Mervyn Bendle Quadrant Online January 26, 2025
It was the Frontier Spirit that Donald Trump invoked in his Second Inaugural Address as the force that would make America great again: The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons … Ambition is the life blood of a great nation, and right now, our nation is more ambitious than any other. There’s no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts, the call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.
This was once a spirit shared with Australia, as became clear as Trump continued:
Our ancestors turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic of the most extraordinary citizens on earth … Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers”, and built a rich, thriving, innovative, democratic and open society that is the envy of the world. Addressing an exultant crowd fired by hope and expectation, he concluded: “If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve.
Australians should reflect upon this shared frontier heritage as we endure the annual anti-Australian protest season with the Left raging against Australia Day and Anzac Day. Just as Trump invoked this frontier spirit to galvanize his supporters and inspire the American people, so the opportunity exists for Australia to follow suit, because, like America, Australian society was wrested from the wilderness, in our case through the immense energy and commitment of many generations of convicts, pioneers, and immigrants, and masses of such people are still present, while many others continue to stream in as ‘New Australians’ eager to build a new life for themselves and their children.
This shared heritage is founded in the phenomenal ‘settler revolution’ that characterised the 19th Century and saw the expansion of the Anglosphere across North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, as the number of English-speaking people exploded from 12 million to 200 million between 1790 and 1930, a far greater rate of growth than that achieved by any other society, including China, India, Russia, and the Hispanic world. This unprecedented demographic revolution was driven by various factors, including the massive disruption caused by Britain’s Industrial Revolution, her naval supremacy, the effectiveness of her stable and transportable political institutions, and the vigour of the Protestant Ethic; and it was facilitated by vastly improved, faster and cheaper forms of mass transport; revolutionary developments in agricultural techniques; and an optimistic and empowering attitude towards colonial settlement, all underwritten by free flowing capital investment. (cf. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: the Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 2011) But above all, there was the Frontier Spirit, a new force on the global stage, to which we will return shortly.
Trump did misspeak, however, when he remarked about his splendid vision of America’s achievements that “No one [else] comes close”, because Australia did come close … once. However, our natural optimism and faith in ourselves and our nation has been brutally suffocated over the past half-century by the Far Left-Greens-ALP stranglehold over academia, the education system, the cultural industries, and the media, especially the ABC and SBS. They have championed forces that hate our country, denounce it as a racist hell-hole, owe their allegiance to hostile powers and Antisemitic theocracies, and entertain apocalyptic fantasies in which they see themselves as prophets of a communist society or saviours of the world. These entrenched, pampered and indulged ideologues insist there is only one legitimate vision of Australia’s past, one of debilitating shame over alleged dark deeds of our colonial past, and that everyone must forever genuflect and abase themselves before ersatz ceremonies that are little more than recently contrived concoctions of pagan fire ceremonies and ancestor worship.
A recent specimen of this nightmare vision of Australia is Killing for Country (2023) by David Marr, who reports his shock “to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier” (thus apparently claiming a prized indigenous heritage for himself). The result of this “soul-searching” is “a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world — of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country…” Reviewed by some of the usual suspects on the Left, the book has been lauded as “more than a personal reckoning with Marr’s forebears and their crimes. It is an account of an Australian war fought here in our own country, with names, dates, crimes, body counts and the ghastly, remorseless views of the ‘settlers’.” It is allegedly “a timely exercise in truth-telling” that “shines a light into the dark shameful corners of our collective national experience”, and so on.
Sadly for Marr, he’s late for the ideological self-hate party, as the systematic demonization of settler societies, colonialism, and the frontier has been a central component of the relentless Leftist attack on Australia for decades. Pioneering examples of this self-lacerating anti-Australian genre include Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (1981), followed by An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (2001); and Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981). The methods, interpretations, and conclusions of such writers were subjected to a comprehensive critique by Keith Windschuttle in his two volumes on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002 & 2009). Their desperate attempts to rebut Windschuttle were then themselves refuted by John Dawson in Washout: On the Academic Response to the Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2010).
