Radicalisation camps, fight clubs, hate campaigns and covert plans to infiltrate major political parties — this is the landscape for the far right in Australia today.

Some groups, like the Antipodean Resistance, don't shy away from the Nazi label, with swastikas, Sieg Heil salutes and posters calling for the extermination of Australia's Jews.

Others — including the Australia First Party, the United Patriots Front, the New Guard — don't outwardly identify with Nazism but have doctrines littered with fascist ideas.

A recent wave of far right rallies, one attended by independent Senator Fraser Anning, have sparked controversy.

Neo-Nazis made their presence known at a recent rally organised by far right groups in St Kilda. ( ABC News )

But Australian Nazism is nothing new; it's almost as old as its German progenitor.

"While it has ebbed and flowed, Nazism has had a presence in Australia from World War II, and then on," historian Jordana Silverstein says.

Hitler's fellow travellers

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler's reputation was far from the personified evil that history has come to know.

Future prime minister Robert Menzies, after a visit to Germany in 1938, wrote that the "abandonment by the Germans of individual liberty … has something rather magnificent about it".

This type of sentiment, combined with the discontent borne from the Great Depression, laid fertile ground for Nazism to be, at the very least, tolerated in Australia.

German doctor Johannes Becker was appointed the Australian trustee for the Nazi party after he migrated to South Australia in the late 1920s.

He built a small but faithful base of Nazi loyalists from within South Australia's German expat community.

Some of the German expat-community flocked to meetings of the Nazi party in Australia. ( The National Library of Australia )

Due to internal Nazi party politics and the pressure of Australian security agencies, Becker's power never stretched beyond a small group.

But Nazism continued to brew within the Australian cultural establishment.

Not long after the outbreak of war, Percy 'Inky' Stephensen, a formidable writer and publisher, founded the Nazi-inspired Australia First Movement.

In between publishing the works of Banjo Paterson and vice-chairing meetings of the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Stephensen became an obsessive believer in Jewish world conspiracy.

This conspiracy, a pillar of Nazi thought, suggested a Jewish plan for global domination detailed in the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', a fabricated text first printed in Russia.

Stephensen's movement boasted members of great prominence: the namesake of Australia's foremost literary award Miles Franklin and Adela Pankhurst of the famous suffragist family, amongst others.

Percy Stephensen, the leader of the Australia First Movement, is said to have styled himself on Adolf Hitler ( Wikipedia Commons )

The group advocated for the pseudoscience of eugenics, and the establishment of a nationalist corporate state.

Stephensen was the most publicly visible of what historian David Bird describes as "a surprisingly diverse group of Australians of similar persuasion".

"Australian Nazis were not only on the fringes but made up by a selection of more mainstream political travellers, tourists, writers, poets, mystics, aesthetes and academic thinkers," he says.

The group was eventually suppressed by Australian security agencies after it pushed for a political alliance with the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.

Stephensen was interned for much of World War II.

He spent almost three years in a camp without trial — a decision described by Australia's official war historian Paul Hasluck as the "grossest infringement of individual liberty made during the war".

A Nazi resurgence

The wounds of the war imprinted a pariah status on Nazism, rendering it more or less politically untouchable for the remainder of the century.

Far right groups, like the League of Rights, tended to avoid the labels of Nazism or fascism when promoting their brand of politics.

Yet not two decades had passed before University of Adelaide physics student Ted Cawthron and council worker Don Lindsay convened in 1962 to form the Australian National Socialist Party.

Vigorously anti-communist, the party argued for the perpetuation of the White Australia policy, a defensive approach to Asia and the total annexation of New Guinea.

It consisted entirely of Cawthron and Lindsay, until they were joined the following year by Arthur Smith, a prominent political figure known for his outward anti-Semitism and aggressive tactics.

The leader of the Australian National Socialist Party, Arthur Smith, addressing a small meeting. ( ABC Four Corners )

Smith, as the party's first leader, managed to slightly increase membership by merging with a host of other motley white supremacist groups in Melbourne.

The height of the party's publicity came when its headquarters were raided by police in 1964.

Smith was convicted of possessing unlicensed firearms, explosives, and stolen goods.

When Smith finally remerged in the late '60s, several of his members had defected to form the competing-yet-almost-indistinguishably-titled National Socialist Party of Australia.

The new-look party aimed to shake the jackbooted image by giving Nazism a sensible electorally-focused visage.

The National Socialist Party of Australia attempted to give Nazism an electorally friendly image ( Wikipedia Commons )

It unsuccessfully contested the May 1970 ACT by-election, and many subsequent polls in Queensland.

Its small spotlight slowly faded as membership plummeted.

In the latter decades of the 20th century the Australian far right was kept alive by characters like Ross 'the Skull' May, and Jim Saleam of the group National Action.

Mr Saleam remains a steady fixture in the far right.

He is the current leader of the Australia First Party, which counts amongst its policies an intention to, "end the divisive, government funded, and institutionalised policy of multiculturalism forwith".

In the internet age

In Australia today, as with overseas, the far right has been emboldened by the internet, which has allowed fascist groups to gain unprecedented reach across borders.

"We are seeing a modern incarnation of Australian Nazism, which picks up on many of the threads in the past, but which adapts to the current moment," Dr Silverstein says.

"The current movement is blending together both European Nazism and Australian white supremacy, racism and colonialism."

A spread of far right groups, often with only minor ideological variations between them, are employing a range of tactics to spread and exercise their message.

The United Patriots Front, for example, attempted to arrange vigilante patrols last year to help maintain law and order in some Melbourne suburbs, in a stated response to "Gangs of Africans".

The United Patriots Front, seen here rallying in Melbourne. ( Getty: Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Anadolu Agency )

Late last year, an investigation by ABC's Background Briefing exposed a coordinated attempt of another group, 'the Lads Society', to infiltrate and then influence the Young Nationals in NSW.

Of all these groups, however, it is the Antipodean Resistance that takes the title of being the most explicitly Nazi in outlook.

It is the real-life form of the once-online far right network The Iron March — its logo combines a laurel wreath with a swastika.

The group describes itself as a youth organisation that adheres to National Socialism as an "embodiment of health values" matched with an unrelenting mission to "keep Australia white".

It was thrust into the public eye when it claimed responsibility for a series of Chinese-language posters at universities threatening Chinese students with deportation.

In recent years, the group has organised a series of 'radicalisation camps' in which members undertake combat training and practise their survival skills in trips to national parks.

Images posted to their social media show young men with faces hidden by an akubra-wearing skull — a confronting tribute to the emblem of Nazi Germany's SS death squads.

The Antipodean Resistance, seen here at a radicalisation camp in 2017, conceals the identity of its members ( Supplied: Antipodean Resistance )

Its members are a far cry from handsomely dressed, highly educated, cultured figures like Inky Stephenson and his contemporaries.

But Nazism, in its 21st century form, is no less insidious.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed Jim Saleam as the former vice-president of the National Socialist Party, and the founder of the Australia First Party.