“A Kind of Humble Proletarian Tragedy”: Romper Stomper, Class and Global White Nationalism

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ABSTRACT Released in 1992, the Australian film Romper Stomper provoked a storm of controversy. Writer/director Geoffrey Wright’s portrayal of neo-Nazi skinheads targeting Vietnamese Australians in Melbourne created unease because it was unclear where the filmmaker’s sympathies lay. Did the film condemn its skinhead characters or, if inadvertently, justify their racist views and behaviour? This article unpacks the film’s ambivalent portrayal of its central protagonists by placing it in historical context, focusing particularly on the filmmaker’s insistence that Romper Stomper is a film about class. Building on scholarship on the history of working-class youth subcultures and the emerging field of global White nationalism, it examines Wright’s feature debut as (in his words) a kind of “proletarian tragedy” to argue that the film offers rare insight into a violent, bigoted, disenfranchised sector of the population and helps illuminate aspects of broader socioeconomic, political and cultural changes taking place in Australia in the 1980s and early 1990s.