So-Called Sovereign Settlers: Settler Conspirituality and Nativism in the Australian Anti-Vax Movement

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic instability that followed, has given new life to conspirituality and far-right ideology in so-called Australia. This article discusses how politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality have pieced together settler narratives about a New World Order and external threats to Western society from far-right and white supremacist Christian ideology circulated via new media. Using anti-colonial discourse analysis, we elucidate the undercurrent of white supremacist ideology in the Australian anti-vax movement, and highlight the misuse of Indigeneity in far-right and anti-vax narratives. We discuss how these narratives are settler-colonial and how conspiritualists co-opt and perform Indigeneity as a form of settler nativism. As a case study, we analyse the use of the term sovereignty by settlers attached to Muckadda Camp—a camp of ‘Original Sovereigns’ occupying the lawn outside Old Parliament house from December 2021 to February 2022. Using Indigenous critique from both new media and academia, we argue that although settlers may perform Indigeneity, they are exercising white supremacist settler narratives, and not Indigenous sovereignty.

1. Introduction

From the attempted insurrection at Capitol Hill in Washington DC in 2021 to the lawns of Old Parliament house in Ngunnawal Country in Canberra in 2022, ‘Freedom, freedom, freedom’1 resounded on signs and in voices reacting to changing governments, laws, and times. In so-called “Australia”,2 those of us resisting settler colonialism and white supremacy heard the word echo from indignant settlers and remembered when it meant something else, when activists like Charles Perkins taught Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people3 that it meant something like collective liberation from systemic oppression, rather than the right to live and act as one pleases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed settler governments responding militantly to enforce lockdowns and restrictions on communities in Southwestern Sydney, where the majority live with higher than average levels of disadvantage compared to other areas across NSW (Barr 2017). Meanwhile, residents of the more affluent Eastern suburbs of Sydney went to the beach (Visontay 2021). We watched failures of the vaccine rollout and medical racism take their toll on regional and remote Aboriginal communities (Collard 2021). We navigated increased police presence in our streets and suburbs, and new kinds of digital tracking and surveillance (Hendl et al. 2022). We battled dis/misinformation4 on social media and grappled with centuries of colonial violence and government mistrust to address vaccine hesitancy in the broader community and at home (Fredericks et al. 2022). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and other communities of colour instigated mutual aid efforts (Bolger and Bowring 2022) and repurposed community hubs and organisations to deliver vaccinations, and to keep one another informed, housed, and fed (Perry and Kerin 2021). As we have many times under colonial occupation, we adapted and endured in fluctuating economic, social, and political conditions.

In the meantime, settler conspiritualists used the pandemic and the ensuing economic and political uncertainty to proliferate and popularise narratives laced with far-right ideology. ‘Conspirituality’ and ‘conspiritualists’ are terms brought to academia by Ward and Voas (2011) to describe politico-spiritual communities invested in both conspiracy theories and New Age spirituality. At present, conspirituality is best observed in the United States of America (USA), the United Kingdom (UK) and Western Europe. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought new relevance and attention to this community in so-called Australia (Halafoff et al. 2022b). Although conspirituality cultures were already blossoming on the internet prior to 2020 (Halafoff et al. 2022b), the pandemic and resistance to ensuing government responses, including mandatory vaccines, gave a platform to social media influencers and religious and political groups who embraced the movement to attract followers and to distribute alternative therapies, products and ideas online (Halafoff et al. 2022a). At the heart of conspiritualist anti-vax movements is the belief in an attempted ‘Great Reset’ to implement a ‘New World Order’—an unstable narrative about clandestine elites using vaccines to corrupt populations and take over the political, economic and social systems of the world (Halafoff et al. 2022a, p. 150) and, in some versions, to form a singular world government (Bruns et al. 2020). Criticisms of concentrated wealth and geopolitical power in Western colonising and colonial nations are formative to Indigenous, post-colonial and anti-colonial studies. There is also necessary critique in these fields of the Western medical industrial complex. As Indigenous authors, we have noted previously that given the historical and ongoing prevalence of medical racism, any vaccine hesitancy from Indigenous communities is warranted (Day and Carlson 2021). However, settler conspiritualist narratives do not engage with these critiques. Instead, their invocations of ‘global elites’ are imbued with deeply held colonial and antisemitic anxieties. While conspiracy theories under the anti-vax banner form a complex web of varied theories that are not all compatible (Van Prooijen and Douglas 2018), settler conspiritualist resistance to COVID-19 vaccines, and particularly mRna vaccines, have grown into a quasi-religious movement centred on a ‘Great Awakening’ or shift in consciousness that empowers believers to prevent the Great Reset/New World Order and return to an ‘underlying, natural state, inspired by ancient, pristine wisdom narratives’ (Halafoff et al. 2022a, p. 150). As we will show, this narrative is steeped in white anxieties of replacement, and in the case of Australia, invokes Indigeneity to naturalise conspritualist settlers on stolen lands. Much of this cult-like ideology spreads online using new media.

