Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1975) [1973] is perhaps the most influential racist book in the world today. It is the book that inspired the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, the fantasy narrative guiding today’s neofascism in America and France (and beyond). Reportedly Steven Bannon’s favourite book, it impacted on Trump administration immigration policy, and it is set reading for the English-speaking Alt-Right. In this paper, I propose that the novel tells us something about rightwing authoritarian radicalization that is otherwise difficult to detect. By presenting the racist fever dream in the form of a narrative fiction, The Camp of the Saints provides crucial insight into how the fantasy scenario and political anxiety are related. I analyse the novel, concluding that the paradox according to which racist fantasy increases, not decreases, anxiety, clarifies why such representations are important recruitment tools. It also explains something about the logic of “pre-emptive retribution” involved in racist violence. 

Note: This paper includes direct citation of passages of racial vilification from this racist novel. 

Dr Geoff Boucher is an Associate Professor in Writing and Literature. He is the author of several books on literature and society, including The Charmed Circle of Ideology (2008), Understanding Marxism (2012) and Adorno Reframed (2012). He is also the author (with Matthew Sharpe) of The Times Will Suit Them (2008) and Zizek and Politics (2010). His most recent book is Habermas and Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021). Geoff’s expertise is in Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Marxism and post-Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He is working on projects on authoritarian politics, fantasy literature, Shakespeare after Zizek and retrieving Althusser. 

In this paper, I explore the links between veterans’ memories, their returns to Việt Nam, and the Anzac legend. I show how Australian veterans’ return journeys have echoed the pilgrimages to Gallipoli, unpack widespread memory myths about the Vietnam War among veterans, and reveal how veterans’ return experiences in contemporary Việt Nam are framed to continue the Anzac story.  I conclude by reflecting the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan in Vung Tau, where veterans’ claims to Anzac threatened the spirit of reconciliation between Vietnamese and Australian veterans.  

Dr Mia Martin Hobbs is an oral historian of war and its legacies. Her research interests include the Vietnam War, the War on Terror, memory, trauma, place, gender, peace, and security.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, members of an established, English-speaking middle class built a new category of work for themselves.  This paper argues that the rise of the professions made middle class morality into economic matter. It was an investment in settler colonisation, for which they expected social and economic profit, accruing to themselves as well as society. By the mid-twentieth century, this ‘virtue capitalism’ governed the world. In the 1970s, however, it was subject to the same disruptions as the rest of the economy. This, combined with decolonisation and civil rights activism, meant the professional class experienced a moral, as well as economic, crisis, encouraging them to reject their old virtues and collaborate with a strengthening group of managers – long their allies, linking ‘knowing’ to ‘doing’ – to codify the ethics they still needed to do their job. But in the 1980s, this managerial class had interests that diverged from the professional class, bringing a new form of class conflict into 21st century capitalism. 

Associate Professor Hannah Forsyth is a historian of work, education and capitalism at ACU where she has taught global history, historiography, history of capitalism, politics and Australian Indigenous History. She was an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow 2017-2019. She is the author of A History of the Modern Australian University and is currently working towards a new book Virtue Capitalists: the rise and fall of the professional class in the Anglo world c.1870-2008 contracted to Cambridge University Press. 

The period between the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw the Australian-Catholic middle classes grow in both size and confidence. Those developments were aided in part by the temporal progress of élite Jesuit schools in Sydney and Melbourne. These colleges performed the dual role of facilitating the entry of young Catholic men into the universities and professions, and further assimilating educated, respectable Catholics within cultural spaces otherwise defined by Protestant, or secular, elements. Such social and economic mobility was threatened, however, by opposing forces that sought to temper Catholics’ acceptance within normative middle-class society in Australia. This opposition came from defensive, often extreme, Protestant voices, but also from insular, Irish factions in the Australian-Catholic community. In navigating these tensions, the Jesuit colleges became symbols for the liminality of middle-class Catholicism, at once straddling a distinctly British, Protestant, public-school privilege, and an irrevocable, Irish-Catholic otherness. This paper will explore these developments, and place them within the wider context of my PhD thesis’ research into middle-class Catholic identity, and that community’s navigation of social and sectarian divisions in Australia between the 1890s and 1920s. 

