There were some genuine Fascisti or camicie nere (Blackshirts) in Australia, and they were much comforted by the appointment to Sydney in early 1938 of Amadeo Mammalella, one of Mussolini’s early followers, as consul-general. But still, with most Italian immigrants, there was confusion about what Fascism actually meant. Carlo Trucano, a foundation member of the Fascio in Cairns, believed that Fascism was anti-Communism. He had seen Communist riots in Turin at the end of World War I and did not like the idea that government could be overturned in that manner. To him, Mussolini and the Fascist Party had saved Italy from revolution and destruction. Dr Giovanni Battaglia, the founder of the Brisbane Fascio, saw Fascism in Australia as a benevolent movement, working in conjunction with the Italian consul to bring relief to poorer Italians. Others may even have joined Fascist groups because they saw the new Italy as giving credibility to themselves, their religion and their language, in the face of anti-Italian hostility.
The first Fascio in Queensland had been founded in 1929. The head of the Innisfail Fascio, Aldo Signorini, belonged to a minority of Italian Australians that would still show unquestioning allegiance to Mussolini even after Italy declared war on Australia. Yet in the 1920s and 1930s, in the Catholic churches Italians attended with other worshippers, there was a growing tolerance of Fascism. It derived in part from the 1929 Concordat between the Italian government and the Vatican, which opened diplomatic relations between Mussolini and the Pope. Now many Catholics, not only Italians, were able to applaud Mussolini more openly. Through the Concordat, Fascism and Catholicism were twin forces for good on earth. Bishop McGuire in Townsville and Limerick-born Archbishop James Duhig in Brisbane expressed that idea of church and patria marching together. Fascist rhetoric, however, urged the Italians to resist assimilation, and keep their language and heritage wherever they might live, and this worsened the hostility directed at them by the general Australian community.
Hundreds of Italian cane cutters at Mourilyan and at Hambledon, and hundreds from elsewhere, demanded that the cane be burned before being cut to prevent Weil’s disease (leptospirosis), a serious infection (lethal in some cases) caused by cuts from green cane. The landowners asked for government intervention and police protection. But the strikers took their case to court, and from late 1934 the cane was burned as they had desired. In Innisfail in 1935 and 1936, there were fights between Italian leftists and the pro-Fascists in the streets during the cane cutters’ strike against the Colonial Sugar Refinery, a strike that broke out over the many cases of so-called Weil’s disease among workers in the sugar fields. The anti-Fascists were supporting the strike, the Fascists trying to end it.
All this had, of course, a history. The anti-Fascists included an anarchist named Francesco Carmagnola, born in Italy in 1901, a former Melbourne resident who had founded in Spring Street in 1927 the Matteotti Club to honour a young socialist member of the Italian Assembly who had been assassinated by Fascists. The club was a centre for anti-Fascist Italians, and pro-Fascists sometimes threw bricks through its windows. Italian immigrants would come in from the bush to the Matteotti, play cards, eat, and attend a Saturday-evening dance where one accordion supplied the music. The visitors from the bush also collected the groceries the club secretary had bought for them during the week. The club was so popular it soon had to move to new premises near the Trades Hall where there was room for a thousand people and a courtyard for the playing of bocce. The Scullin government (ironically more frightened of Italian socialists than of Fascists) reluctantly permitted it to publish a club newspaper. Even the director of the Investigation Branch thought the criticism of the club by the Italian consulate authorities was ‘rabid’.
