I had been putting off seeing the film The Darkest Hour for suspicion that it would be just another revisionist hatchet job and anachronistically present Winston Churchill as a climate-change denier, transphobe, uninvited toucher of female thighs or any of the other things the purveyors of contemporary culture dislike. I saw it only when I was told that it’s not and it doesn’t. But if, rather courageously on the part of the producers, the film concedes no ground to contemporary historical revisionism and instead presents Churchill as a somewhat Hamletian hero, neither does it draw a veil over certain elements of the Great Man’s persona that would indeed provoke disapproval in certain circles today.

It shows him as portly enough that, had they lived in the same era,  ‘iconic’ comedienne Magda Szubanski in her role of fat-shamer could have signed him up for a slimming course. Magda, it will be remembered, was a somewhat improbable Jenny Craig weight-loss spruiker before she reinvented herself as the Boadicea of gay love. The film reveals his alcohol consumption, starting with whisky at breakfast, to have been such as to send today’s ‘safe drinking’ campaigners into a decline, with their two units a month or whatever they grudgingly allow; while the Quit lobby would demand that its taxpayer funding be tripled to propagandise against Churchill’s marathon cigar-smoking, which must have kept the Cuban export balance in the black for decades.

Britain’s darkest hour, as every schoolboy probably no longer knows, was precipitated by resistance to Hitler’s attempt to impose a prototype European Union with himself as a one-man Brussels. His blitzkrieg, he boasted, would bomb Britain into submission and burn its cities to the ground. All at once I remembered – but what a coincidence! – that exactly the same incendiary aspiration had been expressed for our own country a few weeks before I saw the film, and expressed not by a foreign belligerent but from within the ranks of the publicly subsidised Aboriginal grievance industry. Readers might recall – or not, since she had her flicker of fame and hasn’t been heard of since – that our very own scorched-earth advocate was one Tarneen Onus-Williams, or Dtarneen as she later decided her name was. Tarneen (let’s stick with that to avoid consonant cluster) is a volunteer with that esteemed body the Koorie Youth Council of Victoria and an employee of Oxfam, the snootiest moraliser in the crowded field of global charity self-righteousness (whose sanctimony has lately being fully stretched coping with allegations of sex abuse among its ‘aid workers’). You can refresh your memory about Tarneen at ‘Happy Invasion Day II’ at Quadrant Online.

Somehow the thought of Tarneen’s hope being realised – of our country being burnt to the ground – of its becoming an activist-burnt country rather than Dorothea Mackellar’s sunburnt one – juxtaposed with the film’s underlining of just how desperate was Britain’s plight in 1940 made me wonder: what if in Australia’s darkest hour its enemies had won? How different would life be now?

For a start, Tarneen would have had to make her incendiary address in Japanese, and would probably have been bayonetted before she could finish. In other words we wouldn’t have free speech. But actually we’re doing quite nicely disposing of that ourselves, without the assistance of any invader. Not only do we have Section 18C still on the statute book, the public-utterance Gestapo at the Human ‘Rights’ Commission and the ABC as our own Ministry of Propaganda – about as likely to broadcast a non-leftist view as Dr Goebbels would have been to employ a Jewish communist; we are subject to the browbeating of social-media hordes crouched over their laptops emitting pavlovian spurts of poisonous abuse at everyone in public life they disagree with this week. As if that weren’t bad enough, all sorts of other people one encounters in one’s daily round – even, sad to say, friends sometimes – have been well schooled by our education system to constitute the most effective barrier of all to unwelcome opinions. Try defending Trump or Brexit or the Adani mine at a suburban dinner party or in a teachers’ staff room if you dare.

Foreign occupation would have brought the knock on the door in the small hours, so it’s reassuring we still have the liberty to sleep easy in our beds, our life and property protected by the strong arm of the law. Really? Not if the fruits of multiculturalism are being enjoyed in your locality in the form of, well, foreign occupation, and the police, following orders from on high, are backing off. Report that you saw an African kid take a baseball bat to your car and it’s you who could be in trouble for ‘race hate’. It doesn’t help that the police are adopting uniforms that make them look like totalitarian stormtroopers.

If our Axis enemies had won, wouldn’t there be mobs roaming the streets smashing up shops and synagogues? Funny, we have those too, only we call them “demonstrators”. Politically they combine the Tweedledum of Hitlerian thuggery and the Tweedledee of Marxist groupthink. They don’t yet smash up shops, though it was touch and go with Max Brenner’s, but places of worship that refuse gay weddings may soon feel the brunt of their displeasure.

In the event, we survived our darkest hour, a year or so later than Britain’s, and were probably the freest country in the world until the 1970s when, with the Whitlam revolution, Big Government made its appearance and the Left began to muscle in. Now that it runs pretty well everything, some might say we have another darkest hour in the making.

True, not all leftists would find Tarneen’s conflagratory recommendations to their taste – think how unpleasant it would be to see flames leaping from the solar panel-encrusted roofs of all those lovely homes in Greens-voting suburbs, devouring smart inner-city terraces, reducing the Porsche Cayennes and Audis to twisted contemporary sculptures  – but the Left en bloc will never disown Aboriginal irredentism. And here, as has been noted in Quadrant time and time again, there is a very real threat, of the break-up of the nation and the ceding of ever more territory and power to those who demand Aboriginal sovereignty.

Let’s say that Australia is spared a fiery dissolution, if not for the lovely homes then for the sake of the handsome Chicago School edifice in Melbourne (formerly Messrs Ball & Welch’s department store) that houses the Koorie Youth Council. Let’s say that, instead, it is manoeuvred by leftist treachery into political disintegration and becomes two countries, with the ‘indigenous’ one presided over by Tarneen as a sort of Koorie Julia Gillard. Treaties notwithstanding, there would be perpetual tension as Aboriginal activists pursued their claim to the whole continent. Tarneen’s comrades in the ‘Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance’ (don’t laugh at the Richmal Cromptonish name, they’re deadly serious) have made this clear on – of all places – their Facebook page (whitey’s inventions can come in handy even if you can’t stand whitey). There you will find the succinct exhortation: ‘Abolish Australia’.

Of course the Warriors don’t have the numbers, they don’t have the resources to do that. The fire brigades needn’t get their hoses out just yet. But there’s still a lot of damage Aboriginal activists can inflict on the social cohesion which is the essence of every healthy country. In this they can count on the enthusiastic assistance of white leftists who, because they loathe nation states or hate our Western cultural heritage, would not be sorry to see the end of Australia as we know it. For years now, under the pretext or the illusion of undoing past injustice, they have been busily undermining our sense of nationhood through their influence in those institutions prescribed by Gramsci for infiltration and exploiting racial differences to encourage discord.

Tarneen is a product of their efforts. For our country to survive intact, she and those who think like her must be persuaded that their best chance of a satisfying, respected future is in a racially inclusive, unburned Australia of fairness for everyone. Achieving that would turn a dark hour into what could be (with a Churchillian echo) our finest one.