Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  Energised by Bellamy’s book, Lane soon wrote his own analysis of Australian wrongs and of how they might be righted, The Working Man’s Paradise, published in 1892 to raise money for those who had been given gaol sentences in the shearers’ strike. The Working Man’s Paradise featured Nellie Lawton, a selector’s daughter, and Ned Hawkins, a man of the bush, rather like those who would have gathered discontentedly in the shearing camps of the west in the early 1890s. Nellie, however, is the passionate unionist in this case, and in the spirit of Lane’s own puritanism she harangues men out of the pub and into the unions. It is not only the sufferings of the bush that Lane takes on in his novel. Ned is sickened to the core by the slums of Sydney. Typically, one of the characters hopes that marriage will put Nellie in her place, but Nellie is too interested in the mission of equality between humans to marry. Besides, she sees that in these slums men are emasculated by humiliating drudgery. Similarly, seamstresses stitch sixteen hours a day, servant girls are on constant call and housewives struggle and scrape and penny-pinch behind closed doors. As for prostitution, it is also a form of industrial oppression.

  Lane desired to make a perfect Antipodean garden from which the rest of the world’s vileness could be excluded. If the perfect place could not be Australia, then perhaps it could be something smaller and elsewhere. His disillusionment after the strikes of the early 1890s led him to turn his gaze to Western Australia, and then to South America. There would be a perfected Australia, even if it had to be on another continent. Three of his agents received a warm welcome and an offer of assistance from Paraguayan authorities. A place for settlement was chosen and the government offered to give free entrance to everything the settlers brought with them and to transport them to their new home. They would be exempt from customs duties for ten years, but in return the New Australia Settlement Association undertook to settle 800 families on the land in four years.

  This project drew away a great deal of visionary talent from Australia. To those who accused Lane of abandoning Australia, he said, ‘In this new Australia movement, we exchange empty patriotism to a country in which we have no share, for the solid possession of a great tract of good land, secured under terms which could not possibly be secured here.’ Those recruited were shearers unable to get work or enough of it, free selectors living in rural squalor, skilled workers finding it hard to have their skills rewarded, small capitalists ruined by the depression, and intellectuals such as young schoolteacher-poet Mary Gilmore. The vessel chartered to take Lane and his followers to Paraguay, the Royal Tar, sailed from Sydney on 21 July 1893 carrying the first 220 emigrants. In a group photograph, the children of the new Australia are arrayed in the front row in smocks and Sunday suits. The Royal Tar was followed out of the harbour by boats and launches full not of mockers, but of those who had at least a vague regard for the new endeavour. For New Australia was not meant to be simply a gesture of disgruntlement, but to be a bold example for people of all nations to follow. It was, in other words, to have a world-revolutionary effect. The colonists could give an example of the principles of an ideal Australia, but do so from somewhere overseas.

  Lane took one of the smallest cabins on the Royal Tar, worked at potato peeling, and was called Will or Billy by the others. With intellectuals such as John Sibbald and Harry Taylor, and women such as a forthright Mrs McNamara, wife of a Sydney socialist bookseller, he prepared a manifesto on education in New Australia. ‘It is our unanimous and earnest opinion [that] the system of education at present existent in the competitive civilised world, is as brutal, degrading and unsatisfactory as competitive civilisation itself.’

  Rancour began to divide the colonists by the time they hit the cold seas around Cape Horn, and served as an omen of coming conflict in New Australia. As the novelty of participating in domestic efforts wore off for him, men and women began to complain that Lane was despotic and unfair. Everyone was pleased when the Royal Tar reached Montevideo in Uruguay and the journey to neighbouring Paraguay could begin.

  Mary Jean Cameron, a young teacher posted to Stanmore Public School in 1891, would serve as the Sydney contact for Lane’s enterprise in its early phase. She had met William Lane on a discussion evening in 1892 above McNamara’s bookshop in Sydney, the venue for the meetings of the Australian Socialist League. Mary’s politics had been influenced by a teaching stint at Silverton which had shown her, in BHP’s treatment of miners, that the ideal, the fraternal and the cooperative was the way of the future.

