One hundred years ago tomorrow, 5 August 1914, at 12.39pm (EST), the first hostile action of World War I took place, not in Europe but in the eastern entrance to Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. Refer also to my earlier blog of 27 February 2014, First engagement of hostilities? Very odd angry shots indeed!, for more details of the circumstances.
The first shot came from the Australian military gun emplacements stationed at Fort Nepean on the extremity of Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula overlooking the stretch of open water which separates Port Phillip Bay from the Bass Strait. The target was a German steamer, the SS Pfalz, (the name a reference to the German Rhineland-Palatinate region), was carrying 200 tons of coal intended to supply the nearby warships of the Pacific Squadron of the Imperial German Navy.
The incident that followed is now reasonably widely known – Britain (and by necessity, the British Empire) was expected to declare war on Germany that day. As soon as the news was cabled through from London that this had happened, on instructions from the naval command at nearby Fort Queenscliff, the Fort Nepean battery was given a command to stop the (now enemy) vessel from leaving Australian waters. Two warning volleys were fired from the Fort battery before the German captain surrendered (it seems scarcely credible to believe but the first hostile shot launched by the Allied side in the Second World War 25 years later was also fired from the same gun at Fort Nepean!)
The not-so-certain element of this story is the intriguing question of who actually fired on the SS Pfalz, effectively the first shots of World War I. Among the numerous news items currently circulating in the Australian press, the Age identifies Sergeant John Purdue as the individual who fired that first momentous shot 100 years ago [“Fort Nepean’s Sergeant John Purdue fired first shot of World War I”, The Age, 4 August 2014]. Concurrently with this, some papers are running articles on the role of Corporal William Carlin, which suggest that it was Carlin who fired the first shot [“Historic shot echoes a day later”, The Standard (Warrnbl. Vic.) 4 August 2014; “Marshall’s First Shot Connection”, The Surf Coast News (Bell. Pen. Vic.) 31 July 2014]. Both servicemen are now long deceased, and interviews with members of their families reveal their great pride in the part played by their respective kinsman.
Ft Nepean today
The apparent contradiction can be possibly explained as Sgt. Purdue issuing the on-the-ground command to fire, and Corp. Carlin, or another gunner, launching the shells. Given that the gun emplacement crew at Fort Nepean consisted of five or six men, the reality is that we will probably never know in any definitive sense which gunner fired the first shots across the bow of the German coal steamer. At the very least, we do know that both Sgt. Purdue and Corp. Carlin played key roles in the exact operation which symbolically marked the onset of the World War’s hostilities.
◖◗ See also the earlier, related article on this blogsite – “First engagement of hostilities? Very odd angry shots indeed!”
Visionary thinkers in the 19th Century such as Robert Owen, Comte de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, provided the impetus for a whole host of attempts to create new communities which aspired to an ideal or utopian existence. Old Europe looked towards to the ‘New World’, the Americas, as the optimal location for the realisation of an ideal society. Many transplanted “would-be” utopian communities ended up in the United States (with bucolic names like New Harmony, Icaria, Fountain Grove and Altruria), but increasingly many seekers of a better life looked optimistically to the less developed reaches of South America as fertile ground for a model community (the US National Parks Service on its website www.nps.gov identifies literally hundreds of communal utopian experiments in the early period of the United States – article “The Amana Colonies: Utopias in America”).
In this piece I want to focus on two late 19th Century Paraguayan utopian experiments, the colonies of Nueva Germania and Nueva Australia. The German and the Australian colonies were both spectacularly unsuccessful in their aims, hardly surprising perhaps considering how unrealistically high they had set the bar, and how incredibly idealistic were their aims. On the surface the German and the Australian utopian experiments seem very different beasts, one a haven for Nordic exclusionists and the other for disillusioned Antipodean agrarian labourers, ideologically though, as I will attempt to show below, the two colonies had much in common in their character and aspirations.
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The remnants of Neuva Germania today
Neu Deutschland im Amerika: Germany’s “would-be” Aryan colony in the Americas
New Germany in Paraguay was the brainchild of Elizabeth Nietzsche and Bernhard Förster, the sister and brother-in-law of the great German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche. Förster had been prominent in the far right German People’s League, known for its extreme anti-Semitic nationalism. His big idea, supported by his wife, Elizabeth, was to create a model German community in the Americas which embodied Aryan racial purity, free from what the Försters believed to be the “virulent contamination of Europe by Jews”. In the febrile minds of the anti-Semitic couple, the virgin ground of depopulated rural Paraguay held the promise of creating an exclusively Aryan society.
