Hammered music festival: neo-Nazis descended on Gold Coast for 2010 white power event

Gold Coasters, including veterans groups and religious communities were stunned when neo-Nazis descended on the city for a weekend of “sun, surf and radicalist music”.

The Gold Coast loves to welcome tourists.

The sector is the city’s biggest, worth more than $7bn, and industry leaders are always looking for ways to build on it with new audiences.

But it was 15 years ago this week that the Gold Coast made national headlines for all the wrong reasons with a group of tourists civic leaders agreed we could have done without.

Neo Nazis arrived in the city in April 2010 for a highly publicised white supremacist music festival.

The Hammered music festival was organised by white pride groups Crew 38 and Blood & Honour and was held in a secret location which was understood to have been in Carrara.

The latter group, an internationally reviled race-hate group, had been banned in Germany more than a decade earlier for its viewers.

The festival was billed as a week of `sun, surf and radicalist music’.

Skinheads at Ashmore Seafood and Steak ahead of the 2010 Blood and Honour. Hammered festival.

Community leaders in the lead up to the event expressed their disgust that such a festival would be held on the Gold Coast.

Then-Surfers Paradise RSL president Arch McDonald said “most veterans who fought for Australia’s freedom would be disappointed the event was being conducted so close to Anzac Day”.

‘‘They would be disappointed at any time but especially around the time people are conducting memorial services to commemorate their sacrifices … to see this type of activity is disgraceful,’’ he said in 2010.

‘‘Veterans would be offended by this conduct, where people are selling intolerance.’

Gold Coast RSL president Peter Franklin said there was a question over whether white supremacists should be tolerated anywhere.

‘‘There are a lot of people with bad memories of the way they were treated by the Nazis, so why do we tolerate it,’’ he said at the time.

Arch McDonald

Concern was also running high in both the Gold Coast’s Jewish and Islamic communities.

Temple Shalom president Kate Lesser said security would be ramped up.

‘It is quite disturbing … we have an organisation in Brisbane who look after security for synagogues and they have been watching this organisation for quite some time and they will be prepared,” she said.

Islamic Friendship Association of Australia spokesman Keyser Trad said the event was out of sync with Australian society.

‘‘People are entitled to hold values but they need to realise their views are completely unhelpful to the multicultural Gold Coast which has a big reliance on the tourist dollar. They are actually hurting the city,’’ he said.

Gold Coast District RSL Branch President, Peter Franklin

The night before the festival saw more than 30 heavily tattooed skinheads wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan `Blood and Honour’ turn up at Ashmore Seafood and Steak where they dined.

Many had travelled form as far away as New Zealand, NSW and Victoria to attend the event.

“Diners gawked as the group, marked out by their shaved heads, swastikas and tattoos, arrived at the restaurant,” the Bulletin reported at the time. `

“One had a shirt with a swastika on it,’’ one restaurant patron said that night. `

“They were tattooed – heavily tattooed.

“Most of them had shaved heads and some had tattoos on their heads.

“They were a mix of men and women,’’ said the patron.

“They certainly looked out of place in a suburban steakhouse.’’

Further white supremacist festivals were held in the coming years which were all closely monitored by Gold Coast police.