essay | MICHAEL LEACH DON EDUARDO IS SLEEPING A return to New Australia, Paraguay CLERMONT, QUEENSLAND, 1891: Following a drop Barcaldine, too young to be considered a leader, in the wool price, the United Pastoralists Associa- escapes the indictment before trial. tion demands new contracts for shearers—cutting He is a young horsebreaker from Muttaburra wages by one third, and insisting upon ‘freedom of called Ted Murray. contract’. In response, an Amalgamated Shearers’ Union strike camp is formed at Clermont. By Feb- CORONEL OVIEDOS, PARAGUAY, 2001: It’s a warm, ruary strike camps have formed throughout rural sticky day in central Paraguay. I wait by the dusty Queensland, to defend the right to collective bar- intersection just south of a highway town called gaining won in the wool sheds in 1890. The colonial Coronel Oviedos, and hail a taxi. Here, the two government of Griffith and McIlwraith responds with major national thoroughfares—the East-West ruta repressive measures, deputising 1100 special con- one and the North-South ruta two—meet in a stables and dispatching military forces to Clermont.1 cacaphony of buses, ticket touts and Guarani women Hugh Blackwell, a member of the Barcaldine strike selling refreshments. It is Paraguay’s major cross- committee writes to Alec Forrester—“Things are roads, and there is no shortage of cheap public trans- quiet at Clermont. First shot fired there may be the port. But I am close to my destination, so I negotiate cause of the Australian revolution”.2 a taxi fare and head west along the ruta one. Five By March, much of the country between Emer- miles from the main intersection of the nation, we ald and Clermont is on fire, as woolsheds are torched turn north. The rusty cab bundles along a dirt road on the stations. ‘Shear Blade’ Martin is arrested for to Nueva Londres (New London). Dry grasslands advocating resistance to the soldiers, and fourteen roll away for miles, either side of the road. In the unionists are taken into custody after the riot act is distance, patches of forest monte, like small islands, read at Augathella. On the twenty-third, ten men rise from the plain. The driver tells me this whole are arrested at Capella, and taken in chains to area was New Australia. Unlike many locals from Clermont. An assembly of unionists confronts the Coronel Oviedos, he knows of the Australian con- train. Before he is arrested and cuffed, George Taylor nection. I nod, discussing with a feigned air of de- throws some papers into the angry crowd. Mounted tachment those facts about the original settlement I policemen charge with drawn swords and seize the can express in Spanish. But in truth, like other Aus- leaflets.3 Over the next week, eight members of the tralian historians and journalists before me, this is Barcaldine strike committee are arrested. Seven of more homage than research trip. And I have read them are among the twelve convicted under medi- too much to truly witness the present. Already, I am aeval statutes in the infamous Rockhampton con- seeing the ghosts of utopia . spiracy trial. William Lane, editor of the Worker . their bullocks straining under the weight of commences writing The Workingman’s Paradise as the carretas, eighty families, many of them refugees a fundraiser for the ‘union prisoners’, who quickly from the great strikes and the depression trudge enter labour folklore. The eighth man arrested at forward, they believe, into history. An Australian 90 overland 169 2002 communist paradise in the heart of Latin America, ‘manly independence’ on the land. Indeed, one of a model for the world . the great significances of William Lane lay in his attempt to wed a socialist ethic of cooperation to his is New Australia. In September 1893 and some key values of the ‘yeoman dream’: a pre-ex- Tearly 1894, four hundred Australian socialists, isting radical vision of a society comprised of ‘inde- single-taxers and fellow travelers arrived here as pendent’ small holding farmers. This distinctive members of the New Australia Cooperative Settle- hybrid discourse of mateship and independence char- ment Association. Led by the charismatic labour acterised Lane’s utopianism, and symbolically re- journalist William Lane, a key agitator in the great flected the political alliance in the early 1890s between strikes and founder of the Queensland Worker, the socialists and single-taxers around the issue of land settlers aimed to found a communist utopia in which reform. Inspired by the land tax proposals of Henry “every man will be a mate and in which no man George, the single-tax leagues advocated taxes on would dream of taking advantage of another”.4 unimproved land to break up the big estates, and Despite his early role in the formation of the Labor became an influential progressive force in the early Party, recent scholarship suggests that Lane had been 1890s. To some extent, the