We begin this chapter with a discussion of the relationship between the far right, Western occulture, whiteness and settler colonialism or structural colonialism, where settlers attempt to forcefully and permanently replace Indigenous peoples on their own lands (Veracini 2010). Specifically, we highlight the relationships between far right and settler conspiritualist narratives imported from Europe and the USA. In doing this, we respond to claims that settler anti-vax narratives are not inherently white supremacist or far right. Then, we look at a high-profile case study of settler conspiritualist performances of Indigeneity: Muckadda Camp, a camp of ‘Original Sovereigns’ occupying the lawn outside Old Parliament house from December 2021 to February 2022 which attempted to co-opt the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a 50-year-old ongoing protest camp highlighting that the Australian government has never entered into a treaty with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Carlson and Coe 2022). Finally, we offer an anti-colonial analysis of how white settlers embroiled in conspiritualist cultures play out colonial fantasies by performing Indigenous masculinity. This phenomenon was previously captured by Deloria (1998), who discussed the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Deloria argued that colonial patriots in the US adorned themselves with Native American paraphernalia and ‘played Indian’—not to assert a solidarity with Native American peoples, but to symbolize rebellion and to assert a settler identity separate from the British. Deloria’s analysis came to mind again in 2021 as we watched the ‘QAnon Shaman’, a white American settler, participate in the riots at Capitol Hill wearing a hat resembling a Sioux Buffalo Headdress and a bare chest covered in neo-pagan tattoos associated with white supremacists (Birket 2021).

Throughout the chapter, we apply an anti-colonial discursive framework (Dei and Asgharzadeh 2001) comprised of settler colonial theory and Indigenous scholarship. An anti-colonial discursive framework, according to Dei and Asgharzadeh (2001, p. 300),

…allows for the effective theorizing of issues emerging from colonial and colonized relations by way of using indigenous knowledge as an important standpoint. As a theoretical perspective, anti-colonialism interrogates the power configurations embedded in ideas, cultures, and histories of knowledge production, validation, and use.

Thus, we apply an anti-colonial discursive critique to existing analyses of settler conspiritualist ideas and activities, and of how settlers enact these on lands they colonise and occupy. Within this approach, we implement Veracini’s (2010) work on settler colonial narratives and Eve Tuck and colleagues’ work on settler nativism (Tuck and Yang 2012; Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013). We apply anti-colonial discourse analysis to settler conspiritualist discourse and to Muckadda camp, as captured by academia as well as Australian mainstream, independent and especially social media. We do so to examine the relationship between settler conspirituality, the far right, and settler colonialism. We argue that settlers engaged in these movements co-opt Indigeneity to ‘nativise’ themselves to an imagined white settler utopia where they have freedom to operate with impunity.

2. Settler Conspiritualists, Whiteness and the Far Right

While initial thinking on conspirituality labelled New Age spiritualists and conspiracy theorists as new and unlikely associates (Ward and Voas 2011), further examination of these groups and their belief systems reveals a long history of entwined convictions. Asprem and Dyrendal (2015) argue that conspirituality itself is not a new phenomenon but that the internet has given new reach and relevance to both conspiracy theories and Western ‘occulture’—a reservoir of ideas, symbols, and themes that are recycled in Western popular culture and discourse (Partridge 2006). Social media and the internet also provide new means for citizens of the West to handpick, commodify and appropriate knowledge and practices from other cultures, and to repurpose them through their own lens—as is the case with many New Age practices and alternative therapies that are sold by conspiritualists as spiritual solutions to political problems (Asprem and Dyrendal 2015; Russell 2023; Ward and Voas 2011). As Halafoff et al. (2022a, p. 137) point out, this begs the question of why, rather than applying anti-capitalist and anti-colonial logic to COVID-19, and engaging with Indigenous land rights and environmental activism, which was caused by Western environmental desecration and resource mismanagement, and in turn caused exponential political and social disruption, death and harm, have previously left-leaning settler conspiritualists chosen to source answers in right-wing conspiracies? Halafoff et al. (ibid) argue that doing so would be more difficult and long-term. We would also argue that the answer to this can be found in settler colonial anxieties about losing dominion over Indigenous lands and resources.

