by K. R. Bolton
AUSTRALIAN NATIONALIST
Stephensen’s eight-year stay in England seems to have been influential in making him an Australian nationalist. Perhaps it was a simple matter of homesickness. In any case, he left in 1932, feeling that Britain was headed for “inevitable decline” in which he saw possibility of “an Australian resurgence.”265 Settling in Sydney, Stephensen resumed his publishing career as managing director of the Endeavour Press (funded by the Bulletin magazine) and turned out more than 30 volumes of Australian literature.266 Stephensen’s attempts to launch his own publishing ventures were financially unsuccessful, although he had become a recognized figure in Australian literature and vice-president of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. He was also by now advocating what he called “Australia First.”267
FOUNDATIONS OF AUSTRALIAN CULTURE
In July 1935 Stephensen published The Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self Respect.268 It is a vigorous call for an Australian national culture, which has remained influential in literary circles although seldom acknowledged as such.
Stephensen, despite his own defense of the Aborigines and his opposition to Australian colonial “cultural cringe,” states as one of his first axioms that Australian culture begins with the arrival of the British. From this rich heritage of Europe could arise a uniquely Australian culture which would evolve by the impress of “Time and Place”:
As the culture of every nation is an intellectual and emotional expression of the genius loci, our Australian culture will diverge from the purely local color of the British Islands, to the precise extent that our environment differs from that of Britain. A hemisphere separates us from “home.” We are Antipodeans; a gum tree is not a branch of an oak; our Australia culture will evolve distinctively.
. . . what is a national culture? Is it not the expression, in thought form, of art-form, of the Spirit of a Race and of a Place?
It is culture that provides “permanence” for a nation while all else moves on. Culture transcends “modernism” and the ephemeral nature of politics, society, and economics. Race and Place are the two permanent elements in a culture, and Place, I think, is even more important than Race in giving that culture its direction. When races migrate, taking their culture with them, to a new Place, the culture becomes modified. It is the spirit of a Place that ultimately gives any human culture its distinctiveness.
It is literature, according to Stephensen, that gives the greatest sense of Place and Race and Permanence to a nation and which indeed creates the nation. Robert Burns is an example of the way Scotland as an “idea” is expressed. With England, it is Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens, more so than the politicians, merchants and soldiers. The “idea” of the French nation has been likewise expressed through Montaigne, Rabelais, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Balzac. Germany lives in Goethe, Heine, Kant, Hegel, and Richard Wagner. Russia has Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Maxim Gorky; Scandinavia, Ibsen and Knut Hamsun.
However, in the case of Australia, art was more reflective of an emerging Australian culture than was its literature. Early Australian literature based around the Bulletin magazine, and epitomized by poets and writers such as Henry Lawson, was of a rough nature because it was a radical response to British denigration of Australians as “convicts.”
Landscape painting in Australia, however, was never based on a journalistic element. Landscape painters had to examine Australia carefully, expressing “the Spirit of the Place,” the strange contours of the land, the solitude, and the light quality of the atmosphere that symbolize most purely what is Australian. Australian painters were also dependent upon a national audience and market, not a world market where art is prostituted for money. The painting is individual, while the book is mass produced.
Although art can be appreciated internationally it is “nationally created,” “formed locally no matter how it might travel.” Regardless of how travel and communication break down barriers, local cultures remain. A creative thinker contributes to the culture of his own people first, and then to the culture of the world. But a writer or an artist needs the stimulus of his own people.
Despite the universalizing tendencies at work, Australia had the right to become a nation, but there cannot be a nation without “a national place idea, a national culture.” Stephensen’s view of culture as “national” rather than “universal” was widely held by the culture-bearing strata throughout the world. It is also strictly analogous to the sentiments of Rex Fairburn in New Zealand, in response to the communist fad among many contemporaries.
Stephensen attacks those academics who sought to demean Australia as a nation and as a culture by forever subordinating Australia to Britain and to the British Empire. He acknowledges that it is English culture from which Australian culture will proceed. But it is the growing plant, rather than the English fertilizer, that should now be of concern. Culture is the essence of nationality, and the nation an extension of the individuals that comprise it “generation after generation.” Nationality gives the individual a sense of pride and meaning.
Stephensen draws on a cyclical Spenglerian understanding of history in holding that nations and empires undergo decline over the course of centuries. Stephensen’s Spenglerianism was also reflected in an essay in which the cyclic paradigm is used to show that the British Empire, like any other, was subjected to historical laws of rise and fall. He foretells Britain’s decline during the twentieth century, and maintains that on its ruins Australia would find its own identity and destiny:
History is the tale of waxing and waning empires. All empires have waxed before waning. Britain’s Empire has waxed—will it now wane? Yes, inevitably. An empire is no more permanent than an oak-tree: the mightiest oak must fall, rotting hollow at the core. Everything that has life in it has death in it, too. A moment of rapture, or a moment of power, cannot be prolonged unduly beyond its zenith. Where there has been strength and greatness, there must come sequent decline and fall. Without deaths, there would be no births. Death is necessary, to make way for more life. Old empires, old cultures, must crash—and Britain’s Empire with them—to make way for new empires, new cultures. Who would have it otherwise? Only those who object to death’s inevitability and to time’s changes! Let them object—the objection is noted—and history’s blind processes go on.269
Bruce Muirden, for reasons unknown, states that Foundations “was probably to be [Stephensen’s] final public statement as a liberal.” And Stephensen was even then referring to fascism as more a danger to Australia than Bolshevism ever could be (he regarded Bolshevism as “at least [having] a humanitarian goal”270). Nonetheless, Foundations is unmistakably of the “Right,” with its emphasis on the “spirit of race and place,” that has no association with the Left, let alone with “liberalism.” This Rightist orientation was soon to be reflected in Stephensen’s new political associations, which he maintained for the rest of his life.