In 1886 Förster and Nietzsche organised the emigration of a small number of select families from Saxony (who were characteristically Nordic in appearance) to South America. The scheme of the Försters was to build the foundations of a supreme Aryan ‘New World’ colony in the Paraguayan jungle. Förster’s hopes initially were high for Nueva Germania, envisaging an “idyllic Naumburg on the Aguarya-umi” River [Ben MacIntyre, Forgotten Fatherland]. In addition to the racial dimension, Förster and Frau Förster-Nietzsche’s Aryan utopia was based on the pillars of German nationalism, Lutheranism and vegetarianism [JF Williams, Daniela Krause & Harry Knowles “Flights from Modernity: German and Australian Utopian Colonies in Paraguay 1886-1896?”, Journal of Australian Studies (1 Sept 2001)].
The dreams of a German-South American Paráiso en Tierra very soon came to dust as the colony abjectly failed to establish any cohesion or viability. A combination of factors contributed to this including disease affecting the colonists, crop failure and infighting among the migrants from Saxony [Simon Romero, “German Outpost Born of Racism in 1887 Blends into Paraguay”, New York Times, 6 May 2013]. The fact that only a small proportion of the settlers were actually farmers was a factor in the colony’s inability to yield sufficient crops on their land [James Brooke, “Nueva Germania Journal; from a Bigot’s Planting, a Garden Assimilation”, NYT, 18 March 1991].
San Pedro (site of the Germany colony): in the middle of the country, south of Concepción
The elitist personal behaviour of the Försters in Nueva Germania affected the colony’s cohesion and disaffected its members. This manifested itself in displays of megalomania by Förster and the Försters’ demonstrably obvious social and economic advantage which markedly set them apart from the other colonists who were for the large part fairly impoverished families. For example, the Försters built themselves an elegant mansion in the San Pedro wilderness called ‘Försterhof‘, in stark contrast to the meagre and pitiful living conditions of the other settlers; the commune’s farmers in the fields were forced to stop work and submissively bow to Förster every time the overbearing leader rode past! [Romero, op.cit].
Other factors (including biological) undermined any prospect the colony of Nueva Germania ever had of flourishing. A community of only 14 families (as it was originally) would almost inevitably be vulnerable to the likelihood of some degree of inbreeding, especially given the racial homogeneity doctrine on which the commune was based [MacIntyre, op.cit.]. This only served to undermine harmony in the commune and exacerbated tensions among the settlers.
Commune leader Förster, in heavy debt, facing the spectre of bankruptcy and in despair at the utopian disaster, committed suicide in 1889. Nueva Germania struggled on without its main spearhead, now led by Elizabeth Nietzsche who made an attempt to recruit more members from the Fatherland – with little return for her efforts. However in 1893 Frau Förster-Nietzsche abandoned the Aryan Paraíso and it’s settlers, returning to Germany to take charge of her famous brother’s affairs and care for him (Nietzsche had fallen into a state of insanity probably as a result of contracting syphilis). In the years after the philosopher’s death in 1900 the warped Elizabeth proceeded to convert him into a kind of intellectual “pin-up boy” on behalf of the emerging Fascist and Nazi movements of Italy and Germany. Significant to note that Nietzsche, when still in full control of his faculties, had been on record as expressing his complete disapproval of anti-Semitism and of the Försters’ plans for establishing an Aryan colony. Elizabeth, who later became a wholehearted supporter of Hitler, criminally and comprehensively traduced her brother’s reputation by falsely resurrecting Nietzsche as a prophet of the German “master race” to come. [J. Golumb & RS Wistrich (Eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Nazism? On the Uses & Abuses of a Philosophy.]
Cassava, stable crop of NG
Following Elizabeth’s departure from Paraguay, the San Pedro-based colony of German farmers did not disappear altogether but limped on, surviving by scrimping together a bit of income from the growth of yerba mate and other subsistence crops. Nueva Germania (NG) still exists today in San Pedro – as far as ever from being remotely anything like a utopian community. With the bursting of the racial purity myth, the small group of German settlers intermarried with the local Mestizo–Guaraní-Spanish people, and as a result are not conspicuous from the rest of the Paraguayan population. They tend to speak Guaraní, the widely-spoken native language, in preference to German, and are set apart from other Paraguayans only by the retention of German family names (Fischer, Küch, Haudenschild, Stern, and so on).