Carmagnola had denounced Labor as a party of ‘socialisti da caffe latte’, even if café latte was by no means the favourite drink of Australian Laborites. He also condemned the Australian Communists as ‘Red Fascists’. But Italians of all political stripes—as long as they were anti-Mussolini—used the Matteotti Club. In Melbourne, however, the Italian scene was intense. Italian anarchists started to visit clubs, restaurants and boarding houses, armed with knives and knuckle dusters and sometimes pistols, looking for fights with pro-Fascists. The anarchists would rip the Fascist badges from the coats of Italian supporters of Mussolini. Even consuls were not exempt from this treatment; Count Gabrio di San Marzano, Italian consul in Brisbane, had the badge ripped from his lapel while attending a reception in Ingham. Three thousand copies of the Melbourne Matteotti Club’s newspaper, La Riscossa, came out every fortnight to meet the demand from anti-Fascist Italians. The newspaper advertised dance nights and rallies to raise money for political prisoners held in Mussolini’s prisons and for their families. On May Day 1931, Carmagnola addressed seven thousand workers by the banks of the Yarra and asked them to cry out with him, ‘Death to Mussolini!’ They did.
After the Depression wiped out the Matteotti Club, Carmagnola was himself involved in the cane cutters’ strikes in Queensland. When the Italian warship Armando Diaz came to Australia on a goodwill trip in 1934 and put into Cairns, the anarchists, including Carmagnola, went to work amongst the sailors, one of whom was won over by them, deserted, and was saved from arrest until the warship left Cairns. But after all his activism, Carmagnola found it difficult to get work. At the end of 1935 he went to Sydney where he found most anarchists either growing vegetables on the outskirts of the city or banished to various parts of the bush.
In the end, Italian Fascism would never manage to focus Italian Australians into a political movement, any more than the suavity of Count von Luckner, soon to be encountered, could create a Hitlerite unity of purpose amongst the German community.
COOKING AND NAZISM
In 1926, Australian–German diplomatic relationships were opened again, and the first post-war consul-general, Hans Busing, was appointed. He found hostile opinions everywhere about German society, and had the job of reviving in the German–Australian community some pride in their nation of origin. In 1932, Dr Rudolf Asmis was appointed to Sydney, and during his consulate Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power. Asmis transformed himself from a spokesman for the democratic Weimar Republic to become a promoter of—or at least an apologist for—the ‘new Germany’ under Hitler. Deutschtumpolitik was the new policy. The German Australians, Auslandsdeutschen, had to be reminded of their racial purity and the successes of Hitler’s Germany. Many German–Australian itinerant workers and small farmers were suffering in the Depression along with the general community of battlers, as the apparently successful Nazi regime of the 1930s—publicly applauded by many observers, including Robert Menzies—sought to spread Deutschtum, or Germanness, throughout the communities of the New World, as part of the Nazi revolution. German Australians, too, were to be co-opted into the Nazi policy of Volkstumpolitik, a form of cultural politics. In this effort the Sydney-based Nazi newspaper, Die Brücke (The Bridge), first published in 1934, was to be a potent instrument. Asmis, who remained German consul-general until 1939, and co-founded Die Brücke, was concerned by the ‘entombment’ of German–Australian Deutschtum by Australianness. Though not necessarily a zealous Nazi himself, Asmis wanted to arouse a German sensibility even in the Germans of the remoter bush. He knew, however, that he must be careful in making direct appeals to Germanness of the kind that would render the authorities uneasy. As an opening gambit, German Australians were exhorted by Die Brücke to return to the traditions of the cuisine from the hearths they had left behind in Germany.
The spectrum of Australian produce did not make this easy, and in any case the first German-speaking immigrants to arrive in the Barossa Valley in South Australia, and along the Murray in Victoria and New South Wales, were Alt Lutheran or Old Lutherans, whose tables were proudly austere, and whose food was simple. The indigenous Peramangk people of South Australia had in the 1840s taught the Hahndorf settlers, in those harder, early times, to dig for edible buttercups, and the Germans had recourse to wild dogs, native birds and crayfish; one Prussian settler mention
s a meal of ‘kangaroo roasted with bacon and garlic’. The desert quandong (native peach) of South Australia, relished by Indigenous people, became a speciality of the Barossa Germans. Native currants also made excellent jams.
