Beer in the gutters

For an historical trip into a real war look no further than D.S. Bird's Nazi Dreamtime, the story of Australia's very own home-cooked and very cookie Nazis from the 1930s ... Aborigines as "Black Aryans" and other peculiarities ... Procrustes ... Book review 

The queer fish who inspired the Bunyip Critic

WITH John Howard's passing, the heat has gone out of Australia's history wars, or perhaps the sinecures of office are no longer available to the protagonists as reward for their efforts.

Who could forget, for instance, Keith Windschuttle's denunciation of the Tasmanian Aborigines as having self-destructed through their own cultural deficiency.

A circus of characters emerges from David Bird's book Nazi Dreamtime, all of whom would have been rated clowns, if not for the darkening international climate in the 1930s.

Stephensen, "Bunyip Critic"The styles ranged from the ultra-nationalist ranting of Percy (Inky) Stephensen, through the Odinism of dilettante solicitor A.R. Mills (writing as Tasman Firth), to the outright ratbaggery of Adela Pankhurst Walsh.

Undoubtedly, Inky is the main protagonist.

Queensland's Rhodes' Scholar for 1925, he tried his hand and failed as a publisher in London, and on his return home in 1932, in Sydney.

Somehow, as Germany's mad fever was about to take hold, Inky was seized by the bug of nationalism, which carried with it the bacillus of anti-semitism.

The root cause of this madness, particularly in an Australian setting, still puzzles Procrustes, but it was de riguer for Stephensen and his associates.

The principal among them was Billy Miles, a retired accountant with sufficient private means to support a £50 per week gambling habit (about $4,000 to $5,000 today) and a subsidy of £5 per week to Stephensen to support his publishing enterprise, The Publicist. 

The Publicist, subsidised by accountant and gambler Billy Miles

IN tracking the subsidy, Bird is on the right track: follow the money.  A self-inflated "leader" such as Stephensen, a failure in all he undertook, would never have been in a position to cause trouble without secret subventions from those seeking a right-wing front.

The Publicist from 1936 gave Stephensen, the self-appointed "Bunyip Critic", to Miles' "Kookaburra", a platform for preaching ultra-Australian nationalism and anti-semitism, while promoting poets and writers of a nationalist bent, of whom Xavier Herbert is now the only name standing.

Herbert was careful to steer away from Inky soon after Capricornia was published with help from The Publicist.

Most of the material now reads like an incoherent dirge, but the Bunyip Critic was determined on a two pronged strategy involving "poeticals" and "politicals".

The former wrote mightily if inelegantly, but Stephensen lacked the courage to develop a political machine.

On they chugged through the 1930s, with Miles' daughter Bea, later the scourge of Sydney taxi drivers, doing readings at meetings of the faithful. 

Academics provided a camp follower chorus, if not at the meetings, as did then Attorney General Menzies. Old habits die hard, and your correspondent is old enough to remember members of Prof. Eben Waterhouse's family still proud, 30 years after the event, of his audience with the Fuhrer in 1934.

Australian National Socialism emerged as a queer fish, loathing Jews, but proclaiming Australian indigenous to be Black Aryans, and therefore among the blessed.

The amazing aspect of this nonsense was that it didn't blow away with the war in 1939.

If anything it became even more turgid and it was only after Inky and his mates ran public meetings in the wake of Pearl Harbor, proclaiming the virtues of National Socialism, that the authorities acted and after years of shadowing Stephensen (and misspelling his name) interned him and a few others for the duration.

Amid the rich mixture of failed self-publicists and prolix poets, some are outstanding for their total detachment from reality.

Adela Pankhurst Walsh is one such, described by a contemporary as "a screaming ratbag if ever there was one". 

This youngest daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, the leading suffragette, is last noted in Nazi Dreamtime in 1942 still espousing pro-Japanese views.

She had by then a two decade track record of public interest litigation in Australia, together with her labour organiser husband, Tom Walsh.

Adela's star set just three-quarters of a century after her father was counsel for 5,000 women in Manchester seeking a place on the electoral rolls in the 1868 case of Chorlton v Lings.

The women lost, but the future Mrs Pankhurst had spotted her man, who was passionate about women's rights.

There's also a chapter in Bird's book on the Australians who actually served for the Reich during the war.

We had our own Lord Haw Haw, although she escaped the noose, and four prisoners of war put on field grey to serve in the Britischer Frei Korp, led by a New Zealander named Roy Courlander. 

This brought a shock of recognition, as it is 50 years since Procrustes met Courlander in Sydney, by then a spiv driving an E-type Jaguar. Bird leaves him as a pub bore in Auckland in the 1950s. 

I checked the New Zealand Law Reports and, yes, they had shown a refusal of Courlander's appeal against a 15 year sentence, but the kindly NZers let him out after only six.

What is utterly unnerving in the burlesque (and the Odinists and "esoteric Nazis" kept on after the war) is the total faith all expressed in the worthlessness of the ordinary members of the community.

Democracy was to be cast aside in favour of "leadership" by this unelected, self-appointed "elite" of misfits and failures.

The Art Gallery of NSW's collection of works from this period by Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington-Smith and other women confronts the lie.

Art of dignity and depth recorded the development of Australian community and culture, without a Fuhrer in sight.

Procrustes' only remaining friends from long ago school days are both sons of Jewish refugees who made it in 1938 to the safety of these shores.

It's lucky for this country that, as one of them put it to me, there will never be blood in the gutters of Australia, only beer. 

Nazi Dreamtime - Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler's Germany
Australian Scholarly Publishing, $44