This paper takes up the question of who cares about what and why in Australia in the context of popular responses to gun control. Gun control legislation has been built up in various ways by state and federal governments over the past 25 years, but it is the measures introduced by the Howard government after the Port Arthur gun massacre in 1996 that are most at issue in popular accounts. My focus is on the pro-gun discourses of certain radical nationalists, Christian fringe activists, and leading figures of the popular right movement associated with One Nation. The gun lobby in Australia is small and weak compared with that of North America, and there is no broad consensus about a fundamental right to bear arms supporting it in the mainstream Australian population. The pro-gun contingent is significant and interesting, nonetheless. It seeks to draw on the undercurrent of disquiet experienced by many people in the present economic and political conditions of Australia, in particular among those not brought up to expect more than temporary deprivation. It offers a range of articulations that explain and give narrative form to feelings associated with the sense that however humble they are, one’s rightful place and comforts have come under siege: feelings of loss, fear, suspicion, betrayal, outrage and so forth. It speculates about the coming danger for ordinary Australians. It draws up plans for channeling and structuring a broad civilian resistance. It gives new content to the Australian national character, and new myths of origin for Australian democracy. In all this, it also gives academics like myself new insight into the shapes that popular thought might choose to take, in Australia, in the wake of "the Howard years".

When I chose the title "Gunning for Australia" for this paper I had in mind the particular modality of caring for Australia that is the province of the pro-gun activists. This form of caring for the nation is especially engaged and committed. Its plans for righting wrongs call for single-minded dedication, a fearless spirit, and a difficult life of combat. Its narratives promote a sense of urgency. Continually in its sights is the unresponsive and lazy or disengaged side of human existence. That is, its opposite impulse, its symbolic antithesis, may be thought of as apathy. Apathy, however, is the very mark of the Australian character, in its negative consideration. A very recent nationwide survey, released in June of this year, compared findings with an Australian Gallup Poll taken 50 years ago, and found that Australians today consider themselves manifestly and shamefully apathetic. Of their failings as Australians, they above all cited their lack of concern and commitment. "Apathy took over from gambling as our worst fault", it was reported in the survey of 2003. 18 per cent of people nominated apathy as the greatest shortcoming of the Australian people taken as a whole, as against 14.5 per cent of people in the 1950s. ¹ The distinctive local quality of Australia’s pro-gun rhetoric, then, comes from its perception of having to face an entrenched apathy – a perception of the national character and the national shame that is widely shared and acknowledged, as I say. Its dilemma is of having to work against the grain; against the immobilizing moral torpor of a nation that doesn’t care enough about what is happening to it.

In the abstract of my paper I referred to the magazine Lock Stock & Barrel. This was a pro-gun publication that ran, at first sporadically and then regularly twice a year, from 1981 to 1999. It came out of the small Australian town of Gympie in Queensland. This publication featured a serialized fictional piece called "Revolution in Apathralia", penned by magazine editor and Gympie gun shop owner Ron Owen. Ron Owen is one of the activists I have interviewed for this paper. The series had about 15 episodes to it, each at least 2 or 3 pages long. Owen came up with the name "Apathralia" as a contraction of "apathetic Australia" – Australia as a nation of people who don’t care. In the first episode, appearing in Edition 7 of Lock Stock & Barrel, Owen declared, under the pseudonym of Robin Hood, that the people of New South Wales had lost their chance to bury their guns, as Owen had specifically instructed them to do ten years previously. The Unsworth government had brought in gun control and now, for love or money, no one could get hold of the proper plastic pipe for burying guns in the manner advised.² Robin Hood wrote in 1992 "If the firearm owners of 1981 had not been so apathetic it wouldn’t have happened".³ He continues, "We have been living for years on the efforts of our ancestors and our apathy has produced this sorry state of affairs…Don’t do anything. Hand in your guns, take the traitors' hand-outs…If this is your wish don’t read this article any further." As he explains to them, "This article and the series to follow are intended to explain the realities of the third option [of armed guerrilla resistance] if the apathy still prevails and the first option [of political removal of the traitors] doesn’t work."⁴ For Owen, Australians don’t have the moral consciousness and moral courage that is called for in the situation we face today. This is the scenario that is told in the story of "Revolution in Apathralia". The banking system and a "quisling", puppet government progressively take from Apathralians all guns, all private land and all civil liberties. Our conference question, "Australia – who cares?", is repeated in this story along with clichés about Australia as Owen describes the totalitarian nightmare into which Apathralia has descended:

