a rallying point for the post-war extreme-Right, but had the potential to legitimise fascism

owing to the anti-Communist stance taken by the major fascist parties before their defeat.371

This legitimacy was not only in the eyes of fascists themselves, but influenced the perception

and treatment of fascists in countries like Australia after the war. In the 1940s and 1950s,

British and Australian intelligence agencies knowingly assisted Nazi war criminals to safely

emigrate to Australia, because it was believed they could be mobilized against the Communist

370 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, 49. 371 On the role and context of Communism for post-war fascism, see e.g. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, ‘Foreword’, Dreamer of the Day, 11–13; Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun; Coogan, ‘Lost Imperium’; Albanese and del Hierro, Transnational Fascism in the Twentieth Century; Moore, The Right Road?.

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threat.372 Anti-Communism was also a strong connecting point between the extreme-Right and

mainstream politicians in Australia.373 So much so, Andrew Moore argues, that the anti-

Communist stance taken by the Menzies Government ‘made the extra-parliamentary right

virtually redundant.’374 In some respects, therefore, Stephensen’s post-war anti-Communism

was unremarkable. It was typical of not only the post-war far-Right, but of a widespread anti-

Communist position in Cold War Australia.

Mainstream opposition to Communism allowed Stephensen to advocate for a censored

version of his fascist worldview, without compromising any part of it. As with his anti-

Semitism, Stephensen adopted a public position on Communism, and a private one. Publicly,

he outlined his personal grievance against Communism to Sir Garfield Barwick in his

submissions for the Petrov Royal Commission in 1954. 375 In these submissions, Stephensen

was purportedly trying to do his patriotic duty in helping to root out the Communist threat in

Australia. He offered evidence, based on the internment of the AFM members in 1942, of the

links needed to demonstrate a Communist conspiracy and convict the members of Evatt’s

secretariat who were suspected of being Communist agents. He stopped short of naming his

arch-enemy, Evatt himself, as a Communist, but he as good as made the argument through

inference and suggestion. Stephensen was also laying out the evidence that he and the other

Australia First members had been interned because they were a strongly anti-Communist

organisation, and presented a threat to the Communist cause in Australia. In doing so, he was

able to recast himself not as a traitor to Australia, but as a true patriot, who had been locked up

by Australia’s enemies. This was a tactic that Oswald Mosley also used after the war,

capitalizing on anti-Communist sentiment to both ‘overcome the stigma of treason’ and

‘rehabilitate fascists as “premature anti-communists”’.376 Stephensen was not only attempting

to rescue his reputation, but was also continuing his fight against the imaginary Judeo-

Bolshevik conspiracy.

372 Aarons, Sanctuary. 373 Cottle and Keys, ‘Douglas Evelyn Darby, MP: Anti-Communist Internationalist in the Antipodes’. 374 Moore, The Right Road?, 57–58. 375 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Barwick Re Royal Commission on Espionage’, 3 September 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW; Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Barwick Re Royal Commission on Espionage’, 5 September 1954, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW. 376 Coogan, ‘Lost Imperium’, 16–17.

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Privately to his anti-Semitic friends, he made little secret of his belief that Communism

and the Jews were linked, and part of the same global conspiracy that was responsible for

Stephensen’s internment. Less than a year after his release from internment, he told Hardy

Wilson, ‘I am regarded by Communist leaders as their most dangerous opponent, so dangerous

that they had me locked up for three-and-a-half years without trial…’.377 In the same letter, he

wrote that Communism was ‘a Jewish ideal’, and that the Communists were allied with the

Jews.378 In 1953, he warned Tom Graham: ‘”Communism” is Jewish…’.379 By 1960, his mind

was little changed. He wrote to Mills: ‘… the worldwide Communist-Zionist conspiracy

controls all effective means of publication to influence public opinion…’.380 Stephensen may

have edited his beliefs in trying to leverage the Petrov incident to achieve his own aims of self-

exoneration and protection of the nation, but he was still fighting Hitler’s war against Judeo-

Bolshevism.

Conclusion

In 1962, three years before his death, Stephensen was in touch with Sondra Silverman, a

researcher from the Australian National University who was writing about the Australia First

internments. He was hopeful that Silverman’s account of the ‘grave injustice’ done to the

internees would be published. 381 Doubtless Stephensen’s opinion that Silverman was ‘of

German (not Jewish) ancestry’, contributed to Stephensen’s confidence that she would

exonerate him. He forwarded Silverman copies of two lectures he was going to deliver in June

at his former university, the University of Queensland, and remarked:

377 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson Re ‘Communism Is Inevitable’, 21 June 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW, 1. 378 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Wilson Re ‘Communism Is Inevitable’, 21 June 1946, ML MSS 1284: 50, SLNSW, 1-2. 379 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Graham Re Greetings, Murray Thiele, The Cross and the Flag’, 23 November 1953, ML MSS 1284: 57, SLNSW, 4. 380 Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mills Re Graeme Royce and Willyan’s WOTWR’, 31 March 1960, ML MSS 1284: 53, SLNSW, 2. 381 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Mills Re: Sondra Silverman’, 2 June 1962, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW.