Expressly ad hoc and individualised cultures of political engagement on the internet cultivate political conspiracy theories, populism, right-wing extremism, and anti-intellectualism in the West (Morelock and Narita 2022; Russell 2023; Van Prooijen et al. 2015). The resulting overlap between the far right and previously left-leaning New Age communities drew the attention of cultural commentators and journalists throughout the pandemic (Halafoff et al. 2022a), increasing with the visibility of these groups at anti-lockdown and later anti-vaccination demonstrations (Day and Carlson 2021). While some referred to this seemingly new coalition as the ‘cosmic right’ (Milburn 2020; Russell 2023), the links or similarities between New Age and far right movements show a relationship forged through European connections, settler colonialism and whiteness. Understanding the far right requires careful, context-specific engagement, but it is also impossible without understanding that in Australia far-right groups, ideas and political parties are effectively born of those in the UK, Europe and other settler colonial nation-states like the USA (Peucker and Smith 2020). Introducing the internet to these relationships created a complex global web circulating hundreds of years of white political, socio-religious and economic anxieties that join and take new form. Thus, while not all settler conspiritualists or anti-vaxxers are white, it is important to note that many of the core themes and ideas in these movements stem from predominantly white nations and most often from movements defending whiteness within these nations.

While some have queried the relationship between anti-vax movements and white supremacy (Russell 2023), there is a well-documented relationship between wellness culture and the maintenance of white society and bodies (Jain 2020). Historically, there has also been a gendered component to wellness cultures, which have typically catered to white women (Conor 2021). Ward and Voas (2011, p. 104) argue that conspirituality has opened a meeting ground between masculinist conservative political cultures and individualistic self-focused wellness movements that typically attract women. Throughout 2020 and 2021, anti-Black state violence and the Black Lives Matter movement prompted a greater analysis of expressions of white femininity and masculinity in the USA and other Western nations, including in anti-vax and anti-lockdown activism (Negra and Leyda 2021). White privilege, and the capacity to avoid or mitigate the impact of the pandemic on one’s health, income, or housing, allowed many white people, particularly those who lived in less crowded homes or locations, to imagine that the pandemic was a hoax and that measures to protect vulnerable populations, like lockdowns and masks, were a source of oppression (Halafoff et al. 2022a, p. 153). This was amidst a rising culture of reactivity amidst white people in settler colonial nations, epitomised by viral captures of “Karens”—angry white women who surfaced in stores and at protests, refusing to wear a mask and often haranguing Black, Brown and Indigenous people (Negra and Leyda 2021). Alongside “Karen” walked the lone wolf operative, a masculinist embodiment of white supremacist cultures and ideologies who had already gained significant traction and reach on the internet leading up to 2020, as a warrior for white children and white futures (Richards 2020). The defence of white bodies, white wealth and white families was also a significant component of QAnon—an American meta-conspiracy informed by both contemporary conspiracy theories and centuries-old Christian archetypes which contributed to the insurrection at Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021. As Tuters and Willaert (2022) have shown, there is significant convergence between QAnon and other conspiritual ideologies.

QAnon was supported, if not partially incited, by white billionaire populist and former US President Donald Trump, who led a political campaign centred on protecting borders, addressing internal government corruption, and returning to traditional (white) family values (Lagan 2022). Anti-vax and anti-lockdown rhetoric was also significant in Trump’s legacy as President of the USA. Qanon and conspiritualist Great Reset/New World Order theories converge on a belief in ‘Deep State’ actors who are an evil cabal of politicians, celebrities and billionaires engaged in child sacrifice, paedophilia, and Satanic blood rituals—recycled myths about Jewish people derived from the anti-Semitic texts (see Asprem and Dyrendal 2015; Wong 2021). Although QAnon began as a series of fringe theories on a 4chan message board5, its timely affiliation with the re-election of Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic created a ‘perfect storm’ (Conner and MacMurray 2022) of dis/misinformation which drew in conspiritualists across the West. This narrative is immediately legible to other settler colonial nations like Australia as it oversimplifies complex, imbricated systems of political, social and economic power, including settler colonialism and neoliberalism, and transforms them into a secret, evil Deep State other planning world domination. QAnon is a typically settler conspiritualist movement that converts secular political problems and inequalities into a spiritual war of good/evil reminiscent of age-old Christian ideology (Asprem and Dyrendal 2015; Halafoff et al. 2022b). The antisemitic undertones of settler conspiritualist and QAnon conspiracies are better known than their inherent connection to the far right, as is evident by the number of previously left-leaning people embroiled in the movements (Monbiot 2021). Critics of the New Age community’s uptake of antisemitic conspiracies have also highlighted that New Age practices like astrology, alternative therapies, ecosophy6 and mysticism have long histories of appropriation by European fascism, and particularly Nazism (Evans 2020). However, to better understand settler conspirituality and its ties to whiteness and setter colonialism in Australia, there is need for greater attention to the significance of key principles of the far right in these movements.

Leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a rise in far-right political parties in Australia, particularly those expressing anti-Islamic and anti-immigration stances like Pauline Hansen’s One Nation party, as well as an increase in violent right-wing extremism. Most public among these was white Australian Brenton Tarrant’s mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, Aotearoa (New Zealand) in March 2019, which he both live-streamed and supplemented with a fascist, white supremacist manifesto published online entitled ‘The Great Replacement’ (Richards 2020). Like QAnon and the Great Reset/New World Order narrative, Hansen’s party and Tarrant’s manifesto recycled narratives of a non-white, non-Christian evil that must be stopped from encroaching on a valiant white Christian population. Indeed, the term ‘Great Replacement’ comes directly from the 2011 text where French white nationalist Renaud Camus argued that Middle Eastern and African Muslim people, whom he called ‘replacist elites’ were committing a type of reverse colonialism in Europe (Hernandez Aguilar 2023). As Kawsar Ali (2021) has highlighted, the Christchurch massacre was made possible by existing settler colonial and white supremacist political conditions in both Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) which target Indigenous people and other non-white people with racial violence to maintain a majority white settler state. Former prime minister of Australia Tony Abbott was publicly critical of Islam and Middle Eastern communities, Indigenous communities, and non-white immigration during his term from 2013 to 2015 (Peucker and Smith 2020). Then, Hansen’s 2016 campaign and election to the Senate introduced unapologetic racial hatred targeting Indigenous, Asian, and Middle Eastern people, as well as other immigrants, to the political mainstream. The aftermath of 9/11 and George Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ discourse, as well as mainstream political endorsement for Islamophobia, gave rise to new far right groups across Australia, including ‘Reclaim Australia’, the ‘United Patriots Front’ and the ‘True Blue Crew’ (Peucker and Smith 2020, p. 6), who were openly racially violent both on the internet and offline (Carlson and Fraser 2021). This context gave new momentum and new sites of collective belonging to the far right (Richards 2020). Anti-Islamic and far-right extremism maintained momentum right into the pandemic, and the Australia Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) stated that right-wing extremism accounted for 50 per cent of its work in 2021 (Khalil 2022).

Far-right groups and parties in Australia are varied and are also different to other Western nations (Peucker and Smith 2020). Nevertheless, there are a few principles among far-right movements and communities in Western nations that are shared and which connect them. Among these are (1) anti-immigration and xenophobic stances in service of (2) protecting white populations, cultures, and traditional values (especially Christian family values), and (3) a strong sense of one’s own right to enforce law and order to (4) overthrow government elites who are compromised or corrupted by external others (Dean et al. 2016; Mudde 2017; Peucker and Smith 2020). Settler conspiritualists who oppose the COVID-19 vaccine are not necessarily members of far-right groups or political parties, although many far-right groups and political parties in so-called Australia also adopted an anti-vax and anti-lockdown stance (Day and Carlson 2021). However, key principles of the far-right underpin settler conspiritualist movements in Australia. The narrative of a Great Awakening of the New Age, which many conspiritualists promised the pandemic would deliver (Wong 2021), is purported to wake the public up to the Great Reset/New World Order and purge the government of evil actors and return to a pure and truthful state of consciousness and humanity (Halafoff et al. 2022a, p. 150). The Great Reset/New World Order involves a foreign globalist other (the Deep State cabal) who has compromised Western governments and who is corrupting populations genetically with the COVID-19 vaccine, which many conspiracists claim alters DNA and/or is connected to 5G and/or nanobot and/or microchip technologies (Bruns et al. 2020). Depopulation and population control are significant themes in this narrative, which proposes that Big Tech (5 g, nanobots, surveillance), Big Pharma (vaccines) and the mainstream media (fake news) are working for/with the Deep State to both reduce and control Western populations (Bruns et al. 2020, pp. 1223–25). Anxieties about the protection of children are also central—that children must not be corrupted by vaccines or by ideology from the fake news or defiled by the Deep State or its followers. Thus, settler conspiritualists position themselves as spiritual defenders—or warriors tasked with overthrowing the government to protect the future of Western society.

