Before ‘sovereign citizens’, Mel Gibson was linked to a radical group near Porepunkah

2 weeks ago 3

Decades before many Australians had heard the words “sovereign citizen” or imagined that neo-Nazis would openly lead marches through city streets, conspiracy theorists were busily spreading their messages around north-east Victoria, not far from the currently famous village of Porepunkah.

Among them was a fellow who would become one of the world’s best-known Hollywood actors, Mel Gibson. One late night in 1987 at a party in Wodonga, I tried to persuade Gibson that he was being used by a far-right, remorselessly antisemitic outfit named the League of Rights.

Gibson was living with his family at the time on a farm near the wonderfully named village of Tangambalanga, less than an hour north of Porepunkah.

During the federal election campaign of 1987, he’d climbed into the political tussle for the north-east Victorian seat of Indi, lending his support to an obscure independent candidate named Rob Taylor.

I’d got to know Gibson a bit when he came into Albury-Wodonga to drink at a bar called Maudies, favoured by a few of us journalists from the Albury Border Morning Mail.

Once, pie-eyed, he took a swing at some starstruck chap he thought was pestering him. I helped arrange to have Gibson driven home to Tangambalanga.

And then came his entry into politics. Perhaps he was bored.

Everywhere Gibson went, the League of Rights through front organisations like the Australian Heritage Foundation were there, too, recruiting the gormless by distributing sly propaganda claiming the world was being consumed by a cabal of international Jewish bankers and that the Labor Party of Bob Hawke was being run by the Fabian Society and the Club of Rome.

Within a year, Nationals senator Ron Boswell would famously describe the League in a speech to parliament as “racist, antisemitic and neo-Nazi”.

“The League thrives wherever there is discord, dissension, frustration, fear, resentment and financial hardship,” Boswell said.

Over a six-pack of beer at that long-ago party in Wodonga, I told Gibson that if he knew what was good for him and his career, he’d run a mile from anything to do with the League and their hangers-on.

He feigned interest and said he’d look into it.

Mel Gibson appeared on Ray Martin’s Midday Show in 1987.

Shortly after, he went on the Nine Network’s Midday Show with Ray Martin to rave about how Australia was selling itself off to foreign interests, borrowing millions from international bankers in order to “slip a quid” to places like “Red China” and Vietnam so they could compete unfairly against Australia.

The League’s boosters must have very nearly wet themselves with glee.

Taylor got 8.2 per cent of the vote in Liberal-held Indi, or 5412 first-preference votes. A fair clutch of people, clearly, were open to a fringe message retailed by an actor.

Gibson later moved to the United States, where in 2006 he made headlines by allegedly ranting at a Los Angeles policeman while drunk that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”, and demanding of the policeman: “Are you a Jew?” He later apologised and insisted he was no antisemite.

These days, he is a hand-picked envoy of US President Donald Trump, charged with “keeping an eye” on Hollywood’s film industry to ensure it does the right thing for Trump’s America. Gibson was chosen alongside fellow Trump supporters Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight. Surprise, surprise, surprise.

While Gibson was helping spread the word of the far right around north-east Victoria all those years ago, a woman named Jennifer McCallum, founder of People Against Communism, settled in a farmhouse near Wangaratta and began spruiking her latest cause: People Against the One World Government.

The One World Government was the aim of an international Jewish conspiracy, she proclaimed.

It seemed no big step from the Nazi belief in an international Jewish conspiracy, which was used as an excuse for the Holocaust. Not at all, McCallum insisted … why, she supported “good Christian Jews”.

McCallum’s husband had even more interesting views. He confided that UFOs were experimental aircraft held deep underground near Alice Springs and released only at night.

And yet, Jennifer McCallum had no problem filling country halls for her lectures about the so-called “One World Government” threat.

North-east Victoria, of course, is not much different to many country areas. The vast majority of those who live there would recoil at the insidious propaganda of the old League of Rights and the absurd bluster of the McCallums.

Nevertheless, those susceptible to conspiracy theories and the fear of some invisible threat from forces beyond their control were ready-made for the embrace of ideologies that reject authority and even reality as we know it. Groomed, you might say, by the likes of the League (in league with Mel Gibson) and McCallum.

When the COVID-19 pandemic caused governments to lock down communities and restrict citizens’ movements, the ingredients for a full-scale exploration of alternative realities slotted into place for many of these people.

The big anti-vaxxer and anti-lockdown rallies introduced thousands to the idea that it made sense to reject a world controlled by government edict, conventional laws and old beliefs.

The so-called “sovereign citizens”, or “freedom” movements, were waiting.

Boswell’s “discord, dissension, frustration, fear, resentment and financial hardship” combined and mutated within what might be called a perfect storm.

All over the country, small encampments of the newly radicalised began settling in, holding it to be self-evident that unseen forces manipulate events for covert purposes; that everything is connected; that nothing happens by chance; and that they have privileged access to such knowledge, unlike ordinary people (“sheeple”), just as Gibson, in league with the League, and McCallum, had explained.

Off to the even darker side, the malevolent neo-Nazi movement offered itself as a home for men so angered by their cultural, financial and intellectual impotence, they live for violence.

And so, last weekend, society’s gatekeepers, the police, scoured the forests and hills of north-east Victoria for a “sovereign citizen” suspected of having shot dead two police and wounding another; and in the streets of Australia’s big cities, more police were confronted with small battalions of neo-Nazis who felt emboldened enough to attack Indigenous Australians in a park.

How far we have come.

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