William Lane and early Back to the Land Movements

‘…rooting from this new land’s heart
                                    the poison growth of Old World weeds,
                                          Bashing in with Reason’s fists,
                                    The mummy face of Christless creeds.’
                                                            - John Farrell, 1883

Back-to-the-Land movements, which became especially popular with “hippies” in the 1970s, began in New South Wales in 1843 when 5,000 disaffected land-seekers left the country altogether for Valparaiso in Chile. However a similar expedition to New Australia in Paraguay some fifty years later led by the Englishman William (Billy) Lane, has become the one most historians remember.

As to why one expedition is remembered and the other forgotten, is in this case, straight forward enough. Lane had the support of key Labor people such as Arthur Rae, Walter Head, Rose Scott and Mary Gilmore. Thus, despite the fact that the whole thing ended as farce, through Labor’s myth-makers Lane has become, in today’s parlance, another of their teflon-coated “icons.” And this needs to be challenged.

PRIOR EXPEDITIONS

However before moving on to Lane, we should notice one other early expedition  led by Etienne Cabet (1788-1856), a Frenchman who went out to Texas to found an “Icarian Community,” so named after his Voyage en Icarie (1840), a social and philosophical discourse describing a communist utopia. But as in Robert Owen’s New Harmony the autocratic spirit of the leader, which grew to despise every instinct of liberty, soon began to make itself felt and it wasn’t long before Cabet tried to forbid the community from smoking and drinking, or even talking during working-hours

Not surprisingly his supporters soon split into two groups, and as it developed those who opposed Cabet were in the majority, and in October 1856, he was formally expelled. At the beginning of November, he and a faithful minority left their settlement in the old Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, for St. Louis where, after a sudden stroke on November 8, 1856, he died.

            The issues concerning the Icarian communities after Cabet’s death need not detain us beyond the fact that with the evaporation of the early communistic ardour, various scissions led to rupture in 1879 and finally, in 1888, extinction. There were of course lessons to be learned from Cabet’s failure but in Lane’s case these were ignored.

            Nevertheless in the early 1890s dozens of village settlements sprang up in the eastern states of Australia. In Victoria, settlements for the unemployed and their families were established (without much success) at Jindivik, Wonwondah East, Red Hill and Moora Moora. In Queensland, twelve co-operative settlements set up in 1893 namely; Nil Desperandum, Protestant Unity, Reliance and Resolution and so on, comprising 69,000 acres, disintegrated within two years. Similarly, Henry Copeland’s experiment for re-settling the ‘poor’ at Bega, Wilberforce and Pitt Town had all but closed down by 1896.

THE BEGINNING OF THE LANE SCHEME

But of Lane who, in his paper New Australia, was generally referred to as Chairman Lane (just like Chairman Mao), was a young emigrant journalist who’d only arrived in Australia in 1885. Nonetheless he was thought sufficiently qualified to help form the State Aided Village Settlement Committee in Queensland in 1887. His reputation, such as it was, had been made at the Boomerang in Brisbane, where he was free to flaunt his pathological hatred of the Chinese.

Such attitudes, however, were not always appreciated. And Joseph Symes, a well-known publisher and “freethinker” from Melbourne, pleaded for fair play and vigorously opposed Lane’s regular calls for ‘boycotts’ of the Chinese or any other race. The ‘problem that mattered,’ Symes wrote: wasn’t Asian immigration but ‘landlordism.’  

That said, certain single taxers couldn’t quite make up their minds about Lane. Frank Cotton wrote at least one glowing endorsement, and Peter McNaught who, like Cotton, was also on the Single Tax League’s advisory committee, whilst he spoke publicly on Lane’s behalf and served as his deputy-chairman, never actually made it to Paraguay (this might have had something to do with the fact that McNaught lived in a stone house, with water views, in leafy Hunters’ Hill, in Sydney). 

John Farrell on the other hand was opposed to Lane’s scheme from the beginning, and said so in his journal the Single Tax and in a series he wrote for the Brisbane Worker, entitled For Those Who Remain.

Farrell wrote that it was saddening to wander round amongst the women on board the expedition ship Royal Tar. Almost without exception they showed ‘traces’ of a hard fight with the world. ‘Faces,’ he wrote, ‘that were once young and comely [were] now blanched and wrinkled from want of food, or freckled and tanned from exposure to Australian suns. But all, maid or matron, wore the same look of a strange contentment. There was not a little in it of that pathetic look one may see in the eyes of bullocks outside the “shambles.”’

But why was Lane going to South America when, as Farrell reminded him,  within a day’s walk of the spot on which Captain Cook landed there was enough virgin land to absorb thousands of unemployed men and their families?