THE PUBLICIST
W. J. Miles was a wealthy businessman whose First World War activities included opposition to conscription and advocacy of the concept of “Australia First.” In 1935, he contacted Stephensen after reading Foundations. Together they launched a magazine, The Publicist, which lasted until 1942. It was described as “the paper loyal to Australia First.” Miles was in editorial control, and his views were overtly pro-Axis. German, Italian, and Japanese propaganda material was sold at the Publicist offices.271 A free hand for Japan in China was supported at a time when the Left was calling for a boycott of Japan.272
Stephensen viewed Japan as “the only country in the world completely free of international Jew Finance.”273 He believed that there would be a world war involving Australia within a few years. He saw no advantage to Australia in sending her men to spill their blood in Europe.274 Many Australians remembered the huge losses suffered during World War I caused in part by the unrealistic orders of British commanders. Already in 1936 The Publicist was running a satirical recruiting poster referring to the c
oming “Great European War”: “Don’t Go Your Country Needs You. Australia will be Here.”275 In 1939, as the crisis in Europe was fast approaching, Stephensen wrote, “Why need Australians bemoan the absorption of Czechoslovakia by Germany when Australia is already ‘absorbed’ by British and American Jew-Capitalists?”
Despite the radical tone of Miles and Stephensen, The Publicist attracted a number of prominent cultural figures, such as Ian Mudie and Rex Ingamells,276 who wrote on the arts. It also offered a generous amount of space to its enemies for right of reply. In 1939 Stephensen advocated the need for a heroic leader, “a man of harsh vitality, a born leader, a man of action, no what sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. Fanatics are needed, crude harsh men, not sweetened and decorous men, to arouse us from the lethargy of decadence, softness and lies which threatens death to white Australia.”277
Democracy was part of the weakness and decay of the modern world. In a radio talk in 1938 Stephensen stated, “We oppose democracy as a political system, because we believe it can never evolve the bold leadership that will be necessary to guide Australia through the difficulties of the coming year.”278
TOWARDS A PARTY
Between 1936 and 1937 The Publicist started putting forward broad points of policy for the establishment of an Australia First Party.279 In 1938 readers’ groups suggested a twelve-point program as a basis for discussion. The principal group was the Yabber Club in Sydney, whose attendees included Mudie.280 When war was declared, the Australian authorities began to scrutinize the Yabber Club, but their informants could find nothing sinister about it.
In the September issue of The Publicist, Stephensen stated that he had campaigned for peace with Germany, since any war Australia fought should be for Australian rather than Jewish interests.281 The Publicist was now subjected to wartime censorship and paper restrictions. However, only one article, and not one by Stephensen,282 was ever blocked by the authorities. This indicates that The Publicist was not considered subversive by the censorship board. Naturally, the Left was not so charitable, and referred to The Publicist as the center of a “Nazi Underworld,” although the position of the Communists at this stage of the war was hardly intended to be helpful to the Allies.
While the pro-Germany sentiments had to be toned down during 1940, The Publicist maintained its friendly attitude towards Japan. Once Australia was engaged in the war with Japan, the journal opposed any defeatist tendencies but continued to advocate home defense rather than sending Australian troops far afield, and the right to negotiate independently and to sue for a separate peace.
After several years of tentative activities Stephensen formed the Australia First Movement in September 1941. A major element in the formation of the movement was the Sydney Women’s Guild of Empire, formerly antagonistic towards The Publicist due to the issue of loyalty to Britain. The mainstay of the Guild was Adele Pankhurst Walsh of the British suffragette family. On migrating to Australia, she had married the militant Seamen’s Union organizer Tom Walsh in 1917. Both became founding members of the Australian Communist Party. Breaking with communism, Tom joined and lectured for the “New Guard”283 and was outspokenly pro-Japanese.284
A ten-point manifesto was adopted, superseding Stephensen’s more radical manifesto of 1940. The movement demanded recall of Australian troops from overseas, independent action in diplomacy, and the removal of American influence.285
A number of public meetings involved hecklers. However, a meeting in February 1942, which had an audience of around 300, erupted into what the press termed “one of the worst brawls ever to occur in a Sydney public hall.” Half the audience was antagonistic, and Stephensen in particular was met with opposition. He was hit over the head with a water carafe, knocked to the floor, and kicked by a group. The police were slow to respond. However, once order was established, Stephensen continued with the meeting despite the beating, and continuing interjections. Stephensen addressed the meeting for around eighty minutes. He demanded that American troops in Australia be subject to Australian command and stated that they should be there to protect Australia, not to further American objectives.286
On orders from the Attorney General Dr. Evatt, the police prevented Australia First from holding further public meetings. At a later meeting, a crowd of 3000 showed up to listen to Stephensen, only to find the meeting canceled by government directive.287
STEPHENSEN’S POLITICAL DEMANDS
Because the movement was now unable to have public meetings, Stephensen regretted that it would have to exist as, in effect, a social club until after the war. Stephensen’s ideas for a post-war party included policies more far-ranging and elaborate than anything hitherto printed in The Publicist. In particular, they convey Stephensen’s aversion to democracy as causing party and economic divisions, appealing to the lowest common denominator for vote-catching purposes, undermining leadership, avoiding responsibility, and leading to “decay.”