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You will see from them that I have not really been chastened by my ordeal behind

barbed wire! […] I was a meteorologist in the 1930s, able to predict “the winds of

change” which are now blowing very strongly in these 1960s.382

This chapter demonstrated just how true this statement was. It was not only

Stephensen’s internment, but the devastating Second World War and the tumult that followed

that failed to ‘chasten’ Stephensen. He remained committed to the fascist vision that he had

championed in the interwar period: a vision of a world divided into naturally-occurring, distinct

human groups, hierarchically ordered according to race, and at home amongst their own

national-spiritual community. Australia was a home of the white race, and stood to preserve

white civilisation as Europe continued a decline that predated, and was responsible for, the

First World War. Australia faced racial enemies: none more sinister, in Stephensen’s mind,

than the Jews, who were secretly carrying out their supposedly natural inclination for world

domination. The murder of six million Jews that resulted when the Nazi regime acted on this

anti-Semitic conspiracy theory did nothing to change Stephensen’s mind. In Stephensen’s

mind, Britain had made the wrong alliance, and would now face the consequences as the same

Jewish forces moved to topple another Empire. Stephensen believed that these very Jewish

forces were behind the post-war challenges to nationalism and racism. To Stephensen, the

White Australia Policy was being deliberately eroded as part of the Jewish plot to weaken white

nations. Communism, which replaced fascism as the existential threat to liberal democracies

like Australia during the Cold War, was, he believed, yet another Jewish plot to create a global

monoculture controlled by a single government, like the United Nations Organisation.

Stephensen viewed his own internment through this lens, imagining himself as a martyr in the

war against the Jewish-Communist conspiracy that had put him there. Stephensen held out

hope that the white nations of the world would unite to fight back against this Jewish

conspiracy.

Supported and encouraged by like-minded actors, Stephensen carried Hitler’s

genocidal vision of a racial war between white nations and Judeo-Bolshevism into the post-

war period, protecting it from the repulsion of the majority who were shocked by the Holocaust

through a mixture of denial and conviction. Stephensen did not nurse his hatred privately. He

382 Percy Reginald Stephensen, ‘Stephensen to Silverman Re: “Winds of Change”’, 2 June 1962, ML MSS 1284: 52, SLNSW.

84

not only circulated it amongst the extreme-Right network in which he was situated, but adapted

his message for different audiences, without compromising his fascist vision. Stephensen’s

case therefore demonstrates not only the potential for fascism to survive through circulation

amongst a marginalized network, but for the transmission of carefully chosen elements of

fascist ideology to a wider audience.

85

Conclusion

In 1979 Gilbert Allardyce wrote, ‘there is no such thing as fascism. There are only men

and movements that we call by that name’.383 Thirty-three years later, Goodfellow returned to

this notion when arguing for the importance of approaching fascism as a transnational

phenomenon, rather than searching for a definition: ‘The issue is not whether each movement

was fascist, or whether each movement fits some generic definition’, he wrote. ‘What matter

are the mechanisms connecting ideologies and practices across borders.’384 This thesis did not

set out to prove that Stephensen was a fascist, as his contemporary critics argued, for the sake

of identifying him in a pejorative sense with a discredited and disliked (for most) phenomenon,

although that may be one result. Rather, the aim has been to demonstrate that Stephensen was

a participant in this historical phenomenon that originated in Europe in the wake of the First

World War and survived the end of the Second, and to therefore illuminate both the impact that

fascism had in Australia as well as the global spread and longevity of fascism.

Fascism is a complex phenomenon rooted in European ideological traditions and

bearing the imprint of the First World War, in which both soldiers and civilians were subjected

to extreme violence. Post-First World War fascist actors fought in opposition to socialism and

communism, amongst other forces and opponents. They asserted the primacy of the nation as

the organizing concept for society, and, like many on the left, were prepared to use violence to

circumvent democratic parliamentary avenues for change. Fascist violence transcended its

instrumental value, and was imbued with a symbolic, aesthetic, and epistemological value that

was reflected in the words, actions, structures, appearances, and ideas of fascist movements

and regimes. Fascism became an assertion of ‘natural’, instinctive, primordial man over the

Enlightenment philosophies of liberalism and egalitarianism, and against the internationalism

of Marxist politics. Influenced by European colonial traditions of racially-conceived

expansionism and exploitation, Hitler and the Nazi Party emphasized racial nationalism, and

identified a supposed Jewish Communist conspiracy as the existential enemy of the white race.