A more novel approach to the denigration of Australian colonial history has recently been taken by Santilla Chingaipe (left), a Zambian-born journalist who migrated to Australia at the age of 10. Her entry in the crowded anti-Australian market is Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia (2024), an apparent attempt to follow the ‘1619 Project”, “an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that … aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative.” As Australia has never had slaves, it has proven necessary to invent them. Consequently, Chingaipe claims that “on the First Fleet of 1788, at least 15 convicts were of African descent [and] by 1840 the number had risen to almost 500”. This is, of course, 500 out of a total number of convicts sent to Australia of 162,000, i.e., 0.31%, or one out of every 324 convicts, of which none were slaves.
Chingaipe also claims that amongst this miniscule number of “lives whitewashed out of history” was William Cuffay “a prominent London Chartist who led the development of Australia’s labour movement.” The son of a former slave from St Kitts and a white Englishwoman, Cuffay was a successful tailor and trade union activist who was convicted of a ‘treasonous felony’, and who arrived, not in the First Fleet, but in Hobart in 1849, as a favoured ‘ticket of leave man’, permitted to work on his own account and expected only to attend monthly musters at Hobart Penitentiary. He was therefore anything but a slave and he hardly “led the development of Australia’s labour movement”. This doesn’t matter, of course, to the author, as the real point of her book is to further denigrate Australia and her history, despite being a country that welcomes folk like Chingaipe into citizenship and has provided her with many opportunities to pursue her media and propagandist career.
Earlier examples of this genre include Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (2005), edited by A. Dirk Moses, then a professor at University of Sydney (of course!). This manages to conflate the Holocaust, genocide, settler-colonialism, and ‘the Stolen Generation’, and represent them as merely different aspects of the same underlying logic of extermination purportedly inherent in settler societies. In this fashion, the Holocaust and the Nazi pursuit of lebensraum through the systematic annihilation of some 50 million Slavs in Eastern Europe during World War II is treated as conceptually identical to the alleged massacre of aborigines at Warrigal Creek in Gippsland in 1843, frontier violence in Queensland and Tasmania, and the removal into care of children at risk in Aboriginal communities. The core idea is that genocidal tendencies are built into the very fabric of settler societies and the actual scale of the atrocities found in their history is beside the point.
This argument was developed in Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007), by Ben Kiernan, a high-profile member of the Australian New Left and one-time champion of the truly genocidal Khmer Rouge who managed to recant sufficiently to be made a professor of history at Yale University, now a festering hotbed of academic Antisemitism. Like Moses, Kiernan makes Anglophone settler societies central to his litany of atrocity, and consequently focuses not on Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Turkey, and Rwanda, but on the alleged genocides carried out by Britain and Anglosphere societies like America and Australia. Instead of attending to such obvious elements of genocide as Antisemitism, totalitarianism, ultra-nationalism, and criminal dictatorship, Kiernan is more concerned with the “fetish for agriculture” that apparently blights settler societies and from which flows all manner of evil. Consequently, the alleged genocidal history of Australia occupies centre stage in his book, being allocated almost as much space for discussion as the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet Terror combined.
The vital importance of the frontier ethos in Australian history was recognized in yet another propaganda assault: Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback (Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis, eds., 2005). This acknowledges the frontier as “one of the key founding metaphors of virtually all settler-colonial societies, [that] serves as a continual source of symbols in the construction of national histories and identities”. Consequently, the contributors attack it, celebrating historians who are “stripping the frontier … of much of its sacredness as a source of national values”, while recounting (yet again) “the tragedies of Western expansion: the destruction of the environment, [and] the massacres of indigenous populations,”, etc. The “master narratives of Australian history” are relentlessly denounced, including the overcoming of the convict past, the enormous efforts of the explorers, the miners, and the pioneers who had to struggle endlessly with droughts, floods, and bushfires; along with the sacrifices of the Anzacs, who are dismissed as mere “cannon fodder”.