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Australian economic and labour woes in the 1890s: Seeking a socialist paradise new start
The colony of ‘New Australia’ had its origins in the economic conditions and labour relations in pre-Federation Australia, especially in eastern Australia. In the early 1890s the onset of a crippling financial depression and a series of shearers’ and dock strikes in Queensland suppressed heavy-handedly by British troops fostered widespread disillusionment among bush workers. An idealistic English socialist journalist, William Lane, a maverick of the Australian labour movement, formed the New Australia Cooperation Settlement Association (NACSA) with the aim of establishing a “workers’ paradise” in South America.
The Association looked initially in Argentina for land to settle, but when this proved fruitless, Lane turned to neighbouring Paraguay where they found a government much more amenable. Lane’s scheme to export Australian workers suited the Paraguayan Government which was desperate to replenish the loss of manpower in the 1860s suffered in a disastrous war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay, hopelessly outmatched, by war’s end, lost its territorial access to the sea and somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of its male population during the war, leaving the country with an estimated total of only 28,000 adult males [Thomas Whigham, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, Latin American Research Review (1999)].
Consequently the Paraguayan Government freely granted NACSA an ample tract of grasslands near Villarica (in the modern-day Caaguazú Department),south-east of the capital, Asuncíon, to the new settlers. Lane brought over 200 colonists to Paraguay including the famous Australian socialist poet, Mary Gilmore, who was the colony’s schoolteacher. The settlement which became known as Colonía Nueva Australia met with formidable obstacles right from the outset.
Benign dictator of Nueva Australia?
A big part of the problem was the leadership itself. William Lane imposed strict rules on the community which alienated many who had followed him on the venture. Members of the colony were forbidden to drink, which given the combination of the oppressive heat and the plentiful supply of cheap caña (sugar cane rum) in Paraguay, was not a realistic proposition. Lane banned the male colonists from having sexual liaisons with the local Guaraní women, who given that they were 80 per cent of the population, was also an impractical notion. He also displayed a puritan streak by insisting that all members of the commune marry for life. In Lane’s own words, the colony was “a commonhold of English speaking whites, who accept among their principles, Life marriages, Teetotalism and the Colour Line.” [Cosme Monthly, Sept 1896].
‘Commandant’ Lane – a left-wing “Captain Bligh”
William Lane was by nature “autocratic, under pressure his simplistic communism and mateship developed a non-denominational but distinctly religious tinge” [Gavin Souter, ‘William Lane’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 9, (MUP), 1983]. Lane’s leadership style, like Föster’s, clearly inclined towards millenarianism and the messianic [John Kellett, “William Lane and ‘New Australia’, Labour History, 72 (May 1997)]
Racism was always a key feature of Lane’s credo of utopian socialism and his overall philosophy. Back in Australia, this had already shown itself in his race novel, White or Yellow? and in his strident opposition to the introduction of Polynesian labour in Australia. Lane’s vision of utopian socialism put great store on the exalted nature of ‘mateship‘, but as the South Australian Register reported on 1 January 1895, many of the settlers thought the leader impractical, “there was too much talk about mateship and not enough of crops and cattle” [Kellett, ibid.].
El Chaco Austral
Added to this, the conditions under which the Nueva Australinos found themselves were very harsh, the climate was inhospitable, the land was not as arable as had been hoped (less like outback Queensland than initially thought); mosquito and parasite infestation plagued them, tigrés or jaguarés prowled around the camps at night [Ben Stubbs, “The New Australians of South America”, www.australiangeographic.com.au]
Nueva Australia was established on the basis of a socialist cooperative enterprise, the colonists were compelled to commit all of their personal savings to a communal fund. Once underway, all cash in the colony was held collectively. Inevitably, this lead to bickering which was ongoing. Some members were accused of withholding money from the collective ‘kitty'[The West Australian, 29 December 1893, The Brisbane Courier, 9 July 1894]. Harmony within the colony by now was already strained.
Things only deteriorated, an anti-Lane faction developed and Lane expelled some of these dissenters from the commune. At the same time Lane was accused of favouring a friend of his who had transgressed the colony rules [JB Henderson, William Lane, the prophet of Socialism”, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, 8(3) 1968]. Inevitably there was a backlash against Lane’s ‘Law’ by the majority of the settlers. Ideological disputes and personality clashes intensified to the point where Lane was forced to break away from the original settlement and start a new community (he called Colonía Cosme) which adhered to his over-the-top brand of puritanism. The rebels under trade unionist Gilbert Casey maintained the original settlement, Nueva Australia, but disbanded the communistic methods in favour of a more individual approach to financial arrangements.
