Basketweaving in Botany Bay

Nationalists investigate the 'First Fleet Forum'

The attention of nationalists has been drawn to new movements in the dissident space. Following on from last months Western Heritage Australia (WHA) session, a political event called the ‘First Fleet Forum’ is set to be held in NSW in October. Localised chatter and excitement has been generated amongst the Australian dissidents in anticipation. Organised by a UK grouping known by the peculiar name ‘Basketweavers’, the First Fleet Forum signals the incoming arrival of a new (but also familiar) clique of British dissidents into Australian waters. As the forum name suggests, it represents an attempt to settle our shores from afar.

New allies from abroad are of course not something to be needlessly repulsed and whether someone has friendly or hostile intentions can be hard to ascertain during first contact. Looking into the nature of these Basketweavers and the stated intent of their forum, there is much that Australian nationalists can find common cause with. We too share their concerns on mass immigration and ‘the Left’. Their writings on racial realism will hardly make us draw up our bark shields in defense, nor will latent anti-semitism cause us to turn around and flee into the bush. We so far detect no conspicuous presence of Hitler Cultism; the NSN does not rate highly in their books.

But unlike the real arrival of Captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet, where friendly first contact was made with the aborigines, the Basketweavers seem uninterested in reaching out to the representatives of Australian nationalism. After coming to understand the Basketweavers, the feeling is mutual. Nationalist apprehension lies ultimately with whom they chose to make their allegiances with. A man is known by the company he keeps, and in this case, we find said company to be far from ideal.

Decoding WHA

To give a brief contextual recap on the aforementioned event, Western Heritage Australia held their latest ‘Round Table Forum’ gathering in the Jubilee room of the NSW Parliament House. WHA founder David Duffy of the Humanist Society, an Alter Kämpfer of the conservative right, passed away in November of 2022, but the group has held steady in his absence. In attendance that evening were the leading lights of the Australian dissidents, sharing the room – as they are sure to do – with Liberal Party boosters and cronies. Headline speakers Frank Salter of the British Australian Community (BAC), Sydney Trads contributor Luke Torrisi, and Bella d’Abrera, a director at the Liberal Party-aligned think tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), picked apart the conference topic: Decoding Decolonisation – The Reshaping of Cultural Landscapes.

D’Abera is responsible for the IPA’s Foundations of Western Civilisation Program. When the IPA and its wealthy Liberal donors speak of Western Civilisation, they of course mean the free market and ‘Judeo-Christian’ values. The first published work of d’Abrera – The Tribunal of Zaragoza and Crypto-Judaism 1484-1515 (2008) – was written in response to leading scholar of the Spanish Inquisition Benzion Netanyahu (father of the Israeli PM). Her book, which presents evidence that conversos in Spain secretly held on to far more Jewish practices and religious observances than has otherwise been proven, has academic merit for sure. Our concern here is that this is hardly the kind of topic your ordinary gentile conservative simply wanders into. WHA counts among its key backers Jim Sternhell, a dentist by trade who has made a name for himself as a flamboyant ‘MAGA-Jew.’ Sternhell ran for office for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and previously chaperoned for Nick Folkes’ anti-Islam ‘Party for Freedom’.

Indeed WHA has never been shy about giving a platform to Zionists right alongside the dissidents, nor is its Liberal Party-adjacency well disguised. Maurice Newman, founder and financial backer of the right-wing lobby group Advance Australia appeared as a speaker in May 2023 and David Adler, President of the Australian Jewish Association, in March 2022. Past attendees of Round Table Forums are the familiar names of Quadrant writers and editors, Liberal Party branch presidents, sitting MPs from the satellite right, and directors of the Menzies Research Centre. As for the BAC, many lower-ranking dissidents have informed us that they can be counted on to oppose the latest Zionist escalations in the Middle East. BAC President Harry Richardson appears to have missed this memo. Recently taking the headlines on Harry’s news-site The Richardson Post are pieces entitled ‘WHY I TRUST TRUMP ON IRAN’ and ‘Trump Just Took Back What Obama Gave Iran’, the latter of which celebrates the US strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities: “Thank you, God, and thank you, Donald J. Trump. You just made the world safer.”

Image 1: Joel Davis at the Round Table Forum. Hats off inside Parliament House you say? Nah, I’m too cool for school.

Zionist presence aside, the event otherwise came and went without much fanfare, notable more for the perplexing attendance of one Joel Davis of the National Socialist Network, who forked out a few dollars (his average weekly earnings from superchatters) in order to ask the assembled liberals and dissidents why they don’t embrace hardcore super-racism. Other nationalists have already mused on why Davis, dressed more for a night out with the Hells Angels than a ‘smart casual’ event held at Parliament House, was not turfed out on sight. We’ll let readers draw their own conclusions on that.

A basket of deplorables

Unlike the Round Table Forum, this fresh event on the dissident calendar comes not directly from the bowels of the Liberal Party and special guest appearances by leaders of the NSN are a lot less likely. The First Fleet Forum, organised by members of the aforementioned Basketweavers, is an in-person only event to be held somewhere in the Hunter Valley in late October. Tickets are being sold at an eye-watering $1000 apiece, an all-inclusive package of accommodation, food and three days of dissident fun. Footage from prior Basketweaver events gives one the impression of a well-polished and upmarket gathering, perhaps with a tour of a local winery thrown in.