Crucially, and in accordance with the ideological strategy of ‘intersectionality’ that links all forms of ‘oppression’ together as expressions of the one systemic evil, the demonization of the frontier is found also in environmental history. Taming the Great South land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia, by William Lines (1992), recounts a tale of “a continent robbed, people and animals exterminated, land pauperized, air and water poisoned, [and] forests eliminated”. As the radical environmentalist (and self-appointed expert in Australian history), David Suzuki, observes in his Foreword, the book “puts the lie to the myth of the heroic history of modern Australia and reveals it as the sordid tragedy it really was”. The genre achieved another notable success with The Future Eaters: an Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (1994), by Tim Flannery, the basic orientation of which is made explicit in the title.
It has been this type of propaganda that has given radical environmentalists a free ride for decades, as they shut down worthwhile projects and strangle others in ‘green tape’ and ‘law-fare’ designed to make their successful commencement uneconomical or even impossible. Essential investment will continue to shrink and be diverted instead to more hospitable countries as investors realize that their immensely complex, capital-intensive projects will be slandered, stymied, suffocated, and sabotaged by a well-resourced cadre of cosseted vandals (‘protestors’) aided and protected by an array of political, legal, judicial, academic, and media supporters, often funded by foreign foundations and (incredibly!) by the Federal Government, in the case of the Environmental Defenders Office and other agencies .
But what is the Frontier Spirit that both America and Australia once shared and that Trump has so effectively invoked? The pivotal role that the frontier plays in history of settler societies was first identified by the American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, in a famous essay, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ (1893). Turner advanced the thesis that the national identity of settler societies is formed through the extended engagement of their people with their frontiers, and this vital insight helps fundamentally to understand the course of American history. According to this ‘Frontier Thesis’, the history, culture, and core institutions of America were shaped primarily by the engagement of waves of pioneers with the vast alien environment of North America.
For Turner, “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development”, and illuminate how America’s unique national character was forged. It was the “vital forces” inherent in the settler population and unleashed by the Frontier Spirit that called forth the core values, institutions and social structures of American society. Above all, such institutions were “compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people – to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness”, and in implanting civilization where only its antithesis reigned before.
Crucially, Turner saw the frontier not as a fixed location, but rather as an ever-expanding and always challenging zone of nation-building activity, whose very existence inspired an irresistible human force that drove settlement relentlessly along river valleys, through vast forests, and across mountains, lakes, and plains in what became one of the most awesome achievements in human history, as Trump emphasized in his speech. It unleashed the “expansive power” inherent in a pioneering people that didn’t ease up until the physical limits of frontier expansion were reached, at which point the spirit lived on as a vital empowering state of mind that energizes succeeding generations as they make their contributions to the creation of their nation. It is this sleeping spirit and the dynamism it offers that Trump has called upon.
In America (as in Australia), settlers were faced with unprecedented challenges as they confronted a vast wilderness extending on a continental scale from their initial settlements. But as they became aware of the opportunities that lay before them they quite consciously went about creating a New World, with each “advance of the frontier [entailing] a steady growth of independence”. And a very specific set of personal characteristics came to dominate amongst these people as they moved out from their beachheads to create a new nation. Primary among these were individualism, independence, self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, a suspicion of centralized authority, a democratic temper, and staunch allegiance to constitutional structures that facilitate and nurture these qualities.
Turner’s thesis had an obvious relevance for Australia. Indeed, while America had become the largest economy in the world in 1893, Australia enjoyed the world’s highest standard of living and an unexcelled GDP per capita. This was a remarkable achievement for a country that had begun only a century earlier as a convict settlement and wouldn’t became a nation until 1 January 1901, but Australia too possessed its own Frontier Spirit.