Stephensen posited his 50-point manifesto for an Australia First Party to be founded after the war, in the May 1, 1940 issue of The Publicist. This was presented as a series of for-and-against propositions. For example:
6. For national socialism; against international communism.
[. . .]
14. For higher birth-rate; against immigration.
15. For “White” Australia; against heterogeneity.
16. For Aryanism; against Semitism.
[. . .]
35. For women in the home; against women in industry.288
On August 1, 1941 under the heading “Towards a New Order,” it was stated that these were principles, not planks, for a democratic parliamentary party. The article was an explication of the Fifty-Point program of May 1940. “Our self-imposed task was to throw a stone into the stagnant pond of Australian political complacency,” Stephensen writes in the preamble. He states that the war gave birth to the need for forms of government other than democracy, despite the war supposedly being fought for democracy. The war aims made sectional interests redundant in the service of the common interest.289 This perception had formed the basis of fascist movements after the First World War among many returned servicemen, in what Mosley called “the socialism of the trenches,” a camaraderie of soldiers that many held should be brought over into peacetime civil life. The aftermath of the Second World War, however, did not see another revival of that spirit for reasons that cannot detain us here.
The first three points call for Australian cultural and political self-reliance, against imitating ideas from abroad and dependency upon others. A “distinctive national Australian culture” is regarded as the prerequisite for “National Unity, National Consciousness, and National Survival.” The fourth point calls for “nationalism, against internationalism.” Nations are natural political units defined by racial and political factors.
Point 6 favors “national socialism, against international communism.” However, Stephensen repudiates any monopoly of the term National Socialism by Germany. “We support all NATIONAL forms of socialism, as against the international version of socialism favored by Marxism.” In those sectors of the economy where private interests would become a power over the nation, the state would be required to intervene.
Further points call for frankness and honesty in diplomacy, with a “live and let live” attitude minus the moralizing towards others that leads to war. The emphasis on defense was about protecting Australia, rather than serving other interests overseas. An attitude of friendliness was to be fostered towards nations bordering the Pacific Ocean, which could only be achieved when Australia was not subordinate militarily and diplomatically to British or other interests.
Stephensen considers a declining birth rate a symptom of decadence which would lead to the extinction of Australia, especially when there were suggestions to make up for the population shortfall through immigration, one of the panaceas for demographic decline that is now routinely touted by politicians in Australia and New Zealand. He called for a white Australia as a
“biological aim” to create a permanent home for persons of “European racial derivation.” This would exclude “Semites” and other non-absorbable immigrants.
However, Stephensen’s championship of “Aryanism” cannot be dismissed as simple racial supremacism. Stephensen was an avid supporter of Aborigine rights, serving as secretary of the Aborigines’ Citizenship Committee, which supported the Aborigines’ Progressive Association comprised of an Aborigine only membership. The Abo Call was a magazine that sold in the Publicist office alongside the Axis journals. Stephensen helped Aborigines organize the “Aborigine’s Day of Mourning” on January 26, 1939, the 150th anniversary of the “founding of Australia.”290 The sympathy of Australian nationalists with the Aborigine, decades before the issue became a cliché for liberals and “progressives” of all types, was seen by such cultural nationalists as an essential part of formulating a mythos of the nature of Australia that harks back to its earliest days of settlement as a unique southern continent. It was a matter of particular interest to Rex Ingamell’s cultural-nationalist Jindyworobak movement, which had an informal association with Australia First.
Introducing women into the workplace and away from child-bearing under the name of “feminism” is attacked as leading to the decline in the birth-rate as well as undermining the wage standard.
Much of the rest of the manifesto is an attack on the democratic and parliamentary system. Interestingly, in this light, despite Stephensen’s aversion to British and other outside influence, he upheld hereditary monarchy rather than the idea of a republic with an elected head of state. Stephensen desired a government of statesmen with firm, long-term principles, as opposed to short-term vote pandering by political parties leading to compromise and demagoguery rather than the sometimes-harsh policies required for survival. Despite a specifically Australian nationalism, monarchy could reasonably be seen as the best form of government suited to the idea of “permanence,” rather than petty political transience.