Image 2: Carl Benjamin, set to speak at the First Fleet Forum

By this point you are probably asking, who are the Basketweavers exactly? Ostensibly they are a social grouping of like-minded individuals, drawn from members of the UK far-right. Founded in 2021, they gather for meetings and drinks and try to build political and personal connections away from the internet – a noble objective without a doubt. The Basketweavers boast on their X account of a few dozen Australian members, plus a sizeable American contingent. The organisational structure of the Basketweavers is directly intertwined with the Beowulf Foundation and its subsidiary event-hosting company Scyldings, the company officially hosting the First Fleet Forum. Not much can be found online about ‘J. Greenriver’ - the apparent founder of the Beowulf Foundation - besides a fondness for pictures of Australian mammals (Quokkas).

As a whole, the Basketweavers may be placed firmly in the reactionary camp. Their leading thinkers speak of ‘Sensible Centrism’; the swamp of traditionalism, Paganism, Christian Nationalism, Tory-adjacency and the Dark Enlightenment is of much interest to them. Some members of the Basketweavers have so far ran (unsuccessfully) as candidates for UKIP and the Reform party; past associations can be found with Stephen Lennon (aka. Tommy Robinson). What draws the Basketweavers’ broad church together is the eschewing of connections to any of Britain’s genuine nationalists. Sounds rather familiar.

As for the network of the Basketweavers, the prominent faces are well known in the UK scene: veteran YouTuber Carl Benjamin (Sargon of Akkad) and Mark Houghton of The Lotus Eaters podcast, Neema Parvini (Academic Agent), and author/academic Ed Dutton. Provided they pass the infamous character test at s501 of the Migration Act, Benjamin and Thomas Rowsell (Survive The Jive) plan to speak at the First Fleet Forum. Secrecy is the order of the day for the Basketweavers; organisers, collaborators and guests at Scyldings events are primarily anonymous YouTubers and Substack writers in the Anglosphere. A key US connection to the Basketweavers is something called the ‘Old Glory Club’, a conservative-patriotic grouping whose members made up the plurality of speakers at the 2022 Scyldings event in Nashville, Tennessee.

Nevertheless, a few names in the Basketweavers’ international contact list stand out, links which cause strong aversion amongst nationalists beyond even our usual opposition to reactionary politics:

• The Homeland Party: Recent appearances by the Homeland Party at the ‘Remigration Summit’ in Italy – a congregation of Europe’s phoney-populist Zionist parties organised by Austrian identitarian Martin Sellner – has only intensified our concerns regarding this outfit. Chairman Kenny Smith and Alec Cave attended the August 2024 Scyldings ‘Witan’ event;

• Curtis Yarvin: leading figure in the Jewish Neoreactionary (NRx) scene, spoke at the 2022 ‘Witan’ event;

• Raw Egg Nationalist: author of dieting and lifestyle books as well as editor of the NRx magazine Man's World published by Jonathan Keeperman’s Passage Press (aka. Passover Press), set to speak at the August 2025 ‘Witan’ event; and

• Auron MacIntyre: journalist and podcast host working at Glen Beck’s conservative media network BlazeTV, spoke at two Scyldings events in 2023.

Image 3: Raw Egg Zionist reacts to October 7

Prior Scyldings events are not without guests controversial even amongst their allies. One such speaker was Evelyn Grant, a male-to-female transsexual, whose appearance at the 2022 Witan event was marked with much negativity. The presence of one off-colour personality can be forgiven, but when it becomes a pattern, excuses are hard to come by.

Finally, the pieces come together for Australian nationalists to present an odious picture when the local sponsors are pointed out. The poster for the First Fleet Forum carries the sponsorship of the British Australian Community and Imperium Press; “special thanks” is issued in the brochure to the Sydney Traditionalist Forum, ESU - Victoria and Observer & Review (see the prior piece Liberal Shills and Dissident Thrills for coverage of all these characters and their role in the Liberal-conservative ecosystem). Of the Australians so far announced on the speakers list we find of course Frank Salter, as well as a little-known individual named Russell Walter – more on him in a moment. Organisers have already registered a private company in Australia (First Fleet Forum Pty Ltd) to set up shop locally.

Bronzed Australian Pervert

Speaking of off-colour personalities, excluding perennial speaker Frank Salter, the only as-of-yet named Australian speaking at the First Fleet Forum is a man whom no one has ever heard of before, at least not nationalists. Russell Walter, who receives top billing on the event poster, is described as a “...YouTuber and podcaster known for his deep dives into philosophy, history, and cultural critique.” Viewing his videos and reading his Substack essays, it quickly becomes apparent that this anonymous Australian man is yet another internet neoreactionary and a local disciple of Romanian-Jewish academic Costin Alamariu, creator of the ‘Bronze Age Pervert’ character. Expectedly, his media output is replete with the call-signs of the BAP milieu: podcasts deciphering the concept of the ‘Longhouse’ (i.e. women are responsible for all our political problems), ‘aesthetic’ pictures of half-nude men, complaints about “low-IQ anti-semitism”, and paeans to Zionism, telling us in a recent essay that Jews are the only real nationalists left in the world today.