Banknote from ‘Colonía Neuva Australia‘
Both colonies continued to struggle for viability. The Australian newspapers of the day regularly reported entreaties to the authorities from individual families for assisted passage back to Australia owing to their destitution [Brisbane Courier, 12 February 1896, Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW), 20 January 1897]. Lane tried to recruit new members to Cosme from England but was only at best marginally successfully. By 1899 Lane himself had abandoned his own utopian project and returned to Australasia, eventually to do a political volte-face, becoming a conservative journalist in New Zealand.
By the end of the 1890s it was transparent to all that both utopian experiments were abject failures and the Paraguayan Government stepped in and ended the communal nature of the colonies, offering the remaining members (such as there were) individual plots of land to work. In this transformed fashion the settlements stumbled on, sans communism. Today the remnants of Lane’s idealist vision remain in two townships, one called Nueva Australia and the other (somewhat curiously), Nueva Londres.
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“Eugenically-pure”(sic) New Australia
One of the most pervasive and influential ideas in Western thinking in the late 19th Century was the notion of eugenics. This pseudo-scientific belief underpinned the theoretical framework of both Paraguayan utopian societies. The practice of strict racial separation, whether that be white/native American or German/Jew, was an essential tenet of Nuevo Germania and New Australia, based on the supposed inherent superiority of people of English/German stock. The widespread acceptance of Social Darwinism at that time fed into that self-perception of superiority. Lane envisaged a new type of Australian man of pure English (Anglo-Saxon) stock forged out of the South American jungle, an antidote to racial decay of the white man…the theoretical underpinnings of Lane’s ‘New Australia’ brought him uncomfortably close to Förster’s vision for Nueva Germania – an Australian colony in the wilderness providing the breeding ground for a new, higher and purer ‘race’ (sic) of Saxon stock [MacIntyre, op.cit; Williams, Krause & Knowles, op.cit.].
As indicated above, there were a number of distinct similarities between the leaders of the German and the Australian aspirational utopian colonies in their beliefs and prejudices. Both were religious fanatics imbued with peculiar forms of Agrarian Christian Socialism. Both were wowsers and racists harbouring a deep fear of miscegenation [Williams, Krause & Knowles, op.cit.].
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Remnants of Nueva Australia
PostScript: Inflexible, impractical, headstrong leadership and a failure to adapt to Paraguayan conditions
The Australian and German colonies in Paraguay in practice were neither utopian or viable. They failed, partly because, on both counts, there was a sense of unreality about the entire project. Poor leadership retarded the communes’ development. Lane and Förster’s fantastically dreamy visions were not rooted in anything concrete. “Authoritarianism for authoritarianism’s sake” succeeded only in alienating the settlement members. Both leaders were unrealistic in expecting them to blithely accept unreasonable demands that they abstain from drink, from meat, from physical contact with the local women, forgo money, and so on. In addition to all of this, the harshness of conditions in the jungle and wilderness of Paraguay tested the new settlers and repeated crop failures prevented them from making a decent economic livelihood from the land, condemning those that remained to a life of subsistence agriculture.
Most Australians have at some time or other glimpsed the grainy old Cinesound newsreel footage or the still pictures of the dramatic events of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932. What should have been a moment of glory for the NSW Premier, Jack Lang, declaring open Bradfield’s engineering wonder of a bridge, was turned into a minor public relations coup for a shadowy fringe paramilitary group called the New Guard through an audacious act by one of its members.
De Groot’s ‘coup’
Just as the Bridge ribbon was about to be cut by the NSW Premier, Captain Francis De Groot who had attached himself undetected to the escort cavalry, rode forward and pre-emptively slashed the ribbon. In doing so he declared the bridge open “in the name of all decent and respectable people of New South Wales”. De Groot, the Irish-born antique dealer, furniture restorer and part-time soldier, with one outrageous swipe of his sword, secured his “15 minutes of fame”, embarrassed the Lang Labor Government and thrust the New Guard deeply into the consciousness of Sydneysiders at large!
Primrose’s ceremony at the Northern Pylon
Now all this is well known, but what is largely not known is what was happening at the northern end of the Bridge whilst attention was focused on the high drama at Dawes Point. Soon after De Groot “opened the bridge” in unorthodox fashion at the southern pylon end, another member of the New Guard cut the ribbon at the northern pylon. Hubert Leslie Primrose, Mayor of North Sydney, was an assistant adjunct and quartermaster-general in the New Guard. Primrose as mayor had organised his own bridge-opening ceremony from the North Sydney side. Although NSW Police (and Premier Lang) had decided reservations about Alderman Primrose’s Northside celebration of the Bridge, because of his involvement in a suspect para-military movement that was under investigation (the New Guard), they ultimately made no attempts to stop the municipal representative going ahead with his act of public ceremony.