The classic study of this remains Russel Ward’s, The Australian Legend (1958) which, paralleling Turner’s earlier work, identified a specific Australian character that had emerged from the colonists’ encounter with the frontier as they shadowed the American experience of nation-building on a continental scale. The book attempted
To trace the historical origins and development of the Australian legend or national mystique. It argues that a specifically Australian outlook grew up first among the bush workers in the Australian pastoral industry, and that this group has had an influence, completely disproportionate to its numerical and economic strength, on the attitudes of the whole Australian community.
This vision of an Australian national identity was crystallizing in The Bulletin and amongst popular writers in Australia in the 1880s and 1890s. As Ward writes:
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the occupation of the interior had been virtually completed, it was possible to look back and sense what had been happening. Australians generally became actively conscious, not to say self-conscious, of the distinctive ‘bush’ ethos, and of its value as an expression and symbol of nationalism.
Central to this cultural phenomenon was the figure of the resourceful bushman, which exemplified the vital role played by Australia’s pastoral industries and the bush environment.
“It seems that outback conditions exercised a kind of natural selection upon the human material. The qualities favouring successful assimilation [to frontier society] were adaptability, toughness, endurance, activity and loyalty to one’s fellows … Frontier conditions fostered and intensified the growth of the distinctively Australian outlook.”
Consequently, by the time of Federation, “the ‘noble bushman’ was already firmly enshrined in both the popular and the literary imagination.” Determined and daring, he was ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1890), who’d confidently ride his mount over a cliff in pursuit of his quarry.
Ward believed that the Australian frontier experience promoted many values similar to those identified in America by Turner. However, there were other forces in play. These included a convict past experienced by no other nation, and a series of gold rushes that served as a mighty demographic vortex, attracting masses of ambitious, energetic and driven people from Britain, Europe, and Asia. A particular set of qualities evolved out of this unique experience, emphasizing cooperation and egalitarianism rather than the fierce competitiveness that shaped the American frontier. These qualities became the origin of the uniquely Australian notion of ‘mateship’.
But then an epoch-shaping event occurred that took this Frontier Spirit in a unique direction, as this nascent national ethos became associated with the achievements of the Australian military in the Great War to give birth to the Anzac Legend. As detailed elsewhere (Mervyn Bendle, Anzac and its Enemies, 2015), it was the journalist and war historian, Charles Bean, who transmuted the Australian Legend that had crystallized in the 1890s into the Anzac Legend that remains so powerful today, to the great chagrin of the Left.
Possessing a freshly minted Oxford MA, Bean went eagerly to work as a journalist in the bush, and this had a profound impact on him. As he later recalled, “it flashed upon him that the most important product of the wool industry was men; it was responsible for creating some of the outstanding national types”. He subsequently wrote two books on such themes, On the Wool Track (1910) and The Dreadnought of the Darling (1911), which portrayed Australians as the best of men, celebrated mateship, and extolled the bushman as a resourceful and independent type of person.
Bean later became Australia’s first official war correspondent and reported on all the battles in which Australia was engaged throughout the War as it was fought out tens of thousands of kilometers from home. At Gallipoli he helped rescue wounded men under fire and was recommended for the Military Cross and mentioned in dispatches. He edited The Anzac Book (1916) which he compiled from drawings and writing by the soldiers and was very popular, and he later served as editor of the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-1918, writing Volumes I-VI himself, dealing with the activities of the Australian Imperial Force at Gallipoli, France and Belgium.
All of this massive output had a tremendous formative effect on the culture of the new nation as Australia’s identity began to take shape. As Bean explained, the main theme of The Official History “may be stated as the answer to a question”:
“How did this nation, bred in complete peace, largely undisciplined except for a strongly British tradition and the self-discipline necessary for men who grapple with nature … react to what still has to be recognized as the supreme test for fitness to exist?” His answer: “the big thing in the war for Australia was the discovery of the character of Australians. It was character which rushed the hills at Gallipoli and held on there”, in the face of appalling and murderous fire. In his later one-volume history of the War, Anzac to Amiens, Bean observed that “Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valor in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat”. Bean concluded that “the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born” on the 25th of April 1915.