383 Gilbert Allardyce in Goodfellow, ‘Fascism as a Transnational Movement’, 105 384 Goodfellow, 105

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Hitler styled himself as Europe’s defender against this enemy, and, believing that it would be

a fight to the death, led a regime that perpetrated a genocide that killed six million European

Jews.

Hitler and the Nazi regime gave Stephensen an identifiable focal point and reference

for ideas that he had been nurturing his whole life. He was born in the year of Federation, 1901,

into a settler-colonial culture where notions of race and nation defined the national character.

The White Australia Policy, which was broadly supported by Australian politicians and the

public, gave a name to an assortment of social and political mechanisms that aimed to preserve

the white racial homogeneity of Australia. This necessitated excluding First Nations people

from the nation, and where possible, keeping neighbouring populations outside the geographic

boundaries of the continent. Maintaining a white Australia, it was believed, was necessary to

maintain the free and prosperous society which the white race was alone capable of creating.

For many, this notion of white Australia connected them to Britain. Stephensen, on the other

hand, believed in Australian national uniqueness, born of the relationship between the

European race and the Australian natural environment. Stephensen’s vision was the Nazi vision

of a biological nation as the transcendent organizing principle, and the expression of a spirit of

a people unified by blood.

Stephensen grew up in the wake of the First World War, and like others of his

generation, diagnosed the cause of the war as a weak, decadent culture and society that had

taken hold of Europe. European culture, which included Australia, was in need of an urgent

revitalization, a shining vision to push back the moribund forces of modernism. Stephensen

fought for a new world in both politics and culture. As an active member of the Communist

Party in Australia, England, and France, Stephensen fought for the overthrow of liberal

democracy; as a publisher for Norman and Jack Lindsay, D. H. Lawrence, the late Friedrich

Nietzsche, and Aleister Crowley, Stephensen fought for a social and cultural revolution,

echoing the fascist call for Europe’s political, social, and spiritual regeneration.

After Stephensen returned to Australia, he focused on fighting for the emergence of a

sovereign Australian nation. He embarked on a cultural crusade that he hoped would free

Australia from the chains of British Imperialism, and wake Australians up to the dangers of

Empire loyalty. This crusade would have been doomed to bankruptcy if it wasn’t for William

John Miles, a fellow obstinate anti-British nationalist, albeit one with the financial means to

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follow up his rhetoric with action. Together, Stephensen and Miles embarked upon The

Publicist, which, by the end of the 1930s, supported Hitler as a strong, authoritarian, nationalist

leader, who was defending Germany against not only British imperialism but Judeo-

Bolshevism. Stephensen recognized his own vision of a racially pure sovereign nation fighting

against the decadent forces of modern culture and Communist internationalism in Hitler and

the fascist movement, and embraced Hitler as the defender of white nations against an

international Jewish-Communist conspiracy. He thus adopted, in public, the fascist cause. He

warned of the international Jewish conspiracy in terms familiar to Australians, evoking the

White Australia Policy in his support for Hitler’s anti-Semitic crusade. Through a complex

process made murky and opaque by overlapping and distinct contexts, ideas, and influences,

Stephensen adopted fascist ideas in the interwar period, adapting them to his own context.

Internment did nothing to change Stephensen’s views. On the contrary, internment

connected Stephensen with those who shared those views. It also alienated him from the rest

of the Australia First internees. The various processes of appeals and release contributed to this

estrangement, as Stephensen saw himself as a scapegoat for both the government and those

who participated in its processes and accepted its terms. Stephensen was the last AFM member

in internment, and was only released after the end of the war, in August 1945. By that point,

he had grown distant from the more moderate members of his milieu, and closer to the

extremists.

The world into which Stephensen emerged had changed drastically during the Second

World War. Fascism was now associated with a devastating war instigated by Hitler. Allied

forces entering Nazi concentration and extermination camps were confronted with scenes of

mass murder and the brutal treatment of concentration camp inmates, and transferred stories,

images, and film to Australia. The International Military Tribunal which took place at

Nuremberg from November 1945 to October 1946 unearthed further evidence of Nazi genocide

against European Jews. Fascism and Nazism became indelibly linked with these horrors. Many

observers rejected Nazism’s ideological supports of racism, ultra-nationalism, and anti-

Semitism, which had led to the Holocaust. Those who, like Stephensen, still believed in the

cause, had to adjust to a new environment of mainstream hostility.

