By Humphrey McQueen

When The Skull sooled bother-boy Sukkar to “cancel” Attorney-General Dreyfus as he spoke about his family as victims of the Holocaust, a scatter of opposition back-benders appeared dismayed. Their ignorance of the 100 years of crossovers between fascism, antisemitism and the social classes represented by the Coalition and its predecessors, suggests that the civics-deficit does not stop at year 10.

Support for a Mussolini of our own was widespread – so long as he was a Britisher. Archbishop James Duhig greeted parades of uniformed Italian Fascists at Brisbane’s St Stephen’s cathedral in the 1920s. (Ros Pesman, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 1993). Publisher of a fleet of trade journals, the architect Florence Taylor, urged the NSW Government to follow Il Duce’s lead by making street gatherings of more than three people a crime to suppress working-class protest. Taylor is an icon of the Institute of Architects.

A run of right-wing paramilitary bodies from General Hobbs in Fremantle in 1919, the King-and-Empire League in Sydney headed by General Rosenthal (the model for D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo (1923); the White Army in Melbourne in 1923; and Guards, Old and New, in NSW during the early 1930s, were but some of the formations documented by Andrew Moore in The Right Road (1995).

As April 25, 1931 approached, the Paris End of Collins street pressed General Monash to seize the day by mounting a coup against the Scullin Labor government. Sir John told them that he had not put on the king’s uniform to commit treason. (Geoff Serle, Monash).

Failing at overt subversion, the worthies turned to covert manoeuvring. A cabal, including Keith Murdoch and R.G. Menzies, got the leader of the federal opposition to step aside in favour of Joe Lyons who agreed to rat on the Labor Party with the promise of prime ministership, documented by his biographer, Philip Hart, in Labour History 17.

The Melbourne Club had a gentlemen’s agreement not to go public about blackballing Jews, as did the Adelaide, among others. In 1931, opponents of the Labor Government’s selection of Isaac Isaacs as governor-general could not decide whether they were more upset by his being an Australian or a Jew. Until the Holocaust became public knowledge, polite society defined antisemitism as hating Jews more than was absolutely necessary.

At the same time as Goebbels toured his Degenerate Art displays, Menzies put his weight as attorney-general behind securing a royal charter for the Australian Academy of Art. His friend and collaborator, Lionel Lindsay, denounced Modern Art as a plot by Jewish art dealers in Paris. Lindsay and Menzies pictured themselves upholding Western civilisation against what they feared as “the mob”. Menzies voiced that class strain of eugenics in his 1942 radio talks, The Forgotten People — a credo for the Liberal Party he formed in 1946 — when he distanced “the unthinking and unskilled mass” from “the intellectual life which marks us off from the beast”.

Diary entries from Menzies’ first trip “Home” in 1935 record his judging Churchill as not a “first-rater” when his anti-appeasement speech exposed “feet of clay”.

Back in Europe in 1938, Menzies wrote to his brother that the Czech President Benes was a “fairly greasy fellow”, who refused to compromise with Hitler’s demand to break up his country.

Feted in Germany that summer, Menzies finds Berlin drab, the population content in “a gloomy sort of fashion”, “well-looked after, wages are high, social services are good, factories well-planned and humanely conducted”. Hitler, he concludes, was a “dreamer, a man of ideas, many of them good ones”.

As firmly as Menzies resiled from “the easy acceptance by the German people of execution without trial, the complete suppression of criticism and a controlled press”, he had to confess that “[t]he Nazi philosophy has produced a real and disinterested enthusiasm which regards the abandonment of individual liberty with something of the same kind of ecstasy as that with which the medieval monk donned his penitential hair shirt”.

Bidding farewell to his Mother Country in August, Menzies told The Times how much he hoped “that we British people will not too easily accept the idea that because personal liberties have been curtailed in Germany the result is necessarily a base materialism. There is a good deal of really spiritual quality in the willingness of young Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the state”.

Back in Camberwell, his first public speech looped back to his annoyance at Czech recalcitrance during Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich. Menzies cautioned his electors “against any easy falling into habits, to which we are susceptible of dividing the sheep from the goats, and of saying that dictators are bound to be wrong and democracies to be right”.

