European and Australian Fascisms: The Case of Ferenc Molnar and National Socialism in Cold War Australia

European and Australian Fascisms: The Case of Ferenc Molnar and National Socialism in Cold War Australia

The relationship between the Australian far right and Central/Eastern European migrant groups in the 1960s and 1970s has been highlighted by some scholars. Predominantly linked by an extreme anti-communism, with an underlying anti-Semitism and white supremacism, the neo-Nazi groups in Australia closely aligned with certain Hungarian, Ukrainian and Croatian nationalist organisations, primarily made up of people that had emigrated during in the early post-war era. However, for the most part, they remained separate organisations. This chapter looks an exception to this. Ferenc (or Frank) Molnar was a Hungarian migrant to Australia who arrived in the late 1940s and in the mid-1960s, co-founded the National Socialist Party of Australia in Canberra with Edward (or Ted) Robert Cawthron. The rest of his NSPA colleagues were predominantly Anglo-Australian, with Molnar representing the in-roads that the Australian far right were attempting to make into the European migrant communities that had arrived in the post-war period. By exploring the security files that were held on Molnar and the publications of the NSPA, this chapter seeks to outline how Central/Eastern European nationalism and racial politics developed amongst these diasporas in Cold War Australia, and how they interacted with an Anglicised fascism that had developed in a settler colonial environment. Molnar represents a nexus point for these overlapping movements and helps us understand how the Australian far right was fostered within an international and transnational context.

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