An interview he conducted with Eric Kaufmann to discuss his book Whiteshift (2018) (how a prominent Canadian author and political theorist ends up being interviewed by a nobody in Australia with a tiny YouTube channel is a question for another time) may provide some context to those seeking to ‘place’ Walter in the Australian scene, in particular when he writes in a positive way about the White Australia Policy. Writing after the 1^st Trump election win, Kaufmann asserts in Whiteshift that it is inevitable that Whites will become a minority in their own lands. But as this supposedly ‘inevitable’ process continues, certain political realities must be dealt with. Kaufmann entreats to the elite that they must pull back on anti-White messaging and give Whites a certain degree of buy-in to the system, allow them some social space to express their identity rather than subject them to full repression, otherwise the risks of enraging Whites and bringing to the surface uncontrollable political forces are too great. The solution to be given to all White nations, according to half-Jewish Kaufmann, is a controlled and neutered form of White identity, almost as a palliative to ensure any reaction is contained.

Image 4: Chiselled bodies are a must-have accessory for readers of Bronze Age Mindset

Unfortunately, Walter also writes about Australian nationalism. His essay on the subject meanders through history, locating nationalism solely in cult worship of the ANZAC, and utterly excludes mention of laborism, the Australian Workers Movement, or any Australian nationalist writer of note for that matter. Paintings of men bathing naked in the sea and poetic descriptions of the “rose-brown flesh burnt by the sun” of the Anzac soldiers seems to be a necessary inclusion on the other hand. Plagiarising a turn of phrase from Nietzsche, Walter concludes that “...Australian nationalism is dead. And we have killed it.” Is it? Have we? Quite the pronouncement for Mr. Walter to make. Where does he get this idea from? Australian nationalism is dead only when Australian nationalists breathe their last breath, not when some anonymous internet denizen declares it.

A Hostile Invasion

So as they begin their months-long journey to the Antipodes, nationalists ask, what do the Basketweavers actually want in Australia? Are their ships laden with food, valuable goods and fine clothing for trade; or do they come armed with swords and cannons. Their reactionary politics aside, when we read the First Fleet Forum brochure, things do not start off on friendly footing:

“Australia is a modern multicultural democracy proud of its economic success, yet deeply disconnected from its heritage.”

Perhaps the reference to Australia being “multicultural” is no more than a simple statement of current policy fact, one that they, like us, wish to undo. But when an event has the BAC imprinted all over it, a group which has resigned itself to a multicultural future and no longer seeks to fight it, we cannot be so certain. As for pride in economic success, who exactly among us is proud of fleeting prosperity at the hands of a few grubby mining corporations who fought tooth and nail to prevent any kind of proper taxation and distribution of the profits they earned from our land. Are we supposed to be proud when we grow our GDP by means of a population ponzi-scheme and put home-ownership out of reach for all but the rich?

“The phrase Terra Nullius — "land belonging to no one" — echoes through our national psyche, not just as a historical justification for colonisation, but as a lingering metaphor for our present.”

A curious interpretation of the legal concept of Terra Nullius. Certainly nationalists have no difficulty in answering the question who does Australia belong to. Perhaps the Basketweavers should ask us and find out.

To continue:

“In a country where real estate prices sever people from place, fraternal bonds erode, birth rates fall, and cultural inheritance feels uncertain, many Australians live in a land that can feel unmoored from its past and unclaimed by its future.”

Here at least Australian nationalists and Basketweavers can find ourselves in agreement. All this is true and more. But once again we see the poison pill of the BAC, ready to inform us on the need to reclaim not our Australian but instead our ‘Anglo-Celtic’ or British inheritance.

As to the Basketweavers’ intent:

“This conference marks the first contact of Scyldings in Australia and invites participants to chart a new path — to map and make sense of an unfamiliar social and cultural terrain. Charting, in this sense, is both an act of exploration and orientation. We seek to develop a strong local understanding of Australia’s unique historical trajectory, its cultural inheritance, and the political realities shaping its future. What does it mean to plot a course through a landscape many feel no longer belongs to them — or perhaps never did? What, ultimately, justifies Australia's continued existence, and who will inherit what remains?”

If one seeks to develop a strong local understanding of Australia’s unique historical trajectory, surely you ask the established nationalists, those whose bread and butter is the question of the past and the national future. Why then listen to the Anglophiles who turn their backs on Australia and look to the ‘motherland’ instead? Why turn to a blow-in from Canada whose publishing outfit has never published a single Australian author? Furthermore, what can a homoerotic Nietzschean Zionist seeped in Americanisms truly tell you about the political realities of the Australian nation?

If this is who the Basketweavers seek out from the natives, Australian nationalists do not hesitate to take up a defensive stance. When these are the men being brought to the fore – picked out as collaborators so to speak – then we are sure they have not the best interests of the Australian people at heart.

Fin