One possible answer is edifying. ‘Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth’ was one of Oscar Wilde’s better-known sayings. The character ‘John Miller’ was Lane’s mask in the following tirade. (We should also point out that Lane himself was slave to a ‘club’ foot, the relevance of which may soon become apparent). Lane, as a journalist, also used the disguise of a woman, ‘Lucinda Sharpe,’ a practice about which readers will draw their own conclusions. But as John Miller, Lane wrote:

            There was a time…when the women of our people regarded maternity as holy.
            Now, abhorring motherhood, they stifle the race-life unconceived. It is so.
            Every doctor knows it is so. And…vices unknown before are creeping in among
            us, poisoning our little ones…Men think not. Well, it is so. Only men are so
            sensitive that they shrink from discussing it, as a lame man instinctively shrinks
            from talking of lameness.

To whoever looked beneath the surface, the exodus of Australians to Paraguay was an event of terrible significance. However, ‘to the rich of dishonest ease and stolen wealth,’ it was a matter of indifference, Farrell told his readers. Moreover, if such people ever considered the matter, ‘they were probably pleased that the country was rid of so many discontented members of the working-class,’

THE SCHEME IN ACTION

The Royal Tar, with Lane and 250 pioneers left Sydney in July 1893 for Paraguay where he set-up New Australia, a few miles from Asuncion. Some eleven months later Farrell reported their experiences in an essay he called The New Australia Failure. He suggested the experience of settlement really showed how difficult it was to carry out any scheme that disregards, or seeks to supercede ordinary human instincts

But had the venture realized Lane’s highest expectations, according to Farrell, it would have proved little because its members were specially selected. Physically, the men were ‘all above average,’ and the fact that membership demanded casting all possessions into a common fund was proof that the pioneers were more altruistic than most. And had the experiment worked, it would have proved nothing beyond the fact that where altruism is dominant, it was possible, by appealing to higher conceptions of duty, to found a place in which selfishness was subordinated ‘to a wider and inclusive love of all for all.’

The New Australia scheme, which forbid alcohol and any fraternization between ‘the racially pure’ Anglo pioneers and the local native women, seems to have been wrecked on the same authoritarian reef that sank Cabet. Lane was not content with changing the externals of industrial life and the relationship which, in any intelligently organized society, the units must hold one to another, but he aimed at an arbitrary reversal of some of the most stubbornly ingrained characteristics of the race.

The Royal Tar reached Monte Video on 13 September 1893, and by December, three of the pioneers, Fred White, Tom Westwood and Arthur Brittlebank, had been expelled for drinking. It might be argued that Lane was justified in his actions by the terms of his Declaration of Principles that the men had signed before sailing. But in a manner reminiscent of certain reactions to authority in the recent ‘Shearers’ Strikes, the expellees refused to leave. Lloyd Ross tells the story where, shortly thereafter, Lane disappeared for a time, only to return with a body of Paraguayan soldiers and with their assistance, the three were driven out. Ross writes: ‘Lane’s dictatorial acts were a sudden release of his thwarted emotions, like a thunderstorm breaking across the Australian desert …Even his friends were amazed at the intensity of the uncompromising wrath and cruelty of one who had been so humanitarian and tolerant …Rival factions sprang up. And petty intrigues polluted the body politic.’            

THE SCHEME FAILS

Precisely the same experiences befell Lane as had befallen Cabet forty-four years earlier. Before long the colonists took to quarrelling and accusing Lane of tyranny. For not only had he expelled three of their number, he had done so whilst refusing to hold a democratic ballot to test the feelings of the membership on the matter.

Almost inevitably charges of favouritism were made against Lane and his henchmen, as people were becoming increasingly tired of a situation wherein Lane did the ‘thinking’ and the colonist did the work. Not surprisingly, in 1894, no less than one-third of the colony seceded of their own accord. And on the arrival at this juncture, of 190 newcomers who had been drawn by a flood of delusive reports, Lane was himself deposed, and with a remnant of followers, set off to found another settlement that he named Cosme.

For a few years the two colonies struggled on until, in 1899, Lane abandoned his experiment and returned to Australia. The Cosmians who were left, by dint of employing native labour on the hated wage system that they had set out to destroy, were partially successful in restoring their shattered fortunes, but only after Lane’s socialist/syndicalist principles were abandoned in favour of ‘individualism.’

It would seem that Lane;s scheme was ultimately a failure of authority. Ergo the mutual agreement between Lane and the pioneers, the Declaration of Principles, is central to our understanding. But, as the saying goes: ‘The devil was in the detail.’ The Principles placed a heavy emphasis on authority and, as a foretaste of Stalinism and Leninism: ‘religion was not officially recognized by the community.’ Walter Head, as secretary of the Settlement Association, signed off on the Principles, which he assured pioneers would ‘render it impossible for one to tyrannize over another.'

Nonetheless, the evidence strongly suggests that a network of spies existed to ensure compliance with the principles and rules of the Association. One example will suffice. On the matter of White and Brittlebank, and Westwood (who had supped with a Padre Faroni and attended Mass), it was reported by the informer, Arthur Tozer, a young Englishman who went round with a revolver in his belt, that these three bartered goods with the natives for ‘extra milk.’ His report continues: ‘It may be remembered in one of Brittlebank’s letters he wrote  ‘cana rum went well with milk.’ And while there were plenty who would have agreed, we must ask from where did this information come? Were not Brittlebank’s letters confidential? Was everyone’s mail read? Should we just assume that people read their letters aloud to the community as they wrote them?

