The Forgotten History of Perth’s 1988 Neo-Nazi Attacks

Before dawn on September 1, 1988, two Chinese restaurants in Perth were firebombed. Seemingly out of nowhere, the arson left the owners of the beloved family businesses adrift, with damage and loss of business barely covered by insurance, no clear motive available for closure, and those responsible still at large.

From September 1988 to May 1989, three more Asian-Australian businesses in Perth were gutted by deliberately-lit fires.

For months, police had failed to nail the arsonists. But the perpetrators were hiding in plain sight.

The attacks were part of a coordinated far-right terrorist campaign against Asian-Australians, levied with intent to start a race war. In the fantasies of the neo-Nazi gang behind the plan, Perth would soon become ground zero for a fascist revolution. 

For years, the Australian Nationalist Movement (ANM) – a white supremacist, far-right group spearheaded by neo-Nazi Jack Van Tongeren – had been covering the city with racist propaganda. The abolition of the White Australia Policy in the late 60s had fuelled reactionary violence from white nationalists, threatened by the looming multiculturalism that they thought would take the place of “real Australians”, i.e. white colonisers. Members of the ANM marketed themselves as “Aussie patriots” – a dog-whistle used – back then, as today – to mask their flagrant neo-Nazi rhetoric.

Between 1984 and 1989, lamp posts, businesses, bus stops and public spaces were covered with more than 800,000 crude posters bearing slogans like “Asians Out Or Racial War", “No Asians”, “White Revolution: The Only Solution” and “No Coloureds”. 

Before it was destroyed, one of these posters had been pasted up on the Man Lin, the first restaurant attacked in September 1988.

For owners Vincent Chan, his wife Kwan, Chan’s brother-in-law and his wife, the family business had been the fruit of labouring in other peoples’ restaurants for years since migrating to Australia in the early 60s. 

Crispian Chan, the son of Vincent and Kwan, was just eight years old when the building was destroyed. 

“I actually thought as a kid that it was a bit of a novelty, rocking up to this restaurant covered in crime scene tape,” he told VICE. 

“I thought it was something straight out of a film. I took a tumbler from the site and took it to school for Show and Tell. I had no idea what was the real intention at that point, and my parents never actually shared with me that it was a racist attack.”

Crispian is now revisiting the story, working with ABC’s Unravel true crime podcast to uncover the warnings hidden in this forgotten Australian story. 

VICE spoke with him to find out what motivated this retelling, at this time in history, how neo-Nazis were able to spread near-unfettered terror in Perth for so long, and what we can learn from it today.

Crispian Chan: My co-host in the show, Alex, is an investigative reporter at the ABC. He’s been involved in a lot of coverage on the far right and extremism. He found this story through the channels of the far right, he noticed there were these conversations being had about this man called Jack Van Tongeren, and these things he did in the 80s. So he did a bit more research and that's when he came across me. 

So there are neo-Nazis talking about this today?

When Van Tongeren was finally incarcerated, after the first wave of bombings, he spent about twelve years in jail. And during that time, he did a lot of writing. He saw himself as a sort of political prisoner. He even wrote his own Mein Kamph, in a way. It’s this book that’s his version of events in the 80s, and how successful he saw it. And that’s what’s getting circulated around now. For some of them, it’s part of their literature they can look to to do research, some of them are saying, “hey, look, what these guys did in the 80s, wasn't that incredible?”. 

Tell me about your podcast, Firebomb. What questions were you trying to answer?

The story has stayed with me for a long time. It's been 35 years, almost. I was only eight years old at the time. My parents actually never shared with me that it was a racist attack. At that point, they didn’t know either. They had no idea who was doing it to businesses or why they were being targeted. And it was only a few years later, when they went to trial, and I was a bit older, that I started to understand, oh shit, that was a racist attack…and it targeted my family. 

The place I grew up in, and was born in, thinking I was seen as Australian and being part of this country. That was something that really played into me. I grew up going into high school quite disturbed by it, then there was that self-loathing that came through, which is quite typical of a lot of young second-generation migrant kids. 

Years on, I realised that the story got forgotten quite quickly. When I tell people now, by the way, my parents' restaurant was firebombed by neo-Nazis in the 80s in Perth. People go, what? Neo-Nazis in Perth firebombing multiple Chinese restaurants, racist poster campaigns, how did they get away with it? 

They were putting up racist posters that said “Asians out or racial war”, “Jews out”, “white revolution is the only solution”. They got away with that for three years, almost four years. And then after that the firebombing started.

How did they get away with it?

Look at what's happening in Melbourne, look at what's happened in recent years in the rise of neo-Nazism, far-right extremist activities. It feels like déjà vu, this is all happening again. 

You’d think with something as devastating as what happened in the 80s, things would have changed to prevent it happening again now, and it hasn't. 

