Recorded at the dinner of the Australian Natives’ Association national convention in Queensland, 2024.
Transcript:
When looking at the lineup of speakers today it was hard to find something relevant to
talk about that I didn’t learn from them, or from any number of the fine men here today
in the year or so that I have been a member. After all, before I came to the ANA, I was
like many in our spheres: hopelessly entangled in foreign ideologies and movements,
having barely a clue about the rich political, intellectual and artistic traditions raised from
the wellspring of my own nation’s blood and soil.
My mental gymnastics were impeccable. I was living IN this country but I was living
FOR another. With a vague understanding that one day I would return “home” to a place
I’d only ever been on brief holidays to. But whether it was Europa or Brittania or some
other long extinguished society, there was something that never sat right, I was
daydreaming about oaks and meadows a world away while the great plains and
gumtrees lay waiting for me.
I still, subconsciously, couldn’t shake the frame of mind that the Australian continent
was alien to the European and that the days of our settlement here were numbered by
mere fact of nature and that anything native to this land was bound to be a mere dilution
of a more pure, European civilization at best. Of course I appreciate how juvenile that
thinking was in retrospect. As Percy Stephensen writes:
Culture in Australia, if it ever develops indigenously, begins not from the aborigines but
from British culture brought hither by Englishmen, Irishman and Scotsmen throughout
the 19th Century. In a new and quite different environment from that of those damp
British Islands we are here developing the culture which evolved there. We inherit all
that Britain has inherited, and from that point we go on to what?”
That last part is most important: “from that point we go on to what?” Essentially the
question was, what now? And the only answer I could come up with back then
amounted to worshiping a dying flame, if not the ashes themselves. Alas, even the best
mental gymnast can only perform for so long and as I grew a bit older and real life
kicked in my interest in all of this was relegated to a mere hobby.
Still, I yearned for something greater, I kept my eyes and ears open to the movements
of the day, movements that came and went in cycle after cycle of media hysteria as
banners were dropped and romans were thrown. Still, I never found something
compelling or convincing enough to dedicate myself and my labors to in the somewhat
faint hope that I could make a measure of difference. It wasn’t really until covid was
brought to our shores that I renewed my interest in everything political. Within 48 hours
of the first case in Australia, I had lost my job and within 72 I was on the road to
Bryzantium. I suddenly had a lot of spare time on my hands, and I again yearned for a
movement, but I had changed, matured… maybe. My interest in German painters had
long since subsided and the residual love I still felt for Britannia and her empire was
quickly becoming reserved for the young, southern nation she left in her passing. The
nation I had come to know more personally now, being free from the toxic haze that
blankets the greater Sydney region.
Finally, I found the Australian Natives Association, an organization I’d read about very
tangentially in the context of Australia’s federation and an organization I thought was,
like most others of its kind: either long passed or compromised. Thanks to Dio on twitter
and the Austhetics account as well as the website I now knew that wasn’t the case and I
somewhat clumsily rushed an application form out of excitement.
All that searching, and the learning that followed, culminated in me standing here today,
and now I think I’d describe the whole thing as a long walk home. The thing that strikes
me most now is how natural it feels and how ridiculous it seems that our general
worldview is not the standard, at the very least among proclaimed Australian
nationalists.
I’m sure most of these sentiments would be familiar to you, and me repeating them may
seem somewhat tautological. But somewhere therein lies the point. My story in this
regard is not an especially unique one and the times we are experiencing are bound to
see this story repeat itself again and again in the lives of our people.
Housing, cost of living, crime, the list goes on and they all are followed by the word
crisis in national conversation. Meanwhile, those who would never form kinship with us,
and could never build a country like ours, continue to pour in relentlessly at the behest
of our own government.
This storm may well garner swathes of those who have a natural, but A-political love of
country and further awaken the politically active. Sure, the likes of the young LNP or
NSN or even the newly formed British Australia...