So, remarkable as it may seem to us today, the opening of both ends of that most iconic of Sydney symbols, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was accomplished by the New Guard. These deeds (one undertaken officially and the other without state sanction) were achieved by a small, para-military organisation that at best was only ever a marginal player in provincial Australian politics.
Harbour Bridge from Kirribilli
Primrose’s fascination with the New Guard, like many of its initial supporters, was short-lived. In June 1932 he was one of many New Guardsmen elected to the Legislative Assembly for the new conservative force in party politics, the United Australia Party (forerunner to the Liberal Party of Australia), later rising to the rank of UAP Minister for Health, and later Minister for National Emergency Services. Primrose Park in the northern Sydney suburbs of Cremorne and Cammeray is named in his honour, but clearly not for his activities on behalf of the New Guard!
Footnote: Apart from his right wing, para-military enthusiasms, Captain De Groot, the stealer of Premier Lang’s thunder on thatillustrious day, had a respectable day job as the proprietor of a successful antique furniture business in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The plaque below stands on the site of the former shop in Rushcutters Bay.
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[Refs: Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol 11) 1988, HL Primrose, ADB, (Supp. Vol) 2005, FE De Groot, both artls by Andrew Moore]
I have long thought that one of the more intriguing back stories of 20th century Australian history is the rise and (rapid) fall of the New Guard movement. The New Guard which flourished in the early 1930s was Australia’s own home-grown, ‘wannabe’ fascist organisation, one of a number of disgruntled, peripheral Australian Alt-Right groups in the Depression years.
The New Guard was a fairly obscure fringe organisation in early 1931, formed by ex-World War I army officers who broke away from an existing organisation (the Old Guard) deemed by them to be too cautious in its anti-socialist methods❈. The singular incident associated with the New Guard that resonates most clearly in the public consciousness today is the intervention by Francis De Groot (divisional commander in the New Guard) in the opening ceremony of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in March 1932. The fanatical, sword-wielding De Groot, on horseback, upstaged the State Labor government by dramatically cutting the ribbon at the southern pylon of the bridge before NSW Premier JT Lang could do so officially.
At its height the New Guard had somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 members in New South Wales❅ (men only, women were not permitted to join the New Guard). Included in these numbers were prominent Australians such as the famous aviators, Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, Sir Thomas Henley (Nationalist Party MP), Hubert Primrose (Mayor of North Sydney, later NSW UAP Minister for Health), and leading business figures in industry and agriculture such as the Patricks (Patricks Stevedore and Shipping Lines) and the MacArthur Onslows (sheep barons). Interestingly, it has been alleged (though not substantiated) that Lyall Howard, the garage owner-father of former PM John Howard, was very likely to have been a New Guard member (Andrew Moore, ‘The New Guard & the Labour Movement 1931-35’, Labour History, No 89).
JT Lang in typical demagogic mood
.The background to the New Guard’s emergence was the societal dislocation caused by the Great Depression and the sudden and calamitous level of unemployment of the early 1930s. This gave the New Guardsmen the impetus to thrive as it did to right-wing authoritarian political forces in Europe during the same period. In October 1930 a left-leaning Labor Government was elected in NSW under the demagogic nationalist Jack Lang. Lang’s scheme to tackle the state’s catastrophic economic crisis comprised repudiating Australia’s international loan obligations and refusing to make any further interest payments to British bondholders (and re-channelling those retained monies into job creation for the state). This polemical stand not only enraged Big Capital interests but also made fringe groups on the right, especially the New Guard, flare up in hostile opposition to Labor.
Lt.Col Campbell
The leader of the New Guard (NG) was a Sydney North Shore solicitor, company director and WWI army officer of patrician stock, Eric Campbell. The attraction of men who followed Campbell into NG was that it appeared to offer a fresh, alternative solution to the problems of society to those espoused by the democratic parliamentary parties of the day⊚. NG viewed communism and socialism as having a corrosive and degenerative effect on Australian society. Campbell characterised the incumbent Lang government as avowedly socialist, and thus tried to relegate the Labor Party to the status of being abject co-conspirators with the communists working against the liberties of loyal Australians.
Lt-Colonel Campbell asserted that New Guard was “staunchly patriotic”, but by this he meant patriotic to the British Empire, so intricately linked in his mind was Australia with the ‘mother country’, Britain. In effect the New Guardsmen were undisguisedly über-British loyalists. So, when Lang signalled his intent to default on loans to British banks, this infuriated Campbell and loyalists to the Crown generally. Campbell and his executive redoubled the movement’s efforts to bring Labor down. NG believed in minimalist government and individualism, in “sane finance” as Campbell put it, in freeing up private enterprise to get on with business…Lang’s plans to expand the public sector to alleviate the unemployment crisis, put ‘Langism’ very squarely in the ideological cross-hairs of NG.
