Join us online or in person for a seminar with Dr Caitlin Mahar

Re-Viewing Romper Stomper: Class, Youth Subcultures and Global White Nationalism

Released in 1992, 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 paper unpacks the film’s ambivalent portrayal of its central protagonists by reading it in historical context, focussing 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 socio-economic, political and cultural change taking place in Australia in the 1980s and beyond.

Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: TBC

Dr Caitlin Mahar is an historian and education specialist at Swinburne University of Technology whose research and teaching has focussed on histories of dying, pain, sexuality and social movements. Her first book, The Good Death Through Time, was published by Melbourne University Press in 2023 and shortlisted for Educational Publishing Australia’s EPAA Scholarly Book of the Year award.