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The view from the crowd at the weekend protests revealed the progress extremists have made in harnessing anti-immigration sentiment. By Michael Winkler.

In the March for Australia melee

Protesters at Melbourne’s March for Australia rally last Sunday.

Credit: Michael Winkler

I stand on the intersection of Spring and Bourke streets, surrounded by angry Australians brandishing flags. Above us, on the steps of Parliament House, neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell shouts over a crackling loudspeaker. The crowd may not catch his every word, but each time he pauses for effect, they howl approval.

As the Hitler-venerating leader of the National Socialist Network (NSN) delivers his speech, a boxing kangaroo beachball is batted to and fro – bringing the levity of a one-day cricket match to a fascist recruitment and fundraising event.

That’s what March for Australia was, at least in Melbourne, where thousands of people gathered last Sunday to voice their opposition to immigration. Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide hosted similar events, with comparable numbers. On four occasions I was offered a leaflet headlined WHITE AUSTRALIA, directing readers to a website that declares: “Demographics are destiny, every year Australia becomes less White and therefore more brown. You cannot sit on the fence for a matter as important as the future existence of our kind. If you want a brown Australia, you are our enemy. If you want a White Australia, you are our friend.”

In the course of one afternoon, I watched the 32-year-old Sewell go from social pariah to potential mainstream political force. After he finished speaking, dozens of people scaled the steps to shake his hand or ask for selfies. Sewell directed his flunkies to hand them leaflets.

For a paramilitary organisation long considered a pariah, whose hate speech has been outlawed, this was an unprecedented opportunity to present as credible. There were no fascist salutes. Nothing in Sewell’s speech to scare a crowd that had, to be fair, a high threshold for offensive language. “When you’re in a fight with people that hate this country, sometimes you have to learn to make friends,” the great conciliator said. Yes, he made a disparaging reference to “Chinamen”, but he also poached ideas from the labour movement, imploring attendees to “organise”, suggesting that churches and footy clubs could be good places to start. Grassroots National Socialism; bring the kids.

At Sydney’s March for Australia, NSN member Jack Eltis described his cabal as “racist and proud”, confirmation that the quiet part is now being said out loud.

Everything was loud at Melbourne’s event, as if volume connoted legitimacy. “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” was bellowed over and over. Unpleasant opinions were expressed at maximum decibels. The Nazis and their Nazi-adjacent lickspittles roared, “Fucking jeets, off our streets.” The slur apparently refers to people of South Asian, particularly Indian, origin.

A photographer of Asian appearance was singled out. “Fuck off, g--k.” “Get back on your boat.” There was gleefulness in the opportunity to shout whatever slur you preferred, freed from political correctness or civility.

But the overwhelming majority of abuse was anti-Semitic. Avi Yemini was there, a lightning rod for conflict. People hailed slurs on the Australian–Israeli far-right provocateur and shouted that he should be deported. Yemini described the Nazis as “wrapping their hate in the flag” – even a stopped clock is sometimes correct – and when an egg splattered on the head of his private bodyguard, a young man standing next to me took it as encouragement to spit in the face of another of Yemini’s protectors.

I shook hands with a well-presented student named Josh. He said migration was ruining Australia and “I agree with what the boys in black over there are saying”, nodding at the Nazis. He asked if I was on board with them too, and when I said I wasn’t, he looked irritated and walked away.

I tried talking to other attendees. The conversations were janky, disjointed, sometimes straining coherence. The third-person pronoun did a lot of heavy lifting: “They have taken over all the market gardens and bakeries.” “They only care about migrants and trans.” “They give Palestinians who come here free houses and all the money they like.” “They can come onto your property without a warrant. Our property rights have been white-anted.” “They think we can’t see through their green energy lies.” “They don’t assimilate.” “They’re giving all these immigrants $60,000 each to settle here, taking all our resources and leaving nothing for us.”

Various people insisted that “Albo is a communist”, and for Jacinta Allan they revived the Gillard-era taunt, “Ditch the bitch.” There were frequent references to Covid vaccines and tuneless renditions of the national anthem and “Waltzing Matilda”.