Owen invents a character named Professor Gubrik from the dystopian future, who teaches his contemporaries how the people’s enslavement came about. This is in the late 20^th century, several decades after the abandonment of the government’s control of its money, which it held originally with the establishment of the Commonwealth Bank, to international clearing houses. The surrender came with the introduction, firstly, of the chequebook system, followed by the plastic credit card, then electronic eftpos, then Smartcard, and finally, moving into fiction, an electronic implant and outright outlawing of cash. Documents are uncovered from "ancient, freedom fighter’s [sic] camps in Morganland (previously called Queensland)", showing "how by their apathy, the world’s people fell into the trap of an easy life".⁶ Accepting the convenience of a cashless society, Apathralians allowed themselves to be controlled by international forces. Economic control was followed up by more shocking forms of control via the deliberate fabrication and distribution of the Ebola virus. Another fictional character from the future, Dr Peter Matash, MD, explains the scheme behind this move: "In the late 1960’s, the idea of total Unity was already conceived by the forerunners of Global [the military-industrial complex in place by the year 2025]. To achieve total control, not only economic domination had to be secured, but after the Uniting of all the people, the reduction of the population had to be achieved quickly."⁷ This overhead shows an official report of the death of Professor Gubrik in the authorized newspaper, "Global News", from the year 2594.⁸ Notice that the caption is "GLOBAL CARES". This is an ironic displacement of the crucial caring for Australia that we must find in ourselves if we are not to end up in this situation, Owen believes. All hope is placed in a band of maverick gun owners from what used to be Queensland leading a revolt to overthrow this conglomerate called Global, this monstrous realization of an idea of total Unity. But for Owen, the situation looks grim. While a leader of the resistance, code named Shogun, does appear from time to time to smuggle out bits of wisdom from Sun Tze’s The Art of War and the writings of Chairman Mao Tse Tung, nowhere in the long narrative of "Revolution in Apathralia" does the revolution even come close to getting up..⁹

Owen is a British migrant who ended up in Australia only because he wanted to get out of the UK, and found he could not get into Canada. This was in 1967, and Owen was a young socialist and trade unionist at the time. He’d wanted to leave, he says, because of the UK’s "horrendous" gun laws; he’d always wanted guns, had joined the cadets at school, and then the army upon leaving school when he was still 14. Although he was bright, he’d rebelled against school authority and control, and while he followed his interest in guns to the military, he soon discovered the army worse with respect to this control; in his words, "the army’s total".¹⁰ He traces his disenchantment with socialism to the point at which he learned that the Australian Labour Party had signed the GATS agreement in 1974.¹¹ This led him to seek answers elsewhere, and to uncover the influence of the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Bildenburg group and others involved in the Zionist New World Order conspiracy. He does not see himself as having shifted from the left to the right, for he sees that both left and right, at least as they play in the major political parties, are in the pockets of the internationalists. Because all parties depend on these financiers through the banks for their electoral funding, "democracy really is", he says, "a farce". When I asked Owen if he thinks that "there’s a true democracy that we could work towards", he answered in these terms:

For Owen, the Magna Carta and other documents hold a certain set of rules above the people and this is as it should be. Despite, in this quote, Owen setting aside the monarchy as only one form of constitutionalism, a crucial campaign for him in the Australia has been to defend the place of the Queen and the idea of the Commonwealth against the republican push in Australia and its regional identification with Asia. Although he frequently says "we" for Australians, he does not display the pathos of Australian nationalism that I have found in Lisa Oldfield, who became teary during our interview when she tried to convey her feelings for Australia and its essential difference from North America, for example, or Jim Saleam. Saleam, founder of National Action and intellectual leader of the radical right in Australia, has much invested in the Eureka Stockade incident and in cultural figures like Henry Lawson. With its central platform of republicanism, his discourse makes an interesting contrast to Owen’s, as I will soon go on to show.

Before I move on to Saleam’s discourse and Lisa Oldfield’s, I want to recount at length a story from Owen that captures an identification with the people of his adoptive country that is more local than national. Owen is reflecting upon the distinctiveness of Gympie gunowners with reference to the wartime "Brisbane line" that Kitchener and his aides first surveyed in 1912:

JL: Disarmed? [I say]

This gesture of killing yourself before giving up your guns is one that epitomizes the heightened level of concern and commitment that Owen localizes in his small town Queensland community, and that he holds onto as the hope of the nation. Australians otherwise, he believes, have grown soft and complacent in their workers’ paradise and their state-sponsored rural collectives. In the following quotation, Owen’s use of the collective noun "we" does little to overcome his alienation from this Australian mainstream, as he contemplates the essential difference between Australians and North Americans. I should add here that this alienation from the mainstream also comes from the generally very positive response that Australians had to the conservative Howard government’s gun control initiatives. Owen says,

