The night Australian fascism should have died of embarrassment

You’d think it was fiction if the story of the White Army hadn’t been analysed in monumental detail by historian Michael Cathcart in a university thesis in 1985, which he later turned into a riveting book titled Defending the National Tuckshop: Australia’s Secret Army Intrigue of 1931.

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He related that in the Wimmera town of Donald, Protestant militia men were issued ammunition – 500 rounds a man, according to one informant – in response to the rumour that the local priest, Father Coghlan, and a doctor named Flanagan had been ferrying arms to Catholics throughout the district. A dentist by the name of Kelly was reported to be transporting crates of bombs…which turned out to be boxes of tomatoes. Meanwhile, Catholics gathered at the convent, readying for an attack by Protestant militiamen.

At Wedderburn, 225 kilometres down the Calder Highway from Ouyen, the local cell of the White Army, armed with guns and pitchforks, stopped cars and threatened to shoot travellers unless they hoisted white flags. Two men climbed gum trees to guard the town’s water reservoir – and were left there, forgotten for almost two days after their mates had stood down.

Sensible Victorians were shocked in recent weeks by the sight of black-clad neo-Nazi thugs marching and brawling their way through Melbourne’s streets.

Yet, there are no more than a few hundred active neo-Nazis around.

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of citizens were quietly recruited by the White Army in Victoria and its allied fascist New Guard in NSW.

As the Great Depression bit hard, the White Army, which otherwise went by the name League of National Security, was established as a clandestine, extreme right-wing paramilitary led by none other than the chief commissioner of the Victoria Police, Thomas Blamey, along with various like-minded characters including senior military officers.

Blamey expressed public admiration during the 1930s for the fascist dictator of Italy, Benito Mussolini, and spoke approvingly on Melbourne’s radio 3UZ of the German National Socialist (Nazi) movement, which he saw building “a new generation in Germany … growing up with a sense of purpose, direction and discipline”.

When World War II broke out, Blamey put that all behind him.

He was given responsibility for leading Australian troops against Hitler’s and Mussolini’s armies in the Middle East and Greece.

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Blamey had already served with distinction during World War I, rising to the rank of brigadier-general.

He would rise in World War II to command the Australian Imperial Force in the Middle East and later became commander of Allied Land Forces in the South West Pacific Area under America’s general Douglas MacArthur.

But between the wars, his authoritarian streak led him to veer so far to the right that he felt it necessary to establish a covert paramilitary ready to emerge when the Bolsheviks, aided by Catholics and the unemployed, rose in revolution.

Fascism, of course, can’t exist without enemies, real or imagined.

Today’s fascists, the neo-Nazis, have chosen immigrants as their targets, along with Indigenous Australians and anyone from the left.

Anti-immigration has long been a fruitful trough for the hateful, getting its start in Australia during the gold rush when Chinese miners were beaten and terrorised.

By the 1930s, however, the White Australia policy was so well-established there weren’t many immigrants to incite the ire of the fascists.

Threats, thus, needed to be manufactured.

Catholics, most of them of Irish background, had voted heavily against conscription during World War I, and they tended to vote Labor.

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Catholics, then, in the minds of the White Army’s boosters, were surely natural allies of the Bolsheviks, even if this ignored the fact that Catholics and communists not only had nothing in common, but outright opposed each other.

The growing ranks of Depression-era unemployed were added as a handy threat, the jobless having always been easy marks.

Even though there were too few actual communists in Australia to form anything approaching a revolutionary army, the concocted vision of a treasonous threat from a Bolshevik, Catholic and jobless alliance made it easy to alarm the gullible and enlist “patriots” into Blamey’s clandestine army.

It all began falling apart, unsurprisingly, when it became obvious after the night of madness that no Bolshevik revolution was imminent.

World War II, when the world learned the depth of evil that fascism really meant, killed whatever remnants of the White Army that hadn’t already died of embarrassment.

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Yet here we are, 94 years after that night of irrational panic on March 6, 1931.

A new round of trumped-up alarm at the latest bogeyman – “mass immigration” – has enabled the latest iteration of Australia’s fascists to hitch themselves to a broad alliance of “patriotic” Australians so worked up that when they took to the streets a couple of weeks ago, they actually allowed the neo-Nazi goons to lead their marches and gave them a podium to spruik their poison.

The more things change …

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