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1 !"#$ #$ &' ()*"+,-$ (../0*/1 2&')$.,#0* +3 &' &,*#.4/ 0)54#$"/1 #' "#$%&'()'* +)$%,&)-'( .%#/)0$1 6+4789: '+7;: 007 ;<9=;>?: ! !&@4+, A B,&'.#$7 !+ .#*/ *"#$ C+,D 04/&$/ 6#/C *"/ E/,$#+' +3 F/.+,1 &6&54/ +'4#'/ &*G "**0GHHCCC7*&'13+'4#'/7.+IH1+#H&5$HJK7JKLKHJK9J8>JM7;KJJ7>8K>?; Antipodean Eco-nazis? The Organic Gardening and Farming Movement and Far-right Ecology in Postwar Australia.* Andrea Gaynor Abstract : The 1940s saw the emergence in Australia of an organic gardening and farming movement with links to the far right involving both personal connections and ideological convergences. Themes of natural law, unity of soil and people, and anti-urbanism—all attractive to far-right ideologues—can be found within the discourse of the early organic movement. However, not all of these themes were central to the movement, and organic advocates did not adopt a far-right agenda en masse. Though attractive to some as a romantic reaction to modernity, this article argues that organics encompassed a range of political standpoints. In the history of conservation and environmentalism in Australia, the 1940s and ‘50s are somewhat forgotten decades, falling between the progressive conservation activism of the interwar period, and the rise of the new environmentalism in the late 1960s. However, one significant area of environmental activism in this forsaken period that to date has attracted little attention from historians is the emergence of a movement for Australian organic gardening and farming. This movement sought to 2 challenge the prevailing vision of agricultural progress, particularly as manifest in the use of artificial fertilisers and chemical pesticides, and achieve a more harmonious relationship between society and nature. Organic growers published journals, held meetings, and took on the proponents of conventional techniques in the pages of gardening magazines. Understanding this movement enables us to place in its broader historical context the search for healthy food and a sustainable agriculture, which intensified in the wake of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and more recently the controversy over genetically modified organisms. The organic movement is also particularly interesting because it involved a complex set of intersections of differing political ideologies and ideas about nature. This article aims to characterise the ideological leanings of early organic advocates in Australia, focusing on points of connection with the far right, and account for these connections with reference to broader international historical contexts. This study therefore speaks to the growing scholarship on intersections between ideas of race and nation, and horticultural or ecological practices. Kylie Mirmohamadi contends that Australian horticultural debates and practices have often ‘absorbed’ and ‘drawn upon’ ideas about race and nation. 1 Nick Smith goes further. In tracing what he describes as ‘the historical co-development of Australian environmentalism and nationalism’, he compares nature writers James Barrett and Donald Macdonald with ‘nationalists of the Third Reich’, because they both ‘regarded nature as a precious cultural asset’. Furthermore, Smith claims that in Australia, the ‘tainted legacy of blut und erde [sic] lingers still’. 2 Ghassan Hage has launched a more credible critical attack on certain strands of ecological thought in Australia, which he sees as part of a nationalist and racist project based on the domestication of national space. Disguising their intentions through an act of ventriloquy (speaking for 3 nature), proponents of this ecological perspective in Australia propagate a range of white nationalist fantasies, perhaps the most powerful of which involves the image of a perfect fit between people and environment. This image, Hage argues, lays ‘the ground for the commonsense construction of the “perturbing other”’. 3 This article will argue that while racism and nationalism were certainly evident in the early organic gardening and farming movement in Australia, there is nothing inherently racist or nationalist in the practice of organics and the movement was characterised by considerable ideological diversity. While it is important to grasp the nature of far-right ecology and its past manifestations—the better to recognise it in the present—it should be understood as a minority stream within Australian ecological thought. The vast majority of ecological claims have not been (and are not) animated, as some would have it, 4 by the ghost of Hitler. Relatively little has been written on the early organic gardening and farming movement in Australia. Two works published in 2006, an article by Rebecca Jones and Janice Chesters and my book Harvest of the Suburbs , provided an outline of the emergence of these groups, some of their beliefs and especially the horticultural methods they advocated. 