Addressing the Old Melburnians on November 14, he explained that “abandonment by the Germans of individual liberty and of the easy and pleasant things of life has something rather magnificent about it … they have erected the state, with Hitler as its head, into a sort of religion which produces spiritual exaltation that one cannot but admire”.

Kristallnacht had exploded three nights earlier with the fire-bombing of scores of synagogues.

After prime minister Lyons censured the visiting H.G. Wells for calling Hitler a “certifiable lunatic”, Menzies defended his leader, lamenting that he had become “increasingly conscious whenever a politician disappoints the expectations of the people and makes a decisive statement at once he is accused of being fascist”.

He noted that he had the “honour” to serve in Lyons’ cabinet. Within three months, he had stabbed his leader in the back to take the prime ministership. (A.W. Martin, Menzies, v. 1)

Menzies could describe Lyons as “The last man who could be accused of endeavouring to suppress any freedom of opinion” because he had Menzies as his attorney-general who had tried to deport the Czech journalist Egon Kisch in 1934. Kisch was here to address the Movement Against War and Fascism. Its supporters wanted to know why Australians should join a war against fascism in Europe when their government kept edging this country in that direction.

The NSW Government banned Till the Day I Die, Clifford Odet’s anti-Nazi play, in 1936, not only for its upsetting the German consul but because it showed Reds in a favourable light, as Robert Darby detailed in Labour History in 2001.

Nazi Germany was on the other side of the world. Appeasing Hitler’s paper ally, Japan, was trickier. Wool sales from 1936 rescued many a pastoralist from financial ruin, at the price of warming the butchers of Nanking. On the other side of the balance of payments, Sydney department-store proprietors were cosying up to Tokyo to get the most favourable deals to import trinkets, as Drew Cottle documents in The Brisbane Line (2002).

But the sale of scrap metal to Tokyo gave Menzies the nickname “Pig Iron” Bob while a six-month strike by NSW South Coast unionists earned them the title of “Dole-Queue Patriots”. Rupert Lockwood told a Press Club dinner in Canberra that Menzies sought only to redress a shortage of iron in the Chinese diet.

Whitehall hoped to draw the Imperial Japanese Army away from a southward thrust, but deeper into China and to invade Siberia.

Throughout the 1950s, leaders of Nazi-puppet regimes gained entry to Australia even though their part in the murder of millions of Serbs, Jews, Roma, Slavs, homosexuals and “the unfit” was a notorious fact.

Those who found refuge included a Ustase police investigator; a colonel in the Black Legion, a death squad which ran concentration camps; one from the Gestapo’s mobile killing unit; and two Croatian priests devoted to the liquidation of Serbs.

Support for these “New Australians” came from predictable sources as bosses looked forward to an influx of scabs. When they needed skilled Germans, the businessman head of Commonwealth Immigration Planning Council defended the bringing out of “the hundreds of thousands [who] were quiescent Nazis”. That most of them decided to shut up about their pasts once here did not mean that they had never screeched Zeig Heil at home.

Coalition ministers met evidence of Nazi pasts with lies and obfuscation. Immigration Minister Harold Holt claimed in 1951 that a bust of Hitler was a “souvenir” and whips were “carpet beaters”; he also alleged that concentration camp survivors were confusing the SS tattoo under the armpit with the tattoos on their own wrists.

In April 1963, photos emerged of a five-day training exercise by Ustase paramilitary units alongside the Australian army outside Wodonga, with Australian Army rifles while sitting on an armoured vehicle. The Menzies ministry brushed the encounter aside as a “picnic”.

A year later, an Ustase leader had his legs blown off when the bomb he was hoping to plant at the Yugoslav Consulate in Sydney went off prematurely. His comrades threatened to bomb police stations and shoot officers if they investigated. A later double murder in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield is a cold case 55 years on.

Attacks continued with Liberal federal treasurer, William McMahon, describing the perpetrators in 1968 as a “good bunch”. One Ustase leader, Fabijan Luvdovic, had become prominent in the Liberal Party in McMahon’s electorate.