Campbell & his NG acolytes giving a familiar salute at a Sydney rally
By late 1931, disillusioned with parliamentary party politics, the New Guard adopted more aggressive tactics in the fight against the left. New Guardsmen also started to display some of the trappings of fascist parties (military uniforms and armbands, the Nazi salute, ID badges) and began to break up meetings of communists and the unemployed. NG’s unleashing of its paramilitary arm provoked the left into forming communist and Laborite militias which eventually led to pitched street battles with the NG forces.
The most significant, physical confrontation between these groups, occurring in early 1932, became known as the “Battle of Bankstown”. The New Guard in its coercive actions in Bankstown and elsewhere in Sydney did succeed in its aim to disrupt meetings of the labour movement, but these mobilisations ultimately proved counterproductive to the NG leaders’ attempts to consolidate the new movement. The Bankstown mêlée had two adverse effects for NG. First, the leadership’s decision to up the ante in NG’s strong-arm tactics against their ideological opponents alienated a lot of the movement’s rank-and-file and many disaffected members resigned in the aftermath of Bankstown. At an NG meeting soon after some members moved motions of no confidence in the leadership of Führer (the leader) Eric Campbell, ibid.
Secondly, the level of New Guard violence exhibited at Bankstown, and to a lesser extent at other NG mobilisations like Newtown, Drummoyne and Canterbury, following upon De Groot’s bridge antics, convinced NSW Police of the need to take the threat to law and order posed by Campbell’s organisation seriously. The promotion by Premier Lang of an uncompromising, aggressive Glaswegian, Big Bill MacKay, to Acting Metropolitan Superintendent, was the catalyst for a much tougher police line taken against the right-wing paramilitary groups. MacKay intimidated Campbell and De Groot and other NG leaders and exhorted the State police to respond with unrestrained force every time the New Guard initiated a public fracas.
Given free rein by Supt MacKay, the white-helmeted state police launched a savage assault on the trouble-making New Guardsmen, especially in an incident that became known as the “Liverpool Street Police Riot”. Campbell’s enthusiastic but volunteer guardsmen proved no match for a well-trained, disciplined and highly motivated police force. The largely middle class NG members who clashed with the police found the experience distinctly not to their liking. Under instructions from MacKay, the police went at the New Guardsmen full-tilt and absolutely brutalised Campbell’s militia. MacKay’s tactics of intimidation and savage counter-violence against NG paramilitaries kept the agitators in check and dissuaded many from continuing their active involvement in the right wing organisation (Moore, ibid).
Berrima Gaol, NSW
NSW Police in early 1932 undertook investigations aimed at unearthing a possible plot by Campbell to use his so-called Secret Army to launch a coup d’être against Lang’s Labor Government. It was widely rumoured in the press that the New Guard planned to overthrow the Government, kidnap and imprison Lang and his senior cabinet ministers in the disused Berrima Gaol in country NSW. ‘The revolution that wasn’t’ (www.matthewleecunningham.com). Whether Campbell was planning such a strike on democracy or not (he publicly denied it, whereas Major Treloar, disaffected NG deputy commander, informed police that this was indeed Campbell’s true intention)(Robert Darlington, Eric Campbell & the New Guard). The question became academic in May 1932 when the Governor, Sir Philip Game, sacked the Lang Government for withholding revenues deemed owing to the Commonwealth as part of the debt to British financiers. The incoming State UAP Government quickly shelved the CID’s investigation into the alleged New Guard plot.
⇓Gov. Game, co-conspirator?
In what sense could the New Guard movement be said to be fascist in nature? Historians have long debated whether the New Guard organisation was a fascist one or even a quasi-fascist one – as they have done with regard to Franco’s Falange Party in Spain and other authoritarian-right movements. If we stack the New Guard up against the classic Italian and Germany models of inter-war fascism, it is of course a ludicrous comparison. The New Guard movement, in addition to lacking a totalitarian systemic structure, falls well short even of fulfilling the criteria for a semi-fascist organisation like the British Union of Fascists, whose leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, Campbell expressed great admiration for. Campbell visited Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1933 and came away deeply impressed by the Nazi and Fascist systems of rule, and subsequently did integrate some aspects of Mussolini’s Italian Corporatism into the New Guard’s ideology. The most that can be said about Campbell’s organisation however was that it was heavily influenced by the success of the European fascist movements and was openly sympathetic to fascism (Matthew Cunningham, ‘Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the New Guard’, Politics, Religion & Ideology , 13(3)).