5 In a subsequent article, Jones explored how Australian organic growers began to realise that local climates and soils sometimes called for methods diverging from the temperate organic ideal. 6 In her 2010 book Green Harvest , Jones described the ideas and practices of Australian organic growers since the 1940s in more detail. 7 John Paull has explained the timing of the establishment of organic associations in Australia, undertaken a subject analysis of Organic Farming Digest content, and documented efforts by the Living Soil Association of Tasmania to establish relationships with other organisations. 8 A commissioned history of the 4 Organic Gardening and Farming Society of Tasmania documents the emergence and activities of that organisation. 9 None to date have analysed the politics of Australian organic advocacy in any depth. More historical work has been completed in the United Kingdom. Philip Conford’s doctoral thesis and subsequent book, The Origins of the Organic Movement , was the first detailed study of the changing values and preoccupations of the English movement. Although acknowledging its diverse roots, Conford concluded that the movement ‘emerged as a coherent opposition to orthodox agriculture within a context that was both right-wing and Christian’. 10 Furthermore, he suggested that the new environmental movement emerging in the 1960s did not succeed the organic movement, but provided a new context for some of the earlier organic pioneers and ideas. Such continuities are also emphasised by Matthew Reed, who argued for an understanding of the ‘debt the discourse of the organic movement owes to those who were considered Fascists in their day.’ 11 The involvement of far-right nationalists in the early English organic movement has been documented by several authors. 12 Significant figures include Viscount Lymington, 9 th Earl of Portsmouth, a founding member of the Soil Association (the leading organisation of the English organic movement) who had links to Nazi Germany and was at the centre of far-right royalist organisations the English Mistery and the English Array. Another was Jorian Jenks, a member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists who was interned in the Second World War. A prolific journalist who joined the Soil Association early on, Jenks edited its journal Mother Earth from the 1940s to 1960s. 13 Many right-wing organic advocates came together in the Kinship in Husbandry, which aimed to defend the ‘traditional’ English countryside from the assaults of modernity, and in particular, industrial agriculture. 14 5 Their programme was for a system of local food production and processing based on a pseudo-feudal ‘natural’ order with distinct racial elements. 15 A significant early forum for the organic ideas of Kinship members and others was the newspaper New English Weekly , which had started as a platform for followers of C.H. Douglas’ Social Credit theory, but increasingly focused on rural, health and farming issues within an overtly Christian intellectual context. 16 As we will see, similar connections between the far right, Social Credit and organic gardening and farming also emerged in Australia. However, Reed detected only a partial fascist influence on the embryonic English organic movement, attributing its relatively marginal status and influence to its diversity and consequent inability to agree on a coherent programme for agricultural or social reform: ‘All discourses’, he argued, ‘contain contradictions, but few could constrain the divergence between those who believed in dictatorship by the genetic[ally] superior and those who believed that humans were naturally free’. 17 Frank Trentmann assumed a broader view, situating the English organic movement within a spectrum of anti-modern groupings in England and Germany. He argued that ‘new romanticism’ in Britain found expression in broad-based rambling (countryside walking) and folk revival movements as well as organic husbandry. Trentmann added that although there was a ‘hard’ wing of extreme neo-romantics within the organic movement, the ‘peculiarity in England was not the absence of anti-modernism but the relative absence of points of contact that linked neo-romantic culture to neo-corporatist and fascist politics elsewhere’. 18 Although the organic movement accommodated anti-modern themes that were attractive to far-right ideologues, ‘anti-modernism could function as a legitimate search for personal and collective freedom without becoming a search for national and racial enemies.’ 19 ‘Points of contact’ between neo-romantic movements and fascist politics were evident in Australia, as in
