The call for an “Australia First” position has a long history in Australian nationalism. It goes back to at least P.R. Stephensen and his Australia First Movement, which drew on nativist and radical nationalist ideas to build a motley crew of rationalists, suffragettes, and fascists supported by both Roman Catholics and Odinists. A strange political concoction, and not one to emulate too closely. Nonetheless, Stephensen’s political focus on race, place, and a native culture should remain the core principles of the Australia First position, each accompanied by a practical political objective.
The first of these principles is support for the Australian race. Australians are a naturalised, European-descent national community, with an Anglo-Celtic core culture, which has developed its own native Australian way of life. Australian history has involved a form of racial and cultural assimilation, with the former tensions and conflicts between Anglo-Saxons and Irish being sublimated in the birth of the Australian nation far from the lands and conflicts of old Europe. This is due to the genetic closeness of European peoples, something that has been studied by the Australian political ethologist Frank Salter, and it is the possibility of this unified rebirth of European peoples into one nation that makes us a European-descent native community, rather than a carbon copy of Great Britain, as some conservatives, including Salter himself, might wish. It is a great irony that Salter’s work showing the closeness of the genetic interests of Europeans lends support to the Australian Nationalist stance, so ably analysed by Jim Saleam, that we support a White Australia principle, not a British Australia principle. The objective which is associated with this White Australia principle is obvious to all nationalists today, and it is the need for immigration restriction and remigration, which has become especially urgent with the housing crisis and massive coloured immigration program of the current Albanese government, which despite its name has nothing to do with true labourism. We must force our own national interest, that is to say, the interest of our people, into the political conversation. One clear goal in this area is for us to re-racialise the Australian flag as a representation of the Anglo-Celtic core of our nation. For the Christian nationalist, the meaning of the crosses on the flag and the cults of the saints that are tied to the Anglo-Celtic ethnoi should also be emphasised in order to attack the current secular regime, which spends its time celebrating and promoting Islam and Hinduism, which are completely foreign to our Australian history, heritage, and way of life.
The second principle is the importance of place. Culture arises from a close association with land, agricultural cultivation, and the genius of the place, that is, its biological interconnectedness and its territorial spirits. In a time when culture has been reduced to cuisine, and global supply chains have made it possible to enjoy the food of aliens anywhere in the world, we should recall that, primordially, national cuisines arise from the characteristic climates, plants, and animals of particular places. Furthermore, the landscapes and its geological features also shape the psyche of a people. The geopolitical characteristics of different terrains made possible, for example, the different characters of the Russian and British Empires and their core cultures, as was explored most famously by Halford Mackinder, among others. When people truly dwell and are at home in a place, the sacred can become manifest. On the other hand, a place can be approached with an extractive mindset that seeks to nihilistically turn everything into profits, real things into digital dollars. An Australia First position must affirm a traditionalist ecology and recapture environmental issues from the woke left and the “Green” movement, which has been negatively influenced by corporate money-power seeking to neuter any real resistance. Australian nationalists must be at home in this land, and protect our land from those who would seek to destroy it. While current environmental movements may try to gatekeep environmental issues, we should push into this space, beginning with issues which nationalists are strong on such as the degradation of food quality, the proliferation of microplastics, and frivolous consumerism based on imported goods.
The third principle is support for our own Australian culture. Anyone who seeks to advance an Australia First position must be familiar with our history, poetry, great figures, music, and ideas. We must not fall too heavily under the influence of Americanism due to the cultural power of Hollywood, media, and Wall Street, and the cultural gravity of American influence on our politics. We should remember our British and old European heritage, but in doing so understand that it is something that we either have or will outgrow. In practical terms, this means pushing back against the Americanisation of our culture and the homogenising forces of globalism. It is profoundly ironic when Australian “nationalists” slavishly attempt to copy foreign movements and trends. A true nationalist seeks to develop the authentic cultural possibilities of their own nation. When the average person on the streets expresses confusion as to what Australian culture is, or claims that we do not have a culture at all, we must have a clear answer to them as to what this culture is. We will be most convincing on this point when we come to embody and love this culture and be completely at home in it.
I would like to conclude by pointing to a poem that Stephensen considered to be highly important and, indeed, which is resonant with our own times. It is the nationalist “prophecy” of William Charles Wentworth’s poem Australasia, quoted by Stephensen in The Foundations of Culture in Australia:
And, oh, Britannia! shouldst thou cease to ride
Despotic Empress of old Ocean’s tide —
Should thy tamed lion — spent his former might —
No longer roar, the terror of the fight;
Should e’er arrive that dark, disastrous hour,
When, bowed by luxury, thou yield’st to power;
When thou, no longer freest of the free
To some proud victor bend’st the vanquished knee;
May all thy glories in another sphere
Relume, and shine more brightly still than here;
May this, thy last-born infant then arise,
To glad thy heart, and greet thy parent eyes;
AND AUSTRALASIA FLOAT, WITH FLAG UNFURLED,
A NEW BRITANNIA IN ANOTHER WORLD!
Elias Priestly
ANA Victoria