Sunday last, Perry Jewell, the renowned Queensland nationalist and patriotic activist, died at age 84 in a Melbourne facility. He was lucid and convivial to the end.
We, who called Perry a friend and a political comrade, were always overwhelmed by his depth of knowledge, his vista across continents, political epochs and people and events.
Born in Ulster in 1940, taken to Kenya after the end of the Second World War, he grew up amongst Africans and British colonials, was schooled in one of those typical almost nineteenth century institutions, but was one from the start who sought the company of adults and listened to their tales and discussions as his real source of a broad education.
How can we explain to our supporters the depth of his identity? Well, digest just this one packed paragraph, dear reader.
When Perry was eleven, he took the autograph of famed actress Ava Gardner and watched her perform at Mt. Kilimanjaro, as she made a movie of that name. When he was 14, he was living with his father who managed the Pink Elephant hotel. His father was murdered there and as Perry tells it, he thought by Mau Mau terrorists. The man was buried in the foothills of Africa’s tallest mountain. Very late in his life, Perry deduced he was murdered by other colonials over a gold mine. Not long after losing his father and at 16, Perry was co-manager of a coffee plantation which employed hundreds of African workers. In that capacity, the Mau Mau targeted him for assassination and he shot one in his bedroom one lazy evening, but the fellow survived. Perry left that job as a young man, travelled to Europe, met up with an adventurer and drove a Land Rover from Algiers to Cape Town. Perry became, after somehow being ‘stateless’ for a while, a citizen of Zambia and worked in security. He drifted to Rhodesia which had become independent of Britain and ultimately shopped by the liberal world to a terrorist thug. Thence, he went to South Africa, where he married ‘Elizabeth’ a girl of Afrikaner origin. They had met during an earlier sojourn to South Africa and Perry recalled her mother and her severe grandmother who told him, “there’s not been an English speaker in this house for sixty years”. As a child, this woman was confined to a British concentration camp, where her own mother had died. Perry embraced South Africa and worked for a while for military Intelligence and ran several missions outside of the country and about which he would say very little. Perry disliked imperialism, but he still though the white man had a place in Africa and he saw it all betrayed. At one point too, he spent time in the United States and met the US conservative politician George Wallace and joined his campaign for president in 1967. Finally, the antipodes became his ultimate adventure and he arrived with Elizabeth in 1972. He became an Australian citizen. This was a fresh start.
Of course, the first few decades of his life just laid the basis for another life. Perry worked as a croupier at Australia’s first gambling Casino in Hobart and it was here that he noticed money laundering on a huge scale. His new country had its problems too, but he gave it two children and paid Australia the compliment of living in a few States until he settled in Queensland.
So then began Perry’s attempt to right the wrongs of his adopted country: the Confederate Action Party (CAP). In 1989, Perry worked nights at a servo outside of Toowoomba and ‘polled’ people as they came and went on his night shift. He drafted a raft of policies he would call The Promise as he looked about for friends and contacts. One day in June 1990 a group assembled on a veranda of one of those classic Queensland houses and in July, they met again at a trucking office near Ipswich to formally establish CAP. Within three years, it had almost 5000 members across the country. The CAP would ‘confederate’ the national opposition not try to force it together and in a gentler union, affect real change. It was not to be.
Almost like clockwork, the CAP was white-anted and broken from within. It was just too large a threat to globalism. By 1996, divided into new groups as it was, Perry started again and set up the One Australia Party, just as a new name emerged on the political landscape, Pauline Hanson. He turned it all over to her, a decision he would regret as she neither had real roles for the tribe of ex-CAP people who joined ,nor extended thanks. Perry walked away and stayed away and said he should “have joined Graeme Campbell’s Australia First instead”.
Then, in 1997, Perry hit the headlines as his estranged daughter fell into the drug culture and resorted to the oldest profession to pay her habit. He rescued her by force from a Sydney brothel and took her to a remote farm in northern New South Wales to detoxify her. But by a trick of fate she dropped a sleeping pill on him (!), escaped to alert police and have him charged with kidnapping and other offences. Fate intervened and the young woman turned on the ‘law’ and refused to testify against him seeing her father as the medium to a better life, and causing the brave Director of Public Prosecutions to threaten her with prosecution, but she refused to break. All charges vanished and the woman embraced a sober life. For Perry, this was a rebirth and he launched an association to spur community opposition to the drug trade with the emphasis on seeing addicts return to society.
In 2004, Perry started his involvement with Australia First and he maintained this connection through to his death. He became a friend of many and he was a speaker at many meetings and forums. Well appreciated as a brilliant informative conversationalist, he was sought after for our events.
By early 2024, Perry could see things closing in on him with various health issues, but he declined to let that undermine him. During a trip to Sydney, he related to Australia First members, the notes he had assembled for a book of ripper yarns based on his young life in Africa. A member stepped forward, edited it all and published it for him and so ‘Tales Of The Pink Elephant’ saw the light of day that June. Perry said: “It’s like an epitaph in humour!” And yep, you can get it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/Tales-Pink-Elephant-Memoirs-colonial/dp/B0D6L32QW4
A year plus passed and Perry faced his final test with the smile and steadfastness of ever. He shall not be forgotten. This man with no country found a country and lived for its rebirth. A friend and a member of Australia First said to us: “Another tragedy, another of the old guard gone and a great loss to the Australian People. Sad. Impossible to replace this man of action, dedication, fearless of rotten authority and courageous as our Diggers”.
Perry Jewell, Present!