  At McNamara’s she also met Henry Lawson, two years younger than her, deaf and troubled. Their relationship—Mary claimed that Henry proposed both marriage and an elopement—would delay her own departure for New Australia. She also met Louisa Lawson, editor of the Dawn, the feminist journal, and convenor of the Dawn Clubs, which were made up of its readers and who campaigned for women’s suffrage. Before moving to Stanmore, Mary Cameron became for a time a boarder at Louisa’s house. Louisa had come a long way since she had married the shiftless Neils Larsen and endured life as a young mother and drudge in the tents of Gulgong and the Weddin Mountains, and at the small selection at Eurunderee. Louisa’s house in North Sydney contained the printing press which produced the Republican. Lawson’s ‘Song of the Republic’ would resonate with many,

  Sons of the South, make choice between

  (Sons of the South, choose true)

  The Land of Morn and the Land of E’en,

  The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green,

  The land that belongs to the lord and the Queen,

  And the land that belongs to you.

  Lane’s own wife, Ann, returned from the hardships of Paraguay to Mary’s new lodgings at Marrickville. It had been everyone’s hope, including Mrs Lane’s, that Mary would marry Lane’s lieutenant, David Russell Stevenson, a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson. Her other potential husband, Henry Lawson, had returned from Western Australia as hard up as he had left, had visited Bourke, and had spent eight months in New Zealand. When he presented himself at Mary’s door he was often staggering. He saw her off at the dock in 1895 on the journey to join Lane not at Nueva Australia, but at his breakaway settlement at Cosme.

  For New Australia had already split in two, and utopianism had foundered on the rock of Lane’s astringent personality. It had begun with William Lane expelling three men for returning tipsy after a drinking session with the local priest. They also spoke of seeing a Paraguayan woman rolling a cigar on her naked thigh, and were accused of breaking another pledge they had taken about fraternising with the locals and crossing the ‘Colour Line’ so significant in Lane’s brand of socialism. In 1893 William Lane affixed a notice of expulsion of the men, Brittlebank, White and Westward, to the door of the store in Nueva Australia.

  This autocratic expulsion divided the colony, since the constitution called for a vote by the members and a five-sixths majority before anyone could be expelled. The named men refused to leave, and Lane went on refusing a ballot, disappeared, and returned later with a squad of Paraguayan soldiers, riding into the settlement with a revolver in his belt, like an autocrat rather than a socialist leader. ‘Why could he not come down to the campfire and tell us as man to man, as one mate among a crowd, what he wanted?’ wrote one. Another settler declared, ‘Lane does the thinking and the colonists do the work—result, barbarism.’

  Eighty individuals left Nueva Australia and presented themselves in Asunción, the capital, begging the British Consul to ship them back to Australia. A diplomat was sent to reason with Lane but found him to be intransigent. When his colonists moved a motion of no confidence in him, Lane and sixty-three of his followers migrated to a new land grant 80 miles (130 kilometres) away in Cosme, to the south-west and in thicker jungle. Here Lane felt renewed, even though his title to the new land was questionable. A land grant was at length offered by the Paraguayan government. Lane had to pay for the leasehold with money raised in Australia by true believers.


  Mary made her way from Asunción towards the breakaway settlement Cosme by paddle-steamer and steam train. At a siding in the forest, transport arrived for her from Cosme: a horse led into town by Lane’s brother. When Mary reached Cosme she saw thatched huts and found not only that the chief diet consisted of beans and sweet potatoes, monkey or deer meat, but also that she was only the third single woman in a colony heavily populated by unmarried bushworkers, veterans of the 1890–91 strike. Her potential husband Stevenson rebuffed her, and though there was a welcome dance for her in the social hall, it was a poor affair and most of the men were scared off by her frankness and, by the standards of the day, superior education. Nonetheless she wrote to W.G. Spence, ‘I am satisfied with my own lot.’ Mary even wrote to Henry Lawson asking him to ‘come while the field is new . . . PS I didn’t get married’. Lawson did not write back—he had himself just impetuously married the daughter of Mrs McNamara, Bertha Bredt.