This convergence of two powerful and fortuitously compatible visions of national character created problems for the Australian Left that have never been resolved, and each year this drives its academic, media, and other well-funded ideologues out into public to denounce our two Days of celebration and remembrance. This long-standing autumnal phenomenon arose principally because the Gallipoli campaign preceded the Russian Revolution by less than two years. This meant that the ideal of the Anzac was emerging as a powerful cultural force in Australia in opposition to the competing ideological notion of ‘Socialist Man’, being fanatically promoted by the Soviet-directed Communist International in Australia and across the world. As it transpired, the Anzac ideal proved vastly more popular in Australia, and this was intensely resented by the Left, particularly as the ideal had emerged organically as a deeply held populist belief and was neither an ideological construct nor a socialist program imposed on the people over which the Left could assert ownership. It also meant that the newly-formed Communist Party of Australia had little to show its highly demanding Comintern masters.
It was therefore denounced feverishly from the outset by the Left as conservative and reactionary. As the communist historian, Frank Farrell, explains in his history of International Socialism and Australian Labour (1981), “the Anzac myth and the proud digger were powerful right-wing influences in politics” from the Great War on. Consequently, in 1919, the communist-controlled ALP resolved to eliminate from schools all teaching materials “relating to or extolling wars, battles or heroes of past wars”, attempting then, as now, to denigrate and suppress the Anzac Legend.
Over subsequent decades the Left also vacillated between trying to discredit the Australian Legend and trying to co-opt it, torn between its ideological allegiance to the communist mythology of world revolution, and an awareness of the Legend’s populist power. Consequently, the Leftist Coral Lansbury (Malcolm Turnbull’s mother, pictured at left with her the future PM) insisted in a 1966 Meanjin article that the best that could be said of the bush workers was that they “were given to bestiality rather than to buggery or the raping of Aboriginal women”. (Ward, “The Australian Legend Re-Visited”, 1978). The attack was pressed home by Humphrey McQueen in A New Britannia (1970), an extended pamphlet that stood for many years as the only book-length historical work actually produced by the otherwise voluble New Left. This asserted, firstly, that the freed convicts, miners, and bush workers who generated the Legend formed merely a lumpen-proletariat or petit-bourgeoisie, were inherently reactionary and on ‘the wrong side of history’ as the latter marched towards a communist utopia.
Secondly, it was A New Britannia that signaled the excrescence of the now dominant form of racism-based national self-laceration that we discussed above. Tragically, this has now acquired a particularly vile Anti-Ssemitic dimension, targeting not only Israel but Jewish Australians, who should ‘die’ or be ‘gassed’, as demanded by the mass demonstrations facilitated by the Victorian, NSW, and Federal governments, and by the vice-chancellors of our major universities. Most recently, these favoured Antisemitic thugs have taken to burning down synagogues and other Jewish properties in an antipodean replay of the Kristallnacht campaign of November 1938, that began the Nazi onslaught against European Jewry that culminated in the Holocaust.
This unprecedented national crisis is what the dominant Leftist critique of Australia has inflicted upon our nation, and it is well beyond time to fight back. The alternative is further decline into the depths of national self-hatred and a ghastly future of conflict and torpor, of economic and cultural decline, and of inevitable social disintegration and political authoritarianism, as an ever-growing population -increasingly fragmented by racial and religious hatreds – fights amongst itself for an ever-diminishing share of declining national wealth. Australia should therefore re-affirm its national identity as a frontier society eager to once again engage in nation-building projects on a continental scale, and prepared vigorously to harness the natural and human resources required to develop a thriving, highly productive society. This is a battle that must be won in both the political arena and the cultural realm, and it will require a herculean effort to overcome the entrenched forces that wish only the economic devastation and cultural debasement of Australia.
Nelle's journey 