There was a sense of unfocused grievance, roiling but undefined, inchoate grudges. I was reminded of Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild One, asked what he was rebelling against and drawling, “Whaddaya got?” They were protesting because they wanted to protest, to exercise their animus.

Who was in the crowd? White people, of course. A lot more men than women. Plenty of Baby Boomers, the denizens of Sky News and Facebook. A disturbing number of young men, possibly aroused by the frisson of violence rather than any defined ideology.

A lot of attendees reminded me of the people I grew up with, in a lower-income country town. I saw the bad teeth, one giveaway of socioeconomic disadvantage. I guessed that few had had the benefit of higher education. There were not many flash haircuts, not much expensive clothing. These were not people who often see themselves represented in mainstream media, parliament, screen culture or the society pages.

I am an overweight older white cis-male without tertiary education, good clothes or fashionable hair, so I “passed”. I was looked after, cautioned to mind a slippery step, apologised to by the young woman who bonked my head with her anti-immigration sign. How are we different? I have social capital and the good fortune to live within a progressive bubble. I can empathise with their impotent feelings of grievance, while observing that other people with the same level of dislocation from power and money do not retreat into base racism.

March for Australia claimed to be an event without leaders. What this meant in practice was that no one was sure when or where to march. Agitated people pushed simultaneously in different directions, chanting “Let us march” to no one in particular. One person grabbed a bullhorn and urged everyone to “head across the river to visit the governor’s house”. Nobody followed. Several people tried to steer the ship – “Everyone, that way!” – to which the louder response was, “Which way?”

Then, in this vacuum of indecision, the Nazis asserted dominance, pushing through the throng and leading the march west on Flinders Street. Twenty aggressive men in black trousers, black hats and black Helly Hansen jackets, accompanied by a couple of drummers, effortlessly assumed control over thousands of bellicose protesters.

The ragtag throng wove through city blocks and eventually ventured east to parliament, a reminder that the left has had a lot more practice at protest marches than their adversaries. At the point closest to counter-protesters, an Antifa activist screamed that I was a fucking racist piece of shit.

Sewell wasn’t the only person to address the crowd. His march co-initiator, Hugo Lennon, called for “an end to mass immigration. It is an invasion, nothing less.”

For several years, Lennon has monetised his bigotry through online content, writing as “Auspill”. While still at Scotch College, honing his persona as an extremist vlogger, he said, “Name any evil thing you can think of right now and I’ll explain to you why it’s the Jews’ fault.”

While Lennon rails online about migrants destroying the housing market for “Australians”, his father is a director of Peet Limited, which leverages land banking “to achieve optimal shareholder returns”. His grandfather is a property developer whose wealth has been estimated at half a billion dollars.

At the rally, where most marchers wore hoodies and old jeans, Lennon was happy to play the toff, appearing in an extravagant double-breasted overcoat, fine leather boots and a duck egg blue necktie.

He invited “every patriot … to participate in operation raise the flag” and called for another assembling, on January 26, to “take it back”.

The crowd began to dissipate, leaving strewn on the streets of Melbourne’s CBD the detritus of the day’s skirmishes. The fights that broke out, particularly with members of Antifa and pro-Palestinian counter-protesters, were the moments that dominated news coverage. Most reports missed what actually mattered on the day.

In the hours following the march, Sewell and his Nazis moved on to Kings Domain, the leafy parklands that house the Shrine of Remembrance and the site of Camp Sovereignty, a sacred site of First Nations protest. At sunset, according to witnesses, the men in black “ran up the hill and immediately targeted women, grabbing them, throwing them to the ground and striking them in the head”.

One woman said: “I had what looked like a 15-year-old boy rip my hair … and smash into my face with his fists. He did it with a smile on his face.”

This violence was shocking, but no less shocking than the embrace of avowed Nazis by thousands of protesters. Seeing Sewell address the crowd at Parliament House felt seismic, the brutal intrusion into Australian politics of an ideology that has been anathema and underground for 80 years.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as "‘I agree with the boys in black’".

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