As Richards (2020) and Roose et al. (2022) have shown, white masculinity plays a central role in far-right narratives. White men experiencing economic and social precarity because of major social and political changes like those induced by the COVID-19 pandemic are more susceptible to radicalisation. Historically, we have seen this kind of ‘aggrieved entitlement’ occur in response to the Civil Rights movements in the USA and Western feminism (Roose et al. 2022, p. 5). Aggrieved entitled describes the intensifying anger and anxiety experienced by men when they are not able to access the privileges necessary to fulfil their culturally prescribed gender roles (Kimmel 2018). In Australia, we saw the rise of far-right masculinist movements like the True Blue Crew and United Patriots Front in response to political claims that non-white, non-Christian immigrants threatened the prosperity and the futures of white Australians (Peucker and Smith 2020). It is well established that far-right movements and populist politicians prey on the emotions of white men who are dissatisfied with politicians, political systems, unemployment and cultural alienation (Roose 2017). Weaponising aggrieved entitlement, far-right movements, according to Roose et al. (2022, p. 6), “…reposition men as protectors of the tribe, as warriors engaged in an existential war against a defined enemy”. Similarly, settler conspiritualist narratives provide a new means for white men to reposition themselves as leaders and spiritual defenders of Western society. This is a repurposed and highly prevalent narrative of white male supremacy which valorises white, cisgender, heterosexual men as naturalised leaders and protectors of families and states, especially where those white families and states possess colonised lands (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Thus, settler conspiritualist narratives use far-right ideology to attract white men with a renewed sense of purpose and relevance and, as we will see, offer them positions in tribes of like-minded ‘warriors’.

The settler conspiritualist narratives that drive the anti-vax movement in so-called Australia are a mishmash of European Christian archetypes, antisemitic mythology and white anxieties remixed to suit Western secularism. While conspiritualists may not identify with the far-right, they are recycling far-right principles in new ways, perpetuating narratives of an evil non-white and/or non-Christian other, and acting as masculinist defenders of white values, white cultures and white bodies. Anxieties around genetic corruption and the protection of purity, truth and futures from a foreign other are reminiscent of white supremacist and far-right anxieties around replacement and miscegenation. Such anxieties echo the Fourteen Word directive: “We must secure the existence of white people and a future for white children” (Lane, cited in Richards 2020, p. 166).

The above slogan was originally popularised by Klansman David Lane as a guiding directive after the Klu Klux Klan moved towards an individualised, leaderless resistance leading up to the 1990s, and was also reiterated in Brenton Tarrant’s manifesto in 2019 (Richards 2020). The internet and social media have enabled the mass circulation of this ideology and have been highly valued and useful tools for the far right, where they can both recruit white men and anonymously distribute racial hatred (Carlson and Fraser 2021; Richards 2020). Simultaneously, the internet enables the estrangement of ideas from their original sources and provides new means for users to draw from the reservoir of Western occulture while also handpicking and remixing aspects of other cultures (Partridge 2006). However, as we will discuss further below, no matter the ideas settler conspiritualists handpick for themselves, they are unable to extract themselves from a racially violent settler colonial narrative. To spiritually bypass the complexity and onus of settler colonialism, settler conspiritualists in so-called Australia remix European archetypes, mythology and racial anxieties into white settler narratives which both naturalise them to colonised lands and reframe them as valiant white spiritual defenders of their people and race.