  The Cosme settlement still believed it would stand as an example to the world and its members, as Mary Gilmore noticed, deliberately swallowed all complaint about things and avoided factions. People grew haggard, however, and though they did not complain they became cheerless. The women became rundown. A school was opened in which Mary taught, and the engineer of the party, McLeod, built two bridges over streams nearby for the benefit of both settlers and local Indians. In November 1897 the population reached 131, but the newcomers began to express discontent. Gradually the dream that they would influence the whole world into accepting Lane’s communist model was replaced by a desire to survive as what Lane called ‘a small settlement of 100 people, where brotherhood was, [rather] than a huge state of a 100 million, where brotherhood was not’. Soon, as men came to concentrate on the wants and standard of health of their individual families, people began to leave Cosme. Lane had not become less dictatorial. A man named Petrie wrote to Spence, ‘Whiffs of dogma; stacks of selfishness, yards of words and absolutely no liberty.’ Lane himself became ill and sad and even more difficult. In September 1896 he went to England to recruit a proposed 3000 Britons. He managed to enlist only forty to fifty people. While Lane was at these endeavours, nine dissenters turned up in England from Cosme and denounced him publicly.

  In the end, Mary Cameron was courted by a tall and rather gentle bushman named William Gilmore, with whom she took strolls in the rainforest. She married Gilmore in the clearing and he gave her a ring fashioned out of a shilling with the middle cut out. She wrote for the colony’s journal, the Cosme Monthly,

  And us two don’t want nothing

  To make life good and true,

  And lovin’-sweet, and happy,

  While us two’s got us two.

  It would become, through eventual Australian publication, a sentimental favourite, but Mary wanted a great deal more than ‘us two’.

  In August 1898, heavily pregnant, she travelled by third-class carriage to the regional centre of Villarrica, and there she gave birth to a son, William. The colony of Cosme, having already split off from New Australia, was by now itself split into factions. William Lane still enforced the ‘Colour Line’, and fraternising with local Paraguayans, particularly women, was totally prohibited. When men yielded to the temptation, there were further expulsions, and sometimes the offending male’s friends and supporters marched from the colony with him. William Lane himself ultimately gave up on his own people and left with his family in 1899. He would go to New Zealand, perhaps not willing to display his broken dream in Australia, and as a journalist in Auckland came to edit the New Zealand Herald as a new-born conservative imperialist.

  Utopia had failed and William Gilmore, without the fare to take himself and Mary and their son home, went instead to Argentina, to work on the sheep stations of Patagonia. At the end of July 1900, Mary herself left the colonia in Paraguay and went to Patagonia to be with her husband. Her eventual return to Australia, whenever the Gilmores managed to raise the money, was now assured, though many of the Australian idealists would be stuck in the country in which they had chosen to remake Australia anew.

  By March 1902 Mary, her husband and Billy had the money for third-class tickets across the Atlantic for Liverpool. On arriving in Liverpool a message was waiting for them from Henry Lawson and Bertha, his wife, temporarily in London: ‘Bed’s made, and cot’s ready for the little fellow, come at once, am simply mad for the sight of an Australian face.’ The interlude was short. Henry and Mary were two Australians whose voices were confused by the London experience. Back in Australia, the Gilmores lived in a slab hut in rural Victoria where Mary raised Billy during Will’s absence on itinerant work. The marriage virtually ended in 1911, after the publication of her first volume of poetry—ironically entitled Marri’d and Other Verses—when she was given a job writing a women’s page for the trade union paper, the New South Wales Worker. Will took a small farm in Queensland, and Mary wrote him a weekly letter for the next thirty-four years. But her potent voice far transcended his humble farming destiny.

