Staff Writer
Haiku multimedia artist Tom Sewell cranks the handle of a valve he has transformed into a work of art recently in his studio located in Puunene Millâs former tractor repair shop. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photos
PUUNENE Apart from the occasional jet roaring overhead, shuttered Puunene Mill is silent as Tom Sewell leads a visitor around his sculpture studio gallery located in the mill’s former tractor repair shop.
The Haiku multimedia artist’s longtime obsession with documenting the mill and its workers has led him to lease the airy 17,000-square-foot steel building. On display are heavyweight sculptures assembled from massive gears, gargantuan valves and machine tools he salvaged from the mill. Valve and tool handles are worn smooth from many decades of use. Some pieces sport welds, scars bearing testament to bygone repairs.
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The prominence of far-right extremist groups has seen Australia’s peak intelligence body, ASIO, address the growing rise of far-right extremism over the past year.
Sydney Morning Herald, a group of 38 men associated with the Lads Society and the Antipodean Resistance under the umbrella of the National Socialist Network, met in the Grampians National Park loudly chanting white supremacist and neo-Nazi slogans like ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘white power’.
“[It’s] a bit of a wake-up call, we ve got a serious problem. And that it s, it s getting steadily worse,” Professor Greg Barton, Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Globalisation and Citizenship at Deakin University, told
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday pledged to rebuild and revitalise the transatlantic military alliance after a bruising.
Sewell later posted online pictures of the police officers’ name badges as well as images of the neo-Nazi group posing in front of a Ku Klux Klan-stye burning cross and displaying Nazi salutes at various locations in the Grampians.
Dvir Abramovich chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission, an Australian Jewish civil rights organization said the group’s weekend activity should prompt state and federal governments and agencies to push for extreme right-wing groups to be proscribed as terrorist entities.
“We do not need to wait for a Christchurch [terror attack] in Melbourne to act,” Abramovich said. “Who would have thought in 2021 Australia, in a week in which we commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the modern face of Hitler would reveal itself in our state without consequence?”
Authorities are being urged to add a right-wing extremist group to the terror list after its members burnt a cross at the foot of the Grampians on the Australia Day weekend.
They assembled around the local barbecue area, some shirtless with Nazi tattoos, and sipped coffee outside the Black Panther Cafe, which is staffed and owned by an Indian family. “We are the Ku Klux Klan,” one of them belligerently told a local, who declined to be named for fear of repercussions. Another heard the group screaming racist slogans as they got drunk on Sunday night while camping illegally at Lake Bellfield, a beautiful body of water at the foot of the Grampians’ granite peaks and ridges. When Halls Gap resident James passed the group on his mountain bike on Sunday afternoon in town, he was addressed with a Sieg Heil.