The question of any difference between Australia and North America, with regard to gun culture, was one that I raised with all of those whom I interviewed for this paper, Lisa Oldfield included. Lisa Oldfield is spokesperson for the NSW Firearms Dealers Association, and the wife of One Nation NSW senator David Oldfield. She gets, as she puts it, "pretty emotional" in her patriotism saying, "I think living in Australia, being born in Australia, is like winning the lottery, it’s just the most, amazing country ever… I don’t think you can define it, I don’t think it’s all sort of, Ginger Meggs looking kids with blue eyes, eating mince pies [she laughs]… but you know, people expect that you know, you’re an Aussie, you’re going to be friendly, and everyone wants to be your mate, and like, let’s go and have a beer".¹³ The main difference she found in relation to guns is that shooters here do not balk against state supervision of firearms. She told me "… I’d have no problem with the police coming around knocking on my door at 2 o’clock in the morning and saying, look Mrs Oldfield, we know that you own firearms, do you mind if we come in and check that they’re stored correctly, because I know that I do that. And if that means weeding out people who are leaving their firearms sort of lying under the kitchen table, or in the cupboard, then all the better…I think Australia’s fairly unique in that, and we are more regulated, and we’re more, I guess, happy to be regulated. So, um, I guess the American viewpoint all sort of stems from the Declaration of Independence and their God-given [right to bear arms]."¹⁴

All those I interviewed cited the revolutionary War of Independence from Britain as what stokes the fire of America’s cultural attachment to guns, and as what is absent from Australia’s own gun culture, if indeed there is one. Jim Saleam, going against the grain especially of David Oldfield, maintains that Australia has never had a gun culture. And this was precisely because Australians did not make that radical break with the British Empire. They rather have retained their early prison culture of having to fit in with authority, and having their citizen rights circumscribed by this relation. Saleam explains it in these words:

Saleam finds that the Eureka incident and other insurrections like it went some way towards giving us that myth of national independence and a sense of the value of an armed citizenry. Indeed he points out that the Australian Labour Party, "owes part of [its] heritage to an armed incident in Barcaldine in 1891" involving "a thousand armed shearers", and that to this day they "worship the tree, that’s in the centre of Barcaldine where the Eureka oath was taken" and the Eureka flag raised once more.¹⁶ This revolutionary heritage has gone out of the Australian left, however, along with the Marxist idea of the armed and violent overthrow of the state, which featured to some extent in Australia earlier in the 20^th Century with "workers’ gun clubs and communist party sponsored firearms training".¹⁷ This was only ever a minor tradition, however, and even the mainstream military cadet-style gun clubs in all the country towns and cities of Australia have done little to foster a gun culture, according to Saleam. We need to make the break from Britain, from its Queen and Commonwealth, and become a republic, he believes, in order for Australians to discover within themselves the nationalist spirit that will make them want to stick up for themselves as citizens. He agrees with David Mosler that Australia is now fundamentally a recreational society. ¹⁸ To quote Saleam,

Here the moral disengagement that marks the Australian character is distinguished from apathy in its socially engineered quality. Saleam believes that the greatest danger facing the Australian people, that against which they might arm themselves, comes from the state itself, from its security apparatuses in particular, and from its general need to secure its own existence. This is a somewhat different view from that of Ron Owen, for whom the Australian government is only a puppet of the international conspiracy seeking total control. No matter what the actual governmental regime, in Owen’s view, the move to disarm the people can be recognized as a totalitarian imperative, and this is the horizon against which all local initiatives like the Howard government buy back are read. Owen says, "I mean like the first premise of the communists is disarmament, you know what I mean, it’s the first thing of the National Socialists, um, it’s the first, um, premise, of sort of John Howard. …it’s not gun control, it’s people control."²⁰ For Saleam, the move to disarm is not an order that comes from the top, in either national or international politics, but is rather only the logical outcome of bureaucratic rationality. As he puts it "it’s not a conspiracy as in a conspiracy of dark satanic forces, it’s the routinized workings of the bureaucratic mind. Why would you have people with weapons, if you wish to incarcerate people for terrorist offenses?"²¹

For both Saleam and Owen, we can say at this point, the Howard-era war on terror is primarily a technique for securing more control. Its real targets are not terrorists, Muslim terrorists or any other kind, but ordinary Australians. Caring for Australia, for these pro-gun activists, means recognizing the erosion of civil liberties as the main game, and overcoming one’s disengagement from crucial national questions by rising up against the forces of civilian disarmament. Pro-gun discourse is able to expose the way governments like the present Liberal-National coalition led by Howard seize upon historical accidents like the Port Arthur tragedy, or the September 11-inspired war on terror, to institute a regime of increased surveillance and reduced civic freedoms. This is whether it comes from the self-educated, rural, conservative right, represented here by Ron Owen, or the university-educated, urban, radical nationalist right, represented by Dr Saleam. For any discourse that seeks to counter the pro-gun rhetoric as it plays in Australia, an equally or otherwise compelling rhetoric of caring for Australia in relation to these important, immediate and urgent questions needs to be imagined and put into popular circulation.