3. Settler Natives and Narratives

In Australia, the future of settler whiteness relies on the continued production of narratives that legitimise white economic and political dominance, as well as ongoing access to land (Moreton-Robinson 2015). It takes significant discursive and cultural work to simultaneously suppress Indigenous peoples and naturalise white settler presence on Indigenous homelands (Johnston and Lawson 2005; Veracini 2010). In neoliberal settler colonial societies like Australia, where settlers experience increasing economic, political and social precarity as well as greater individual responsibility and power to select and consume information via the internet, oversimplified narratives that blame global, foreign others have gained significant social and political traction. As we have shown, rather than focus on the structural realities and inequalities produced by neoliberal settler colonial governments, settler conspiritualists turn to the occulture for symbols, ideas and inspiration for narratives that enable them to spiritually bypass (Halafoff et al. 2022a) the complex histories and socio-political conditions in which they are embedded. Settler governments and institutions have no small part in producing these narratives, which are further enabled by a lack of transparency and education about political and legal systems (Sarre and McIntyre 2020). Settler narratives have a dual function of deleting Indigenous people and nativizing settlers (Johnston and Lawson 2005; Veracini 2010). White supremacy and settler colonialism work together in the Great Reset/New World Order narrative to not only construct a non-white and/or non-Christian evil outsider, but also work to erase Indigenous peoples and replace them with nativized white settlers who defend their lives, bodies and ways of life. White settler narratives conceive of a return, not to Europe, but rather to the original vision for society and nations imposed on the lands which they occupy. Veracini explains that they envision a “return to the land, but also a return to an Edenic condition…to a Golden Age of unsurrendered freedoms” (2010, p. 99). For many settler conspiritualists, this is a utopian project—a dual manifestation of a Christian heaven on earth and a New Age return to nature (Halafoff et al. 2022a, p. 151).

The ‘back to nature’ narrative has a long history in anti-vaccination movements, dating back as far as 1885, when William White wrote The Story of a Great Delusion in a Series of Matter-of-Fact Chapters—a book arguing that vaccines spoiled the blood and corrupted the order of nature (Leask in Lewis 2022). Today, these narratives are repurposed by settler conspiritualists selling alternative health products, like Pete Evans, a white Australian celebrity chef and Trump supporter who was fined twice by the Therapeutic Good Administration (TGA) for attempting to sell alternative health products that he claimed could arm bodies against COVID-19 (Lewis 2022, p. 67). In November 2020, Evans also lost sponsors and a book contract for reposting a meme from a ‘Nordic Neo-Nazi’ site, which included a white supremacist symbol that featured in Tarrant’s Great Replacement manifesto (Gillespie 2020). As is the case for many settler conspiritualists, it is unclear whether Evans fully understood the far-right associations with this symbol, or whether he encountered it out of context on the internet. However, Nordic symbolism and back-to-nature discourses are prevalent across the far right, who simultaneously promote the protection and maintenance of white bodies and the natural and religiously sanctioned order of white supremacy (Peucker and Smith 2020). Nature-worship is also prevalent in far-right organisations, particularly those like the Sons of Odin, who strongly associate with Norse mythology, odinism and neo-paganism (Lentini 2019). Anti-Islamic and antisemitic narratives, as well as support for Nazism, are central tenets of these organisations, who argue that white Europeans ‘need to return to the indigenous spirituality of our ancient people’ (Odinic Rite of Australia in Lentini (2019, p. 31)).

While some white settlers stake their claim to Indigeneity by identifying with Northern European religions, symbols and identities, others claim to be Indigenous to the Australian continent. Since long before Federation, white Australians have produced narratives of ‘native white colonists’ and forged organizations like ‘The Australian Natives’ Association’ in 1871, which promoted a native Australian identity by advocating for Australian history in schools and a national holiday on January 26 (Blackton 1958, pp. 37–38) which commemorates settler invasion of the continent. This holiday is now known as Australia Day. Eve Tuck has coined the phenomenon of settlers indigenizing themselves to the lands they colonize ‘settler nativism’. She and colleagues (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 11) have described this as firstly an attempt:

to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land.

and secondly:

to vanish Indigenous peoples and replace them with settlers, which see themselves as the rightful claimants to land, and indeed as indigenous.

(Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013, p. 73)

Lynda-June Coe (2022a) points out that white Australian far-right politicians and commentators like Pauline Hansen and Andrew Bolt continue traditions of settler nativism, claiming that they are Indigenous because they are born in Australia, and simultaneously refusing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty. Endemic to settler narratives and nativism is a white settler anxiety that they may ultimately be defeated by Indigenous peoples, or that they may be replaced by external forces (Veracini 2010, pp. 99–100) and thus have to forfeit white futures on Indigenous lands. So, white settlers in Australia rely on narratives like those recycled across far-right and settler conspiritualist circles that delete Indigenous people, exaggerate external threats and reframe themselves as heroic defenders of an unfettered white utopia.