Heading the NSW Liberal Party’s “Uglies” was Lyenko Urbanchich, chair of the branch’s Ethnic Affairs Committee, who was widely believed to have been Bronwyn Bishop’s brain. Outed in the late 1970s as a Nazi propagandist in Slovenia, he denied giving Nazi salutes or wearing its swastika. He did not have to. Each puppet regime flaunted rituals and regalia of its own.

Leading Liberals who graced celebrations for the founding of the Croatian puppet state on 10 April 1941, include Communications Minister Helen Coonan and Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who served as Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs under Turnbull. W.C. Wentworth, sometime premier Eric Willis, and short-term opposition leader, Peter Coleman, joined commemorations for the Croatian Fuhrer, Ante Pavelic.

In 1972, McMahon’s government turned down a recommendation from the Commonwealth Police to stop one of their prime suspects from travelling overseas. In September, his attorney-general, Ivor Greenwood, refused to acknowledge the existence of the organisation behind the bombings of two Sydney Yugoslav travel agencies which had injured sixteen passers-by.

Refusal by ASIO to co-operate with Commonwealth Police led its commissioner and Labor attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, to ASIO’s Melbourne offices to secure relevant documents.

The Ustase engaged in terrorism across Australia, back in Yugoslavia under the Communists, and again during its break-up in the early 1990s when an estimated 200 Croatian-Australians joined the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.

Croatian fans, known as ‘BBB’ (Bad Blue Boys), bashed Jewish and Serbian players and their supporters, with the war cry “Kill the Serbs”. (John Hughson, ANZ J. of Sociology, 1997). Two of three convictions for giving fascist salutes at the 2022 Australia Cup Final were overturned.

Evidence of war criminals being given refuge in Australia was hardly new when the arrest of Konrad Kalejs in the US in April 1985 sparked Mark Aarons to research his ABC radio series and book, Sanctuary, Nazi Fugitives in Australia (1989).

Kalejs did not slip into Australia. He was shipped in on the basis of reports from the International Refugee Organisation. Its chief in Australia, Major-General C.E.M. Lloyd, was active in yet another secret army, “The Association”, headed by Field-Marshall Blamey in the late 1940s. The RSL allowed Serbian collaborators to join ANZAC parades.

How Kalejs got IRO support, became a camp official here and was accepted for naturalisation led War Crimes Prosecutor, Bob Greenwood, in 1988 to believe that he had been recruited by ASIO, which cleared him for citizenship in 1957. ASIO chief Brigadier Sir Charles Spry praised other war criminals because they “can and do assist ASIO to the limit of their ability”. The Coalition’s 1988 concern was that probes into the spy agency’s deals with devil could assist only the Soviets.

Garfield Barwick fronted up for ASIO at the Petrov Commission in 1954-5 before serving as attorney-general under Menzies, and as chief justice from 1964 to 1981. When academic Dennis H. Phillips interviewed him on 23 November 1975, about why he had encouraged Kerr to sack Whitlam, his Honour pointed to the lack of supply and said that Whitlam had already put into motion moves to secure other sources of revenue outside the usual channels. He said he did not think the banks would co-operate and the prime minister would have ended up writing IOUs everywhere. He then stated that the last time anything like that happened the Jews bought up the IOUs. He said that any time this country does something like that the Jews get in early. He said the last time it happened, the Jews “really made a killing”. He indicated that no responsible governor-general could allow something like that to happen.

When David Marr included this exchange in his 1980 biography of Barwick, the chief justice said he “had not used the words attributed to him” – which is not the same as swearing on oath that he had not used other words of the same intent.

Eric Butler set up the League of Rights in 1946 in Adelaide, denied the Holocaust and declared Hitler a Jew. His supporters infiltrated the Country Party and its nominal successor, the National Party, to be checked by Doug Anthony and later in Queensland by Senator Boswell. Those long-running and public fights for the soul of the coalition partner did not stop Alexander Downer from addressing the League in 1987. Eight years later, as opposition leader, he said he had not known what Butler was on about.

Should The Skull be quizzed about his Coalition’s heritage, we shall be reminded: ‘That’s ancient history” from which we are “moving on” and “putting that behind us” for “the sake of our children’s shareholdings”.