Keeping an ‘Eye on Hitler’: 1923–1932

Chapter 2 examines how the rise of Adolf Hitler and his strident antisemitism and nativist ideology were received and framed by the Australian press during the first decade of his political life. When did Hitler and his Nazi Party enter the nation’s consciousness, and why? The press coverage reveals the limitations, routines and hierarchical structures of Australian journalism during the 1920s, as well as the social, political and cultural values of the era. The chapter introduces some of the journalists who feature prominently in the book: among them, Godfrey ‘Geof’ Blunden, Ronald Monson, Ronald Selkirk Panton, Elizabeth Riddell and Sam White. By analysing their young lives, we can see how exclusionary Australian attitudes to race—written into national law by an infamously prohibitive immigration policy—shaped their values and attitudes, and those of the mainstream Australian press more broadly. The very foundation of Australia’s racial attitudes was disturbingly derived from the doctrines of nineteenth-century Social Darwinism that underwrote the National Socialists’ hatred of Jews and others. I argue that the treatment of the distant events in Germany illuminates an historical pattern of responding to the persecution of the Jews and later, the Nazis’ extermination campaign.