Everywhere from Queensland to the north coast of New South Wales to South Australia, German settlers integrated or married into Anglo-Celtic Australia, and their traditional cooking disappeared under the weight of Australian beef and mutton. Bavarians who had fled Bismarck’s Kulturkampf of the 1870s, which they had seen as an attack on their Catholicism, and had settled on the north coast of New South Wales, intermarried with the Irish who attended the same churches, had Australian children, and made bad cases for Nazi redemption.
Nonetheless, Nazi Stützpunkten (small party branches) were founded in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane between 1932 and 1934, some of them before Hitler even came to power. It was hard for the Australian Nazis to find committed members, and by 1937 the Australian party had recruited only 160 members. German emigration to Australia had declined in the 1920s and early 1930s. Among the fifty to a hundred thousand Australian citizens of German birth or descent, there was apparently little enthusiasm for doctrinaire Nazism. But the Stützpunkten were able to create organisations that had broader appeal, such as the German Workers’ Front and the Working Committee of German Women Abroad. These brought in a large number of general sympathisers with a regime that in the mid-1930s was, like Mussolini’s Italian state, attracting much conservative approval generally.
Asmis himself established the Deutschtum cultural organisations in Australia and New Zealand as umbrella organisations encompassing various German organisations and clubs. In Die Brücke, German Australians were urged to live in a suitably German home with German art on their walls, German books on their shelves, and German food on their plates. Die Brücke pushed German recipes in its editions—recipes for Pfeffernüsse mit Guss (iced honeyball cookies) and Christbaum-feingebäck (Christmas-tree biscuits). Following a movement initiated by Dr Goebbels in Germany in 1933, Australian women were encouraged to make Eintopfessen, or ‘one-pot meals’, for the poor. The Eintopfessen charity held a get-together in 1936 at the German Concordia Club in Sydney—an event which attracted, Die Brücke declared, probably the greatest number of Germans to have met in a hall in Australia. The audience, said Die Brücke, ‘delivered the best proof not only of this feeling of belonging together, not only in the German colony of Sydney, but also of the ties of the inner heart with the old homeland’. The Nazi-instigated Working Committee of German Women Abroad, under the leadership of Frau Herta Schmidt of Sydney, were credited with directing the Eintopfessen preparation of lentils and smoked meat. A poetic prologue was spoken by a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of Australia, Ruth Cramer. The donations offered by those who ate the one-pot meals would be used for suffering German Volksgenossen—needy folk—in Australia in the midst of the Depression. Three Sieg-Heils were raised to the Führer and the people in the Fatherland, and two German national hymns were sung.
News of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and others later in the decade undermined Asmis in his endeavour to show Germany as a revitalised great power in which German Australians could take pride. Asmis and his assistants, however, encouraged trade missions to Germany and promoted Hitler’s favourite Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the famed documentary on the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Count Felix von Luckner, famous World War I commander of a German raider, and an orator, arrived in 1938 on his own yacht on a world tour to talk up the Reich. Like Amis, von Luckner did not want to be seen as an advocate of Hitler’s ambitions but preached that the German and British empires would march together into the future. Von Luckner’s goodwill visit took in speaking at events in Albury, Henty, Walla Walla and Jindera, where the German communities of the Murray area were concentrated. He could do tricks—bend coins, tear up phone directories—but on more serious ground he dealt with the ‘regrettable tension between the English and German people’. After the Count’s short tour of Australia there was an increase in Nazi Party membership, though within a year its members would all be behind the wire of internment camps.
Far fewer Germans and German Australians were interned between 1939 and 1945—about eleven hundred—than Italians, five thousand of whom would be interned. Asmis himself escaped that fate, since he was on home leave when World War II broke out. The Tweed and Snowy River shires, however, pressed for the internment of his constituency. The Defence Department was calmer than it had been during the previous war about weighing the worth of information. Johannes Stolz, the Lutheran pastor in Walla Walla, had attracted adverse reports in the mid-1930s. He was believed to have celebrated Hitler’s birthday, but in reality his interest in Nazism was based on its anti-Communism, and he became an opponent of the regime in 1936 once Hitler created a Reich church, a Lutheran church under Nazi control, led by a puppet bishop named Ludwig Müller. Stolz would support the Allied war efforts through his editorship of the Lutheran Herald. So it was decided that his arrest might alienate Germans who were as yet loyal Australians.
