‘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.