
'Racy of the Soil': Ian Mudie, Right-Wing Nationalism, and the South Australian Soil Erosion Crisis
Ian Mudie was an Adelaide-based freelance journalist, short story and history writer, and most notably a passionate and political poet. During the 1930s and 1940s the degradation of South Australian agricultural and pastoral soil inspired Mudie to evoke soil in his poetry. Soil also
proved a useful metaphor which Mudie could deploy in aid of his right-wing political stance. Critics and historians have described Mudie either as a 'nationalist or propagandist' and a 'hectoring' nationalist, or, alternatively, as an early conservationist and even a 'proto ecologist'; none
address the intersection of environmental concern and right-wing nationalism in his poetry and politics. This article will interrogate the relationship between these two ideologies in Mudie's work. Despite echoes of Nazi 'blood and soil' ideology, Mudie's soil erosion poetry was primarily
the product of his settler imagination, and resonated with 'cultural nationalists' in the Australian literary community.
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Keywords: Nazism; Soil erosion; environmentalism; nationalism; poetry
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: August 1, 2018
This article was made available online on January 4, 2018 as a Fast Track article with title: "‘Racy of the Soil’: Ian Mudie, Right-Wing Nationalism, and the South Australian Soil Erosion Crisis".
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