Stolz’s brother-in-law, Pastor Muetzelfeldt, was of Jewish descent and had fled Germany with his family in 1934. He was critical of the pro-Nazi sympathies of some of the instructors at the Immanuel Lutheran Seminary in North Adelaide. It was with the beginning of the war with Japan that, like other German-born, Muetzelfeldt was required to sell his car, and give up his driving licence and petrol consumer’s licence to the government. Reclassified as a refugee alien in 1943, he received his motor vehicle back.
THE EAST IS TO BLAME
By mid-Depression, the idea of seceding from the whole Commonwealth mess had become an attractive one to Western Australians. They knew that Western Australia had joined the Federation mainly on the votes of ‘T’othersiders’, easterners who had fled the depression of the 1890s in Victoria and New South Wales to work on the goldfields of Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie. Now eastern Australia was again drawing Western Australia into grief. Shortly after the state election of May 1930, a meeting was called to re-establish a secessionist organisation, the Dominion League of Western Australia. The meeting was chaired by Premier Sir James Mitchell himself. The driving force became H.K. Watson, a thirty-year-old accountant who now managed the proposition skilfully and passionately. He pointed furiously at tariffs introduced by the Federal government, which seemed to discriminate against Western Australian farmers and Perth merchants. The secessionists argued that Western Australia, as a primary-producing state dependent on export, was injured by Commonwealth policies designed to protect the factories of Melbourne and Sydney. The price of importing even state-government stock, locomotives for example, was rendered high by the Canberra-imposed tariffs.
In November 1930, an inauspicious representative of the Sugar Industry Defence Association travelled across Australia, including Western Australia, drumming up support for Commonwealth tariffs and bounties protecting the Queensland sugar industry. ‘In this man, the secessionists saw one of the evils of Federation in human form,’ writes Dr E.D. Watt, one of the promoters of secession. The new victory in 1930 of the supposed ‘Red’, Jack Lang, in New South Wales, also made them feel nervous of the toxic east.
The primary producers warmly supported secession, though the ALP was against it, as was the RSL, given that its membership had fought as Australians and were subject to the Federal Repatriation Board for any compensation for the damage they had suffered in that conflict.
The perceived need for secession attracted and absorbed much of the Western Australians’ discontent. Canberra became a popular focus for blame, rather than the capitalist system itself. Sir Otto Niemeyer, who had appeared as a stylish avatar of the Bank of England, had made the Federal government fall for him, but the popular Western Australian premier Mitchell, a decent, identifiably Australian human being, had been seen to have been patronised by him—and indeed was. Feeling was so high afterwards that the Dominion League was able to ask Mitchell for a refere
ndum on secession. Mitchell told them that he was an ardent secessionist and wore the badge of the Dominion League, but he hedged on a referendum. Cabinet was divided. Powerful business figures weighed in with the unhelpful idea that either Western Australia should secede, or else that the Western Australian government should be entrusted to a commission of five experienced businessmen.
The latter idea was not conducive to parliamentary democracy. Premier Mitchell had indeed attempted to get a bill passed in August 1931 to empower a referendum, but the Legislative Council, both its Labor and conservative members, put on it conditions unacceptable to Mitchell. He tried with better success in December 1932, when the mess in the east was even more apparent. Once a referendum was decided on, two questions would appear on the ballot. First, ‘Are you in favour of the state of Western Australia withdrawing from the Federal Commonwealth established under the Commonwealth of Australia Constitutional Act (Imperial)?’ Second, ‘Are you in favour of a convention of representatives of equal number from each of the Australian States being summoned for the purpose of proposing such alterations in the Constitution of the Commonwealth as may appear to such convention to be necessary?’ This second, alternate question had been added to satisfy the Labor Party and to persuade them to pass the legislation.
Australians: Flappers to Vietnam Page 15