4. Muckadda Camp and ‘Sovereign Settlers’

The setting up of the Muckadda Camp was part of larger Australian anti-vaccine-mandate protests that began with protestors setting fire to the doors of Old Parliament house in December 2021 and then setting up camp on the lawns of Old Parliament house, next to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (Coe 2022b). After police disassembled Muckadda Camp in January 2022, ‘Freedom’ campers gradually descended on other sites in Canberra and eventually formed a protest of tens of thousands of people in concomitance with the Convoy to Canberra in February 2022. Eventually, police dispersed the protest and camps, but the ‘Freedom’ movement continued, with future protests planned throughout 2022. None mounted to the same scale. Although Muckadda Camp was a relatively short moment in these protests, it was a critical moment for settler conspiritualist influence in Australian anti-vax movements. Aboriginal men in particular were made the face of Muckadda Camp—reported to mean ‘storm coming’ (Hassan 2022). While the names and faces of these men are well-circulated in Australian media, we omit them here because they have been held to account by their own families and communities (Coe 2022b). Focusing on the actions of a handful of Aboriginal men detracts from the behaviour of white settler conspiritualists who populated the camp, and many who were performing Indigeneity free from accountability to Indigenous families and communities. Perhaps because of camp members’ vehement rejection of mainstream media, the majority of in-depth reporting on the camp occurred through independent media like What’s Doin Media7, on social media by people in anti-vax movements and through Indigenous journalists and social media users (Latimore and Dexter 2022). For a short period of time, Muckadda Camp was conflated with the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, until leaders renounced these claims, emphasising that the other camp was mostly white (Coe 2022b; Evans 2022). There was widespread criticism of Muckadda Camp by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including that the movement was ‘blackfishing’ to recruit Indigenous people (Fredericks et al. 2022; Latimore 2022) and co-opting Aboriginal struggles for sovereignty (Coe 2022b).

Camp members identified themselves as ‘Original Sovereigns’, which connected them to the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation (OSTF), a group founded by white Australian Mark McMurtrie, which blends notions of Aboriginal sovereignty with values of the Sovereign Citizen movement (Latimore 2022). Muckadda camp was also promoted by a number of social media accounts run by Sovereign Citizens, and connected to the Freemen on the Land movement (Latimore and Dexter 2022). Both the Sovereign Citizen (beginnings in the USA) and Freemen on the Land (beginnings in Canada) movements promote rejecting the government, which they believe is a corporation, and returning to naturalised law (or common law) and freedoms through undermining legal systems with specific pseudo-legal language. These political ideologies stem from the far right, but the Freemen on the Land movement especially has positioned themselves as apolitical (Veracini 2016). Concepts of sovereignty in these movements are focused on personal sovereignty or bodily autonomy, and closely linked to exemption from statute law, tax, fines and official registration processes (Sydney Criminal Lawyers 2016). While camp members’ identification as Original Sovereigns connected them to the Sovereign Citizen and Freemen movements, the camp’s name, Muckadda, or storm coming, alluded to investment in QAnon rhetoric which frequently invokes ‘the storm’ to describe an impending moment when followers will be called upon to attack government to rid it of ‘paedophiles’ and ‘corruption’ through mass arrests and executions (Rothschild 2021; Conner and MacMurray 2022). Although a pseudo-Indigenous camp on the lawns of Old Parliament house in the capital of Australia may seem like a strange site for these groups to blend, white Australian men like McMurtrie and former One Nation senator Rod Culleton align with these ideologies and were seen to be actively pursuing Indigenous endorsement of political claims that the Australian government was illegal prior to the camp’s establishment (Baker 2021). Other anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown political groups and parties were also working throughout the pandemic to recruit Indigenous people using Indigenous iconography, including the Aboriginal flag, and Aboriginal spokespeople (Koob et al. 2021)—this is what Fredericks et al. (2022) and Latimore (2022) have labelled ‘blackfishing’.