Scott McCarthy is a PhD student in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. His PhD research examines the Australian-Catholic middle class in Victoria and New South Wales through the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. 

This paper reflects on recent teamwork in both the UK and on Menang Country on the dispersed collection of animals, artefacts, and archives that Robert Neill made with the assistance of Menang Noongar people in Albany, WA in 1841. This fieldwork, which brought together Menang Elders and knowledge holders with fish scientists and curators, enabled new understandings of the collection through workshopping language words, understanding fish habitats and through touch. In the museum, our work is beginning to challenge the dominance of western science taxonomies in databases and displays, while historical research reveals that Menang taxonomies were more persistent all along than previously understood. Our workshopping of the collection occurs within larger conversations around Menang people’s symbiotic relationships with animals and the collapsing and division of “nature-culture” that were present in the museum in the 19th and 20th centuries. These new understandings and debates are changing the scope of our project as we bring these ideas back to Menang Country via a series of non-traditional research outputs. 

Associate Professor Tiffany Shellam works collaboratively with the Nyungar community of Western Australian, historians, museum curators, and archivists to unearth hidden and alternative histories of 19th century encounters. She is interested in the ways in which collaborative work can unsettle the surety of archives, and the ways in which ethnographic and biocultural collections offer different narratives of past events. Tiffany has worked at Deakin since 2009.  

In this paper, we examine the use of intangible cultural heritage as a vehicle for soft power in the service of geostrategic competitions between Iran and Turkey—two regional powers in West Asia. We focus on two significant trans-regional cases of intangible cultural heritage, namely, Nowruz, a celebration that has evolved through millennia to become Persian New Year but is subsequently claimed by Turkey, and the thirteenth century mystic poet Rumi who wrote in Persian and, while born in Balkh (Afghanistan), migrated to the city of Konya in southern Turkey where his present day shrine and museum are located. Drawing on theories in political science and heritage diplomacy, and a host of sources in Persian, Turkish, and Azerbaijani, we demonstrate how heritage is mobilised concurrently as a nation-building device and a tool for soft power in international relations. 

Ali Mozaffari, PhD, is Australian Research Council (DECRA) Fellow and Senior Fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Australia. His current research interests include geopolitics of the past, culture and the built environment with a specific focus on West Asia. His publications include Heritage Movements in Asia: Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics, and Identity (edited volume with Tod Jones, Berghahn 2020), Development, architecture and the formation of heritage in late-twentieth century Iran: A vital past (Manchester University Press 2020), World Heritage in Iran; Perspectives on Pasargadae (Routledge 2016), and Forming National Identity in Iran: The Idea of Homeland Derived from Ancient Persian and Islamic Imaginations of Place (IB Tauris 2014). Mozaffari is the founding co-editor of Berghahn’s series Explorations in Heritage Studies. 

Also involved in the research but not speaking is Dr. Ali Akbar, a Research Fellow with the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University and Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where he received his PhD in Islamic Studies. He is an expert in the fields of Islamic studies and Middle Eastern politics as well as Iranian politics.  

Delivered by This week’s seminar will be given by Alexia Moncrieff (University of Leeds) and Bart Ziino (Deakin University) 

Spiritualism originated as a Victorian-era craze centered around communicating with the dead, featuring parlour séances, renowned mediums performing on stage and the rapid formation of associations and societies advocating its principles. Contrary to the hopes of its numerous critics, this phenomenon did not wane over time. Instead, in the interwar period in Australia, Spiritualism experienced a remarkable flourishing. Its followers established numerous new congregations, acquired properties for their churches, lobbied for government recognition, and endeavoured to establish state and national-level organisations. 