  In 1914–15, some of the young of the two South American Australian utopias would return to Australia to join the First AIF. It was particularly in the 1930s that tragedy overcame the English and Spanish-speaking grandchildren of those who made up New Australia and Cosme. In 1932, a three-year war of considerable savagery was fought between Paraguay and Bolivia over a disputed, barren region known as the Chaco. Control over the region was for the Paraguayans essential for the production of mate, a caffeine-rich drink made of the desert yerba plant, of great commercial value in South America. For Bolivia, the control of the Paraguay River and possible oil deposits provided motivation. In the jungles many soldiers lost their lives to fevers, in the dryer area they lacked water. One hundred thousand men were lost from both countries, including the flower of the descendants of New Australia and Cosme.

  LEMURIA

  Lemuria was an ancient continent which connected India to Madagascar, since both Madagascar and India were home to the same species of lemur. But Madame Blavatsky, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, argued that it was Australia that was the remains of Lemuria and that the Aborigines were the leftovers of its sub-humans. Theosophy had considerable impact in Australia, not least for its mysticism and sense of the immanence of spirits in all nature and amongst the living—an idea which appealed to Alfred Deakin—but also for its teaching that Aryans were the highest Root Race to emerge on the development path of humanity, and that they were descended from the inhabitants of the Lemurian civilisation of Atlantis. The idea that Australia was the remains of Lemuria gave Australia a significance which transcended the colonial, and inspired writers to create novels which redeemed Australia from its aridity, its withered antiquity and its Aboriginality. All these novels involved lost superior races, pre-Aboriginal golden societies which were the remains of Atlantis.

  In the 1891 novel Golden Lake by Carlton Dawe, a prolific Australian writer, the fantastically named Dick Hardwicke looks at the surface of Central Australia from the security of an oasis and says, as millions of Australians would say, ‘Ah, what a country this could be if only it had more water.’ But Dick discovers wonderful subterranean waters and, beneath the Aborigine of the surface, an Atlantean race, people who pre-dated history but whose racial superiority was a beacon for White Australia. The lost race and hidden waters characterised the genre. The famous Rosa Praed, Queensland-born (1851), with a soul tempered early in her marriage by two years spent on a remote station near Gladstone, was soon taken by her husband to an affluent life in London in her mid-twenties. Apart from her belief in Madame Blavatsky and the concept of Lemuria, she was a public advocate of Irish home rule, left her husband to live with a medium named Nancy Harward (whom she believed to have been a Germanic slave in ancient Rome) and in 1902, still in London, echoed the preoccupations of her fellow countrymen in a novel named Fugitive Anne. In this work the characters encounter, in the uninhabitable country below the Gulf of
Carpenteria, an underground world blessed by water, and a noble race named the Aca. Much of her material on the surface world of colonial pastoral life in the Gulf came from her sister Lizzie Jardine, a pastoralist’s wife in the region. Fugitive Anne and her rescuer-pursuer, a naturalist named Hansen, penetrate a hole in a great stone to enter a ‘small Switzerland’, and ‘mountains, some covered with tropical verdure; others, bare granite peaks and humps, barring the horizon as far as the eye could see’. Hanson ‘knew that he had found here in the unexplored heart of Australia—that continent which had been declared to have no previous inhabitants but the degraded Aboriginals found there on the first explorers’ landing—ruins which proclaim the fact of a civilisation’. The Aca who are then encountered even fulfil Mr Deakin’s dream of irrigation, producing ‘plantations of cocoa, bananas, palms’.

  Thus Rosa Praed tried to redeem Australia from its limitations of race and climate.

  WAR IN NORTHERN AUSTRALIA

  It was on the surface, not in some mythic underworld, that Australians continued their lives. In some places in northern Australia a war between pastoralists and natives would continue for decades. Squatter George Sutherland recorded how in the 1860s he had arrived at Lake Mary in Central Queensland to confront the local people and ‘rob them of their country’, by means of carbine fire. After later assault upon others in the Barclay and Gregory river areas of the Gulf country, he wrote that his party ‘kept trotting behind them to . . . make them understand we were their masters’. Another squatter concluded, ‘They are a hard-used race but we have to occupy the country; and no two races can inhabit the same country but the weaker must go to the wall.’