Editor’s note: Many of our readers will be familiar with Graeme Campbell, but for those who are not, he was described by former Labor leader Mark Latham in his book The Latham Diaries as the “last remnant of remnant of White Australia inside the Federal ALP”, and was eventually disendorsed by the party for his nationalist views, including his opposition to immigration, multiculturalism, and criticism of the Jewish lobby’s support for hate speech laws in the mid-90s – issues ever-more relevant today with the rising popularity of Pauline Hanson, who was both an ally and a rival.
“There is no such thing as a lost cause when you are fighting for the right to have a say in your future”
On the 28th of November 1995 Paul Keating formally disendorsed Graeme Campbell as a candidate for the seat of Kalgoorlie, coldly stating that he had “placed himself in direct public conflict with the platform, policies and rules of the Australian Labor Party”.
However shameful it may be, the statement was correct. Campbell stood as a man against time, against the managed neoliberal decline that embodies the modern Australian Labor Party, against the narrow-mindedness produced by the talent pipelines of the major parties.
Abingdon, Campbell’s birthplace, a quiet market town perched on the muddy banks of the Thames, is a nondescript place, a homeland for retired stockbrokers and the remnants of England’s minor gentry.
However, it is from places such as these that the British Empire was birthed, which at one point covered a quarter of our planet in its glory. 14,871 kilometres away, in the great red plain that covers the western half of the antipodean continent, a small town was founded during the great 1890s gold rush. An outpost of the aforementioned race in an untamed and hostile land. It was here, or rather in the vast electorate to which it gave its name, that Campbell would make his home, amongst the myall and bluebrush.
It was this migration, reminiscent of the great explorers of old, and his enigmatic and eclectic variety of careers, far more reminiscent of the men who established our nation than the dull and uninspired tales of corporate law to parliament of our small-minded leaders, that shaped a working man’s poet and self-taught intellectual.
In his essays Campbell addresses a wide range of subjects such as the nature of Australian historiography, the Jewish lobby, an overview of the state of the right (critics of Pauline will enjoy this section), and our international relations philosophy, with fascinating anecdotes throughout.
A convenient mythology has taken hold amongst the international Anglophile right that our nations reached something of a peak in the 1990s, with our rapid decline being attributed to an ambiguous “woke mind virus” that metastasized into existence around 2008.
Australia Forever serves as an excellent antidote to this ridiculous thought pattern.
It challenges the reader to contemplate why, if we lived in a sun-tanned paradise, was the Department of Foreign Affairs pressuring firms to hire ethnic Chinese, and why were both of our major parties establishing ethnicity-specific branches all over Victoria and New South Wales?
Campbell takes a distinctively nativist approach. In this he contradicts the liberal-conservative Anglophilic school of history historically common amongst the Australian right, in particular the conservative flank of the Liberal Party which is the source of much of our intellectual commentary.
For too long nativism has been the domain of cheap, kitsch, regime-approved slop history, the queer bushranger who fought the colonial authorities with his Aboriginal sidekick.
As Jonathan Bowden states, we must “remember who we are” to face the future. If not, what faces us, as Campbell notes, is oblivion, a South Pacific Economic Zone which ironically cannot develop a productive economy that does not depend on mining and an over-inflated housing market.
The term “Asianisation” strikes one throughout reading, although this was perhaps slightly optimistic now that we are faced with Asianisation, Indianisation, Arabisation and Africanisation.
Campbell served in parliament during the time in which our great cities slowly morphed into a cloaca gentium through mass migration. He correctly observed that “the participation of the general public was not called for in the achievement of a consensus”, which is admittedly a fairly obvious statement. But where Australia Forever differentiates itself from modern right-wing political analysis is that it portrays the zeitgeist of the time to a sympathetic modern audience.
It is easy to adopt an abstract model of politics, where “supernatural” forces decree that hordes of immigrants must flow into our nations, this is not, however, the case. Real people, some acting naively, many acting maliciously, implemented material policies that lead to this.
Reading Campbell’s anecdotes and realising this gives hope, it shows that just as easily as they can arrive they can be returned.
“My hope is that his story and these papers inspire others to continue the fight – to keep standing for what is right, even when the path is difficult” – Ainsley Campbell (Graeme’s son)
My hope is that through reading this book, the energy and vitalism of our burgeoning New Right scene and the wisdom of those who have come before can merge and we can move forward into a new Australian century, that we can dream of something marvellous.
Australia Forever is available to purchase on The National Observer.
The post Book review: Australia Forever – The Collected Essays Of Graeme Campbell first appeared on The Noticer.
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