I think a lot of people kind of think this whole neo-Nazi thing is new, only since Trump, since Charlottesville. There are younger generations that think oh this is new. And it's like no, actually. We have a very long history of racism in Australia that we haven’t acknowledged fully, and I think we’ve forgotten that neo-Nazis have been around and have been quite active. 

What has it been like retelling this story that is so entwined with your own family history?

As I said, my parents never told me about this. I had to work this all out and process it all myself. My community back then was working so hard to try and make a living for the kids and try not to stir things up. They were new migrants, why would they want to try and stir shit up? 

Our story never got told. We never really heard from the victims, we never heard from the Asian-Australian community about the effects of racism. We now have a generations-long story to tell about how it's affected us. So it's a rebalancing of history as well – not only just talking about the outrageous side of the neo-Nazi movement, but also to say, there's another side, that's the Asian-Australian community, a community that has had a long history here. We have been here for quite a while – since the Goldfields. So adding another voice to the story, to show that we have a place here. That’s a reason why we're telling this, but also it’s a warning sign about what happens when you don't take the neo-Nazis seriously. 

Were there any moments in the production of this story that really surprised you?

There's this part where I go and meet the neo-Nazis, some former Nazis, neo-Nazi members or followers. We try to talk to them and try to kind of expose their mindset. To try to start a conversation, not give them a platform, but to kind of understand it. There's an interesting fact about Jack Van Tongeren – he's actually a quarter Asian himself. His father's part-Dutch, part-Javanese. And that for me was a really interesting thing. When I found that out, it made me think we had a little bit of common ground, there’s a little intersection in our experiences. 

In our research, we found that he experienced racism as a kid. So his colonial background, mixed with his Asian cultural background – it's interesting how that has played out in him. That phenomenon of self loathing in migrants that comes from systemic racism is a really interesting aspect about this story. And the fact that he had all these followers, these white Australians following this Eurasian man, in this neo-Nazi, white supremacist group, was a fascinating study of human behaviour as well. 

What was it about Perth in the 80s that produced this kind of terrorism, and allowed it to flourish unchecked?

The White Australia Policy was only abolished in the 70s, so there was an opportunity for Asian migration to come through again, post-70s. 

With the influx of refugees from the Vietnam War, the doors were open for migration of Asians into the country, and I think, in some ways, multiculturalism started in the 80s.

Australia kept its doors closed for such a long time, so to open them like that, there was just this interesting transitional period where there were tensions. 

Neo-Nazi ideology preys on fear. These groups latch onto that fear and try to bring people into the ideology through it. I think migration at that time was an easy target for them. Whatever issues are happening in society and government, it's always easier to blame the minority groups. As a community, I don’t think we spoke up loud enough back then. There's a whole “model minority” syndrome – that effect you have where we try to just keep quiet and just get on with our lives. We just let the police take care of things. 

There was a poster campaign for years left unaddressed, which led directly to the firebombings. Did the police take it seriously in the early days?

There were no laws at that time against posters that incite racial hatred. It was illegal to put a poster up on government property, it was graffiti. It was illegal to put a poster up in the wrong place, but it wasn't illegal for it to read “Asians out or race war”. I think the idea of terrorism back then also wasn't taken seriously. I think that we didn't really think about that until the early 2000s. The idea of terrorists in Australia in the 80s just seemed like a really distant notion. And I think the police weren’t prepared for that, weren't prepared for that level of sustained violence.

Do you think they underestimated the threat?

Totally. And this is the problem that I think hasn't changed. People thought of these guys as misguided fools, they wore these quasi-Nazi uniforms and everyone just thought they were a joke. Larrikins, not terrorists, because they're white. 

But imagine if it was Islamic terrorists, these brown men wearing these same things walking around? I think people would have a different reaction. It’s interesting.

There’s a kind of latent racist undercurrent, a subconscious racism, that may have slowed our reactions in some ways. It was underestimating the seriousness of these men, which is the lesson we're trying to remind everyone now on this podcast: yes, they're just walking around wearing black right now, they're sieg-heiling at Parliament House, they've got balaclavas and sunglasses and they look kind of like idiots. But all you need is just one guy to go, you know what I think I can do better… then you’d have a much more dire turn.

What's super fascinating about this case is that it's such a clear example of what can happen if propaganda is allowed to be spread unfettered. Immediately, you see the result: terrorism.

That’s the thing, it’s so much faster now. 

These guys had to physically walk around Perth, to put up tens of thousands of posters around the city, on lampposts, bus stops, street signs everywhere, right? They had to physically do that to get their message out there. And they did that for three years. 

These days, you can make one meme and send that off to 40,000 people, and they all receive it straight away. And then they read that and absorb that straight away. 

It's scary.

Listen to Unravel here.

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