Indigenous people took to social media and actively lodged their outrage over the misappropriation of Indigenous iconography and settlers mimicking stereotypical ideas and imagery of Indigenous peoples, such as painting oneself with ochre, playing the yidaki (didgeridoo) and performing ‘ceremony’ as shown in Figure 1. Aboriginal rapper Adam Briggs, who playfully self-identifies as “Senator Briggs”, tweeted this image of one of the members of the Muckadda camp, a white settler, ochred up and playing a didgeridoo accompanied by a play on the lyrics of the 1963 novelty song ‘Camp Granada’, recorded by Allen Sherman. Briggs amended the lyrics, posting, “Hello, Muddah, Hello Faddah, Here I am at Camp Muckudda!” (Briggs 2022). Making fun of settlers often works to produce and sustain a sense of group identity and belonging and identifies interlopers. Nakata (2007, p. 12) observes that Indigenous humour “reveals the ignorance of outsiders of how we operate in and understand our world and many a merry laugh we have all had at whitefellas’ expense”.

In another post, on @Whatsdoinmedia8 on Instagram, members of the Muckudda camp were filmed speaking about how they felt “connected and spiritual”, usual tropes when non-Indigenous people try to co-opt Indigeneity. The video includes footage of white men ‘performing’ ceremony, which is further explained by one participant as being “very spiritual”, and he goes on to state that they get all “painted up”. The man reminisces about his year three teacher, who introduced him to Aboriginal content, and he felt that he has since then felt “likeminded with their lores and stuff” and “talking to the spirits”.

Blackfulla Revolution is a popular public Facebook page that promotes “Aboriginal media in Aboriginal hands”, and they have over 190,000 followers. In the post shown in Figure 2, they articulate the connections between Muckudda camp dwellers, ‘Original Sovereign’ members and alignment with white supremacy and white settler conspiritualists movements.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty rests not on personal freedoms or autonomy, but on precedence and complex governing systems that establish ongoing relationships to place (Moreton-Robinson 2015). This is important to understand because although white settler conspiritualists involved in Muckadda Camp dressed up in an effort to lead people to think they were Aboriginal people by wearing white paint on their face and bodies and playing didgeridoo and clapsticks while they danced around a campfire, and although they positioned themselves in proximity to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (Latimore 2022) and called themselves ‘Original Sovereigns’ and use the word in their movement, they were never and will never be able to access Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander sovereignty in its true meaning. To do so would require being an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person related to the first governing peoples of the so-called Australian continent and the long history of resistance to colonial occupation (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Performing as Indigenous or, as Deloria (1998) may suggest, “playing Aboriginal” to actualise settler narratives of warriorhood against a corrupting, external evil that has infiltrated the settler government, is denying Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty. It is not enacting it. As we have shown, white settlers nativise themselves to Indigenous lands to replace Indigenous people (Tuck and Yang 2012), and to position themselves as spiritual defenders of those same lands as sites of white settler utopias (Veracini 2010). Thus, the denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty embodied by settler conspiritualists at Muckadda Camp is aimed towards a project of replacement of Indigenous peoples. As Lynda-June Coe (2022a, p. 44) succinctly explains, “The denial of our rightful sovereignty manifests in the denial of our right to exist”.

In this way, Muckadda Camp can be read as the culmination of settler narratives forged through Christian archetypes, European mythology, hand-picked New Age sentiments and white anxieties, to ultimately erase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and sovereignty, and to imagine settler conspiritualists as heroic defenders of white lives, lands and societies. COVID-19 and government mandates on vaccinations and restricting freedom of movement provided the trigger that these groups needed to gain traction. They have been able to leverage vaccine hesitancy to distribute settler conspiritualist ideologies to new audiences via new media. It is not usual for restrictions and government intervention to impact the lives of white settlers in the same way they have historically impacted and continue to impact the lives of Indigenous peoples. As we have previously (2022, para. 14) noted,

Anti-vax movements have proven especially appealing to white women and groups of men who feel disadvantaged by rapid changes in Western society, which have destabilised their economic and social standing.

In unpacking the aims and rhetoric of the Australian settler conspiritualists who set up Muckudda camp, we have demonstrated a deep analysis of these phenomena and how they relate to the aims and objectives of the settler colonial state. This has allowed us to disclose the discursivities surrounding far-right rhetoric as it pertains to the anti-vax movement during the pandemic. We have connected this ideology to the settler colonial state and its manifold institutions, such as the church, the media and the education and political systems. The sovereignty of Indigenous peoples is clearly a fraught matter for so-called Sovereign Settlers. This is evidenced by the desire to co-opt various modes of spirituality, New Age ideals, body ‘purity’ and, most importantly, by the desire to be Indigenous. However, Indigenous sovereignty remains indisputable, which is the reason it incurs such a high level of anxiety for white settlers.