Real fascists ⇓
Nor can it be said that the New Guard had any claims to be considered as a mass movement in NSW politics. NG remained fundamentally a middle class organisation, the core of its base were urban professionals and small businessmen, like Campbell himself (Cunningham, Ibid.). Unlike many other fascist/authoritarian parties in Europe, it lacked for significant working class participation (Moore, op.cit.). Moreover, geographically, the New Guard was very limited in scope. It was confined almost entirely to one state, NSW, and even more, was essentially a Sydney metropolitan phenomena with only around 3,000 members from rural areas outside of Sydney (Cunningham, ibid.).
The staunchly pro-monarchist and pro-capitalist (and distinctly non-radical) positions of the New Guard demonstrates that the organisation didn’t cross over into a fascist character…contrast the monarchist fervour of Campbell and NG with the positions of Hitler and Mussolini in their countries, Hitler had no interest in restoring the exiled Kaiser during his Reich, and Il Duce merely ignored the powerless Italian King. Rather, the retention of these allegiances shows that the NG movement retained an essentially conservative authoritarianism in appearance (Cunningham, ibid.).
1930s New Guard propaganda against Premier Lang
Why did the New Guard decline and dissolve so swiftly in the mid 1930s? As alluded to above, one reason for the disaffection and eventual alienation of much of the respectable, middle class membership from the New Guard was the resort to more extreme violent means by the leadership from around the end of 1931. Vigilante action by the Fascist Legion, a splinter grooup within NG, did nothing to assuage the doubters in the organisation. In May of that momentous year a number of the Fascist Legion members, clad in black Ku Klux Klan style hooded capes, attacked and bashed Jock Garden, a prominent communist and trade union official in his Maroubra home (Garden was a close associate of Premier Lang). This violent act of what we now would call home invasion brought disastrous publicity to the New Guard (Richard Evans, ‘A menace to this realm’: The New Guard & NSW Police, History Australia, 5(3). This coming on top of the general perception that NG leadership was seriously contemplating taking extra-legal action against the elected Lang Government, made many people distance themselves from the increasingly extremist actions of the New Guard. Interestingly, afterwards the Deputy Leader of the opposition Nationalists came out in parliament denying any involvement by NG in Garden’s bashing, alleging it was a Labor “put-up job” in which Garden himself was complicit! (Darlington, op.cit.).
The ‘Maroubra incident’ 1932 Garden’s bashing by NG thugs
One week after the Maroubra bashing of Jock Garden, the State Governor dismissed Lang and at the subsequent election Labor was soundly beaten by the UAP led by Stevens. The removal of Lang-Labor had been the New Guard’s overriding objective, so with Lang gone and the conservatives firmly in control, a large part of NG’s raison d’être was at an end. The sacking of Lang released the tension that had been building up between the various opposing forces in the political crisis of 1932.
The gradual recovery of the economy starting from late 1932 encouraged many who had joined the movement from a fear of socialism to drop their political allegiance to NG (Darlington, op.cit.). The New Guard’s strength dwindled after 1932 and by 1935 the NG support base had largely eroded. In that year Campbell tried to revive the movement’s fortunes by forming a new political group, the Centre Party, and contesting the state elections. Campbell’s last despairing grab at some semblance of power, a electoral bid for the seat of Lane Cove, went nowhere, and soon after, he faded into political obscurity.
PostScript: The New Guard – the Mini-series? A few years ago I suggested to SBS that the story of the New Guard and its ambitious if deeply flawed leader, Eric Campbell, would have the makings of a first-rate mini-series for television, and that they might like to explore the possibilities of this. They never got back to me!
I think this episode in Australian history has the same kind of dramatic ingredients and appeal as the successful Bodyline mini-series made for TV in the 1980s where the English cricket captain’s s breaching of the rules of the “Gentlemen’s game of cricket” forced many Australians (momentarily at least) to question their loyalty to Crown and Empire. Lang’s refusal to back down and the establishment’s uncompromising response was the makings of a high political stakes drama set against the turbulent background of the depression and a very real chance of a bitterly antagonistic explosion of class conflict; the violence of the New Guardsmen and the counter-violence from organised labour, and the unleashed mayhem and retribution of the NSW Police; there are the colourful and complex personalities in the story, larger than life figures such as Jack Lang and Bill MacKay, the paradoxical and enigmatic Campbell. There was also Sir Philip Game – was he the political executioner of the rebellious Lang to safeguard the interests of international capitalism or was he the dutiful King’s representative, an honest broker bring to heel a dangerously out of line state premier?