Stephensen found support and validation in a small number of like-minded actors after

the war. These included those who, like Tom Graham, had been interned with Stephensen, or,

88

like Charles Willyan, knew what the internment experience was like. It also included those

who had avoided internment, but who shared Stephensen’s anti-Semitic beliefs, like Hardy

Wilson, or, in the case of V. L. Borin, a European political operative who continued his anti-

Communist fight in Australia. Such like-minded actors consoled and encouraged each other

emotionally and ideologically, circulating and preserving ideas that they couldn’t find support

for in the cultural and political mainstream. They passed information, material, and resources

to one another. Stephensen encouraged Tom Graham’s efforts to build a strong, internationally

connected National Socialist movement, and De Wykeham de Louth’s attempts to expose the

Jewish conspiracy that they both believed was threatening the nations of the world. Stephensen

applied his literary skills, both in a professional and private capacity, to helping craft the anti-

Communist, anti-Labor, anti-Semitic message of those he agreed with, and to disseminating it

more widely. He also attempted to reach out to those in the political mainstream, censoring his

message according to his audience. Stephensen played an important role in this network: he

was a conduit for ideas, material, and information, and provided and received encouragement

for the spread and retention of fascist ideology. He became embedded in a network that

included the internationally-connected Australian extreme-Right organisations that emerged in

the late 1950s and early 1960s. Stephensen was not politically inactive after 1945, but played

a significant role in the survival and transmission of fascism in Australia.

This mutually-re-enforcing network enabled Stephensen to maintain the fascist

ideology that he had developed and adopted prior to internment. Core tenets of this ideology

faced challenges in the post-war period. The revelations of the Holocaust had initiated an

international anti-racism movement that, along with changing migration demographics,

challenged the ideological pillars of the White Australia Policy. Stephensen nevertheless

remained committed to the Policy, and defended its foundational ideas of a naturally-occurring,

racially homogenous, superior white nation. Of course, in light of Stephensen’s anti-Semitism,

this nation would exclude the Jews, who Stephensen still positioned as a racial other, alongside

other inferior non-white races. Stephensen also moved away from emphasizing the racial

uniqueness of Australians, to focusing on transnational racial solidarity with other white

nations. The White Australia Policy accommodated both ideas, and this didn’t threaten

Stephensen’s support for the Policy.

Stephensen remained a Holocaust denier until his death. He was suspicious of reports

about the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews. He viewed the Nuremberg Trials as an example of

89

‘victor’s justice’, likening them to the show-trial of Trotsky. Even news from friends about the

deaths of their loved-ones in Nazi concentration camps failed to make Stephensen re-consider

his beliefs. He continued to believe in the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy that Hitler had outlined,

in which the racial character of the Jews drove a quest for world domination that lay behind

attempts to destroy white nations through racial ‘miscegenation’ and Communism. He believed

that this Jewish conspiracy had brought down Hitler, and was now threatening the remaining

white nations of the world, including Britain and Australia. He hoped for a union of white

nations against the Jewish conspiracy, and spoke about the removal of the Jews from Australia.

These views perpetuated fascist anti-Semitism, valorised Hitler, minimalized the horrors of the

Holocaust, and had the potential to incite anti-Semitic violence, as Stephensen shared his views

amongst the post-war extreme-Right network.

Stephensen also demonstrated an ability to reach outside of these marginalized

networks, in order to leverage points of commonality with mainstream Australia. Stephensen

took advantage of popular anti-Communist sentiment, and the Royal Commission into

Espionage that followed the Petrov affair, to reach out to Sir Garfield Barwick and offer his

own experience as proof of the Communist plot at work in Australia. The fear of Communism

allowed Stephensen to recast the Australia First Movement as an anti-Communist movement,

and himself as a victim of anti-Australian forces, rather than a traitor. It also enabled him to

fight his campaign against the Jewish conspiracy that he believed was behind Communism, but

as with his defence of the White Australia Policy, he could do so without revealing the full

extent of his beliefs. This self-censorship for a mainstream audience illustrates Stephensen’s

attempts to extend his impact outside of the marginalized extreme-Right.

This thesis follows numerous studies of Percy Reginald Stephensen, who was a

significant figure in Australian literary and cultural history. It offers a new conceptualization

of Stephensen, not as an Australian literary nationalist who supported Hitler and shared some

ideas with European fascists, but as a member of the transnational fascist movement, and a

component of the fascist phenomenon, that spread across the globe in the interwar period and

survived the defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in 1945. It thereby contributes to

understanding how fascism spread, and manifested in context-specific forms, through

processes of adoption and adaptation, as well as the role of subcultural networks in the survival

and transmission of fascism after the Second World War. It also sheds further light on the ideas

that circulated amongst the post-war extreme-Right, particularly in Australia. It is therefore

90

hoped that this thesis contributes to understanding not only the history of fascism and the

Australian extreme-Right, but their present-day manifestations.

91

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