The trouble was of course that Lane was imbued with the phoney doctrines of syndicalism and Karl Marx (real name Mordechi Mark Levi), a German Jew whose major motivation was the destruction of Catholicism. Thus Lane entered whole-heartedly into the great syndicalist strikes which did so much damage to capital in the 1890s and which had the effect on workers of reducing their wages ‘to the level of the 1840s’

THE AFTERMATH

Disillusioned by the failure of the Queensland strikes, Lane thought up the idea of starting again in Paraguay. Immediately this became public he was forced to deal with the charge of desertion. The gist of Farrell’s thinking on the matter was this: If it took courage to face 12,000 miles of ocean, and miles of jungle to find bread for one’s children, it also required courage to stay ‘and take by the throat the legalized thieves who were robbing our children [in Australia] of bread.’

In the meantime, since about two pounds a week was the average wage, and a down payment of sixty pounds was necessary before anyone could take ship to Paraguay, for most workers the idea of moving to New Australia was never more than a pipe-dream.

The subsequent adventures of the settlers has been vividly described by Lloyd Ross, Gavin Souter and Stewart Grahame (the latter’s account is the most brutal and has the additional merit of being the most accurate). However, it is doubtful if any saw the basic flaw in Lane’s vision more clearly than Farrell who wrote:

            The fundamental law of freedom is the right of every man to himself, and,
            therefore, the right to all that is the product of his own labour, and, to supercede
            this primary principle, on any pretence…is not an advance, but a falling away
            in everything that constitutes liberty. If successful, it could only be
            perpetuated at the cost of all that is most noble and godlike in humanity.

TWO SUCCESSES

Finally, in spite of the above, there were at least two success stories in the ‘back-to-the-land’ movements of the 1890s. And while each is worthy of the fullest treatment, this is not possible in a short essay. The first was the exotically-titled Robert Emmett Section, an anarchist group that issued its own currency and ran its own coal mine near Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains. And where the men, working a forty-eight hour week, signed-on for one pound per year, a few items of clothing, two pairs of boots, their meals, and eight ounces of tobacco a week. The second was New Italy, in Northern New South Wales. Of the success of New Italy, we should point out that as their name suggests, the people involved were all Italian (and Catholic) and Lane would have despised them. 

And whilst both the men and women in New Italy cut railway sleepers to earn cash, every family’s holding (which had been divided up into fenced, manageable 40 acre lots) grew fruit and vegetables, and flowers as well as grapes and wine for their own use and for sale. Each family also fattened a pig and in the winter the neighbours helped each other to make salami. The making of salami was a festive occasion, as it had been in Italy. Not surprisingly the Italians were also law-abiding and in 1910, local police reported that there had never been a single conviction recorded against them.

The demise of New England came only slowly. As the colonists did well, many sold up and moved; the young tended to move to Sydney or Brisbane to find work.

Giacomo Piccoli, who had made several return trips to Italy, was the last of the original settlers. He died on 8 July 1955, and was buried in the local cemetery. Finally, the one thing we can say for certain is this, had Lane ever known Piccoli, instead of hiding in New Zealand and becoming the angry old pro-war advocate that he became in 1914, he might have at least become a better singer.

See for example Anne Whitehead, Paradise Mislaid, UQP, 1997

Cabet was an early influence on both Henry George and Terence Powderly of the Knights of Labor.
Henry Copeland, Minister for Lands in New South Wales.
Joseph Symes, Liberator, Melbourne, Joseph Symes, 26 February 1888.
Peter McNaught was then also ‘Master Workman’ for the Knights of Labor.
Peter McNaught entertained Henry George and other well-known single taxers at his home in Hunters’ Hill, on at least one Sunday during George’s three-months tour in 1890.
John Farrell, Single Tax, 25 July 1893 (“shambles,” a slaughterhouse and meat market in London).
John Miller, New Australia, Sydney, 8 April 1893.
John Farrell, Single Tax, 25 july 1893.
John Farrell, Single Tax, 20 June 1894.
Lloyd Ross, William Lane and the Australian Labor Movement, Sydney, Hale & Iremonger, c. 1935.
Walter Head, New Australia, Sydney, 28 January 1892.
Gavin Souter, A Peculiar People, SUP, 1981 edition, hereafter referred to as People, p.86.
New Australia, 24 March 1894.
Nesta H. Webster, World Revolution, Western Australia, Veritas Press, 1994 reprint edition.
John Farrell, Single Tax, 25 July 1893.
Gavin Souter, People.
Stewart G. Grahame, Where Socialism Failed, n.p., 1913.
John Farrell, Single Tax, 20 June 1894.
Northern Star, 24 April 1910.