single-taxers were sup- planning a utopian settlement for some years.5 ported by moral agrarian philosophies of the Angli- Throughout late 1891 Lane had written The can Church. These philosophies emphasised Workingman’s Paradise, a novel which portrayed a independence, based on the symbolic figure of the modern vision of urban decay and racial decline, self-sufficient man on the land, providing for his fam- and envisaged a socialist future of cooperation, ru- ily. For the single-taxers and agrarian thinkers, this ral communism, and manly independence. The social structure formed the most solid basis for an promised sequel to The Workingman’s Paradise was enduring moral and social order, away from the cor- to be set in New Australia, where a ‘happier life’ ruption and degradation of urban life. This ideal of would be found. the ‘yeoman farmer’ lived on well into the twentieth For Lane and many other socialists of the early century in the form of soldier settlement schemes. 1890s, collective land settlement on cooperative prin- Though he eschewed individual land settlement, ciples offered solutions for a range of social prob- Lane shared the anti-urban ideals of single-taxers. lems, and a guiding light for those frustrated by the In The Workingman’s Paradise, images of Sydney parliamentary road. Following the failure of the great slums replete with “thin dwarved children” and “un- strikes, and in the context of economic depression kempt vile-tongued women” form the background and rising unemployment, some thousands of Aus- to Lane’s analysis of the social problem through- tralians were briefly drawn to cooperative land settle- out.8 Lane contrasted the strength, manliness, and ment schemes.6 Lane’s proposal for New Australia, independence of spirit of his idealised Australian an ‘experiment in practical communism’, promised a bushman with the degeneration of ‘enervated’ town settlement based upon the principles of cooperation, dwellers.9 Civilisation, he wrote, and particularly the racial purity, gender equality and teetotalism. urban slums of the great cities were ‘slaying’ all that ‘The men of New Australia’, an anthem pub- was ‘manly and true’ in the Australian worker.10 The lished in the cooperative society’s journal, highlighted great towns were ‘sterile’, and no place for society the centrality of ‘mateship’ to Lane’s utopianism:7 or ‘the race’ to fulfil their historical destinies. In his appeal for single women to join the New Australia Shoulder to shoulder, mates, venture, Lane boasted that the settlement would have Shoulders together, many bushmen, “strong and straight and manly with Hand clasped in hand, my mates, a manliness that town life destroys”.11 Fair and foul weather, Lane embraced the pre-existing ideal of manly Hearts beating close, my mates, independence, but sought to redefine it along so- Each man a brother, cialist lines. He maintained that independence could Building a home, my mates, only be found in the escape from the degradation of All for each other wage slavery—most poignantly expressed as the in- dignity of having to beg another man for “the right While emphasising the cooperative value of mateship, to work and live”. For the majority of workers, Lane Lane also appealed to contemporary visions of argued, the right to independence would have to be 169 2002 overland 91 secured collectively in the joint ownership of land. The wide streets are peppered with gums—not en- In this sense, two separate visions inspired the co- tirely unusual in South America—but also, more dis- operative land settlement movement, with a rhetori- tinctively, with silky oaks (native to Queensland). cal commitment to both ‘manly independence’ and It was here that the colonists split after a few cooperation; it attracted a wide range of followers short, hard months. The New Australians split over with little more in common than a desire for land. a variety of issues, but the core problem appears to Lane and the first batch of arrivals laid out the have been Lane’s latent authoritarianism, which be- wide streets of a communist utopia at a place then came manifest under the stress of difficult living con- known as Las Ovejas, on the generous land grant ditions. Other factors included the distance from offered by a Paraguayan government desperate to running water and transport, compounded by the repopulate after the War of the Triple Alliance. Here, lack of single women in the colony and the stric- in the heart of Paraguay, some descendants of those tures of the colony’s teetotal rule. The undemocratic who followed Lane away from the depression of expulsion of three colonists for breaching the tem- the early 1890s remain. perance pledge became I arrive to find a quiet the spark which moti- Paraguayan village, built vated the departure of around a well-treed town eighty dissatisfied mem- square, and surrounded by bers in December 1893.