Although a few studies have investigated the resurgence of Spiritualism in Britain after World War I, the Australian context remains largely unexplored. The loss of soldiers intensified the longing to communicate with the departed. However, its appeal extended beyond the bereaved. Spiritualism not only offered solace but also furnished its adherents with spiritual guidance, a sense of purpose and a community. Its allure extended to those who felt disillusioned with traditional churches, emerging as an important source of spiritual insight and communal support during a challenging period. 

Crucially, the movement presented women with avenues for leadership, authority and financial independence. In this presentation, I employ photographs, spirit art and maps to portray the vibrant influence of Spiritualism in interwar Australia. 

Andrew is Professor of Sociology and Social Research in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin. Andrew is also a member of the CCH Executive. His research interests include spirituality, young people, new religious movements (including Spiritualism), global Christianity, secularisation, non-religion, religious change, and contemporary survey methods.  

In this seminar Dr Alice Garner will discuss her research into the life and times of Mavis Robertson AM (1930-2015), a political and social activist who became a pioneer figure in Australian industry superannuation. Mavis Robertson recorded a whole-of-life interview for the National Library of Australia in 2003, an interview that will form the backbone of an audio documentary Dr Garner intends to produce about Robertson’s activism across different life stages. Dr Garner will discuss how her approach to the papers of Mavis Robertson has been shaped by an attention to sound and music. 

Dr Alice Garner is a historian, writer, performer, and a former French and humanities teacher in the Victorian secondary school system. She has published in social, environmental and educational history and is currently based in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, working on an interdisciplinary project on trade union education in Australia with colleagues in history, adult education and labour law.

Phyllis Mander-Jones, undated (State Library of NSW) 

Much historiographical analysis is concerned with how historians approach ‘the archives’, especially how documents are curated, maintained and accessed through the policies and procedures of a particular institution. Less has been written of the people functioning at an individual level, employees like Phyllis Mander-Jones, who developed the foundations of Australia’s archival profession.  In this seminar, Dr Deborah Lee-Talbot discusses some highlights from her research project, Archive of the Archivist: Phyllis Mander-Jones and Australian Pacific History, 1901-1957. Doing so, she considers how women like Mander-Jones were crucial contributors to the policies and procedures of archives and record-keeping in modern Australian libraries. 

 Deborah is a professional and academic historian fascinated by religion, gender, archives, libraries and community engagement. With financial support from a scholarship at Deakin University, these interests were expressed in her PhD thesis ‘Kaleidoscopic Archives: finding hidden histories in the Pacific Records of the Australian Joint Copying Project’. This year she is conducting research at the State Library of New South Wales as CH Currey Fellow with the project the ‘Archives of the Archivist: Phyllis Mander-Jones and the Keeping of Australian-Pacific records, 1896-1957. She received a National Library of Australia Summer Scholarship in 2022 to analyse records concerning the Australian Joint Copying Project. Her research paper regarding women’s leadership in Pacific missions was highly commended at the Pacific Historians Association conference in 2021.  

This seminar will be based on Nate’s recent book, Number One Realist. 

In a 1965 letter to Newsweek, French writer and academic Bernard Fall (1926-67) staked a claim as the ‘Number One Realist’ on the Vietnam War. This is the first book to study the thought of this overlooked figure, one of the most important experts on counterinsurgency warfare in Indochina. Nathaniel L. Moir’s intellectual history analyses Fall’s formative experiences: his service in the French underground and army during the Second World War; his father’s execution by the Germans and his mother’s murder in Auschwitz; and his work as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials. 

Moir demonstrates how these critical events shaped Fall’s trenchant analysis of Viet Minh-led revolutionary warfare during the French-Indochina War and the early Vietnam War. In the years before conventional American intervention in 1965, Fall argued that–far more than anything in the United States’ military arsenal–resolving conflict in Vietnam would require political strength, willpower, integrity and skill. 

Number One Realist illuminates Fall’s study of political reconciliation in Indochina, while showing how his profound, humanitarian critique of war continues to echo in the endless conflicts of the present. It will challenge and change the way we think about the Vietnam War. 

Nathaniel L. Moir is a research associate in the Applied History Project at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, a former senior research fellow at the Naval Postgraduate School, and a former Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Kennedy School.