When you think of the word “soldier”, what springs to your mind?
Fearless? Brave? Heroic? Fighting for what’s good and true?
When white supremacist group The Southern Cross Soldiers decided to hold a rally on Australia Day, they thought the beach would be their oyster, and the media their bitch. What patriotic, beach loving Aussie could ignore their call for immigrants to fuck off?
Sadly, it was not to be.
You could tell it would be an exercise in idiocy from the moment the first little troopers arrived under The Clocks and began casting anxious eyes over the Australia Day parade rolling down Swanston St.
Chinese marchers with their dragons, Turkish dancers, new arrivals from Africa – the sort of people your typical Southern Cross Soldier wants to send back where they came from.
But outnumbered as they were, there wasn’t a peep out of these heroes, whose ranks swelled gradually to about 30.
Thirty? Sounds like a right proper army to me.
And at Mordialloc’s multicultural melting pot, well you just had to laugh. They congregated for a while at the foot of the pier like virgins at an orgy, glancing anxiously down the beach and at all those non-Anglo faces, who paid them no heed whatsoever.
When a couple of brawny Pacific Islanders ambled past, their silence was deafening.
[...]
When a Herald Sun photographer tried to snap their pictures, that was the moment to demonstrate courage. Fifteen on one, those are the sort of odds cowards like best.
There was a bit of pushing and shoving and lens-blocking, and one big kid struck a boxing pose and offered to punch some heads.
He didn’t and they drifted away on a cloud of obscenity to have another go at remembering the words to Advance Australia Fair.
It’s good to know John Ray has these guys on his side, because when the New Soviets come they will not be spared.