Was there a conspiracy or not? – a coup, behind-the-scenes, shadowy figures intent on usurping by whatever means the premier, an arrogant demagogue but nonetheless a democratically elected head of a provincial government (a forewarning of 1975?). How far did NG infiltrate the Sydney establishment and the conservative Nationalist Party? Then there was the question of the bashing of the communist union official Jock Garden, who was really behind it? Many questions to explore.
The New Guard had something of a chameleon-like character, many in society and in the press didn’t take it very seriously with its pompous and overblown leader and his supporters who at times resembled a ‘Dad’s Army’ trying to imitate the real thing in Germany and Italy (the Labor press regularly referred to them as the ‘Boo Guard’). Some however were concerned, especially on the left, including European émigrés with an insight into the threats to liberty a nascent fascism might pose – these sectors viewed the New Guard’s brief ascendancy very gravely. Others in the community of a more traditional, conservative bent, well-connected politically and socially and often from the North Shore and the Eastern Suburbs, took a different and more sanguine view of the New Guard and endorsed the fringe group’s need and right to inject some new energy into the stalled world of parliamentary politics.
Drama, tension, intrigue, civil unrest, all set against an international context of fascism and communism on the rise. Unfortunately, SBS did not express any interest in this proposition, but I still maintain that the subject conveyed through a mini-series remains a most worthy project – done well! An expert academic history consultant for the period (such as Andrew Moore or Robert Darlington) working with a good screenwriter and some money, could produce a very good product, both as entertainment and as historical reconstruction of a not terribly well-known chapter of our history. Perhaps the ABC … budgetary constraints in the reality of a national Liberal government permitting.
_____________________________________________ ❈ the New Guard in rhetoric also distanced itself from the establishment conservative parties as well, the National (or Nationalist) Party and the Country Party (despite there being a good amount of conspicuous cross-membership!), seeing them as failing to take action against the communists and trade unions, and seeing itself as a legitimate, alternative right-wing movement ❅ an active membership of around 36,000 was claimed by NG leadership ⊚ Campbell himself had impeccable establishment credentials…a professional man, a Freemason, a company director, the Turramurra resident was a member of all the right clubs (Imperial Services, the Union, the NSW, Rotary, Royal Sydney Golf and Killara Golf), [Keith Amos, ‘Campbell, Eric (1893–1970)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/campbell-eric-5487/text9331, published first in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 31 May 2014].
The first shot came from the Australian military gun emplacements stationed at Fort Nepean on the extremity of Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula overlooking the stretch of open water which separates Port Phillip Bay from the Bass Strait. The target was a German steamer, the SS Pfalz, (the name a reference to the German Rhineland-Palatinate region), was carrying 200 tons of coal intended to supply the nearby warships of the Pacific Squadron of the Imperial German Navy.
Ft Nepean today
Commune leader Förster, in heavy debt, facing the spectre of bankruptcy and in despair at the utopian disaster, committed suicide in 1889. Nueva Germania struggled on without its main spearhead, now led by Elizabeth Nietzsche who made an attempt to recruit more members from the Fatherland – with little return for her efforts. However in 1893 Frau Förster-Nietzsche abandoned the Aryan Paraíso and it’s settlers, returning to Germany to take charge of her famous brother’s affairs and care for him (Nietzsche had fallen into a state of insanity probably as a result of contracting syphilis). In the years after the philosopher’s death in 1900 the warped Elizabeth proceeded to convert him into a kind of intellectual “pin-up boy” on behalf of the emerging Fascist and Nazi movements of Italy and Germany. Significant to note that Nietzsche, when still in full control of his faculties, had been on record as expressing his complete disapproval of anti-Semitism and of the Försters’ plans for establishing an Aryan colony. Elizabeth, who later became a wholehearted supporter of Hitler, criminally and comprehensively traduced her brother’s reputation by falsely resurrecting Nietzsche as a prophet of the German “master race” to come. [J. Golumb & RS Wistrich (Eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Nazism? On the Uses & Abuses of a Philosophy.]
The Association looked initially in Argentina for land to settle, but when this proved fruitless, Lane turned to neighbouring Paraguay where they found a government much more amenable. Lane’s scheme to export Australian workers suited the Paraguayan Government which was desperate to replenish the loss of manpower in the 1860s suffered in a disastrous war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Paraguay, hopelessly outmatched, by war’s end, lost its territorial access to the sea and somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of its male population during the war, leaving the country with an estimated total of only 28,000 adult males [Thomas Whigham, “The Paraguayan Rosetta Stone”, Latin American Research Review (1999)].
