Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  In the arena were teams of horsemen and horsewomen, all clad in colourful costume, waiting in disciplined clusters. From time to time two of these teams would thunder across the ground towards each other, and a sort of mock battle or pseudo-polo match would take place, though with no ball, sticks or goals. The teams were wearing either Colorado red or Liberale blue neck scarves: the Colorados always won. The women’s teams were much better than the men’s. It was impossible to work out what the rules were or what was actually happening, but it was extremely typical of something or other, and was just the sort of thing people in Europe thought went on all the time in this part of South America, but never in fact did, except on one day of the year. It was a far cry from anything Australian – there were no violent drunks, foul-mouthed hoons, or swag-bellied larrikins, for a start – though we were on the same latitude as Rockhampton, and the countryside around us could just about have been a flat bit of Queensland. William Lane’s nightmare had come true: Nueva Australia had just become another bit of Paraguay, albeit one with a sprinkling of ocker genes.

  After a while, however, the still hot sun and the endless electric red-hot polka band began to drill deep into my skull, and I suggested it was time to wend our way back to find Marcello and Carlos. I took a photo of Victor Smith underneath the road sign which read ‘Nueva Londres’. He was, I realized, slightly ga-ga, or else the brain operation had been more serious than anyone wanted to admit. Everyone he spoke to responded in that oh-yes-it’s-the-village-simpleton-again way: they probably thought I was some cousin from Ajos, a few kilometres away.

  ‘Come again,’ he cried out as we parted. ‘Come and stay for a long time. Paraguay is a perfect country – not too hot, not too cold – just right.’ I thanked him for his hospitality and waved goodbye.

  Marcello and Carlos were waiting patiently in the jeep. ‘I like this place,’ affirmed Marcello. ‘Clean, modern – like Nueva Germania.’ Apart from the silky oaks and the odd Anglo-Saxon surname there was nothing left to show this had once been a pioneer Australian colony, except the tell-tale blond and redheaded children, lanky and ungainly, who trailed around after Victor and me, giggling and whispering, but speaking no English.

  On 11 October 1893, an official delegation from Asunción rode into this place, then merely a clearing in the jungle, where the New Australia colony had just erected a partially thatched hall, their first public building. Led by the colony’s agent Alf Walker, the horsemen included Dr López, wearing a poncho, Minister in the Paraguayan government, the German secretary to the President, who spoke some English, the administrator for the local district of Ajos, a few other notables, and an officer and four soldiers of the Presidential Guard. A horn was sounded as they approached and the Australian colonists swarmed out to meet them, cheering. This was to be the day of the official flag-raising, the formal commencement of the settlement. After refreshments – non-alcoholic, for the colonists were strict teetotallers – the horn sounded again, and Dr López and the leader of the colony, William Lane, linked arms, advanced to the flagstaff and together hauled up the Paraguayan flag, as the soldiers fired a volley with their Winchester rifles. The Minister and Lane both made speeches, the latter expressing his gratitude to the Paraguayan government for their welcome and their generosity in granting land for their new settlement. The whole scene was witnessed by the four-year-old Voltaire Molesworth, son of James Molesworth who had purchased for the colonists’ association the barque Royal Tar that had brought the 200 emigrants there present from Sydney to their new home. Years later, Voltaire Molesworth would recall that flag-raising with emotion, and the cheering Australian colonists saluting the ‘Paz y Justicia’ on the flag. His own name, a strange combination of Continental European radical philosophe and solid Anglo-Saxon from the Shires, strikes the paradoxical keynote for the Utopian communists of Nueva Australia. This bizarre venture grew out of the embittered and radicalized Labor politics of Queensland in the 1890s. A sheepshearers strike turned violent after intimidatory picketing and the dynamiting of ‘scab’ labour transport which caused death and injury. The strike had been put down with armed force by the authorities and the ringleaders sent to gaol with hard labour for sedition. The time had now come, some radical Labor leaders said, for the ultimate strike, the permanent removal of labour from the bosses by emigration to another land, somewhere in which ‘true mateship’ could flourish and a communist reality could be built in a pure state, an agricultural co-operative commune in which capitalism was banned by the articles of association.

  The undoubted leader and originator of this novel social experiment was the 32-year-old William Lane, a self-educated journalist and author, who had been born in Bristol, England, but who had sailed for the US aged 16 as an emigrant. He had married an American, and after 10 years in the US, had eventually found himself at the centre of radical communist politics in Australia, editing the Worker, and making inflammatory speeches wherever he could. His novel The Workingman’s Paradise was a Utopian tract predicting a world to come when capitalism was defeated and communism made a reality. The model for his fictional hero Ned Hawkins, the idealized Queensland bushman, was Robert Louis Stevenson’s cousin, David Russell Stevenson, who although from a landed Scottish background, had thrown in his lot with radical Labor in Queensland. Stevenson was a personal friend of Lane’s and a political ally – and maybe more as well, at least on Lane’s side. Stevenson was the Lothario of the Australian Labor movement, which had allies among radical and advanced Australian women, circles where feminism, communism and sexual emancipation made easy bedfellows, literally as well as metaphorically. He was tall, strong and immensely good looking, with great sexual charisma. He made many conquests, in Australia and in New Australia, where several women were said to have borne him children. He had a private income from his family in Scotland, which he used to spring treats on the children of the colony. He was an educated, cultivated man, an accomplished amateur actor, singer and raconteur, as well as being muscular, masculine and physically capable – a relatively rare combination of talents, particularly in British colonies, where male philistinism, lack of charm, and inarticulateness are the general norm as much today as they were 100 years ago. The Australian novelist Kathy Lette’s description of Australian men as ‘emotional bonsai’ is cruel but accurate: by contrast, Stevenson was a positive Californian redwood.

  Lane contributed £1,000 to the funds for the venture, others put in a minimum of £60 each. Some gave all they owned. More than 2,000 people came up with the money, and many more signed up for later emigration when the colony was established. Land was found by Alf Walker in Paraguay – the government there was eager to assist Anglo-Saxon immigration after the devastating losses of the War of the Triple Alliance. Forty square leagues, or 93,000 hectares of fine, well-watered fertile land were made over to the Australian Co-operative Settlement Association and the emigrants converged on Sydney to board the Royal Tar. No more radical communist community had been attempted since the Desert Fathers of the Early Church in Egypt. Everything was to be held in common, even cutlery and crockery, except worktools and personal clothes. There was to be no money, no wages, no savings and no capital. There was also to be no alcohol and no sexual intercourse with the natives. ‘Our children must be white in order that they may take the lamp of progress from us and be able to keep it burning for the generation to come,’ averred Lane. His prophecy of doom for Old Australia was that race war was inevitable now that the bosses had succeeded in importing Melanesian and Chinese workers who undercut the unionized Anglo-Saxons and Celts of British stock.

  Brendan Behan, an old IRA man, observed that ‘the first item on the agenda for discussion was always The Split’. No sooner do oppositional, revolutionary movements start to coalesce than they also begin to fissure, breaking apart into factions and conventicles of rival groupings. Lane’s New Australia was no exception. Even before the first boatload of colonists had reached South America the party was divided into two disputing groups. �
��The first revolt against Lane occurred on board,’ reported James Molesworth. ‘Lane had been given dictatorial powers until the settlement was constituted. He imposed restrictions … we threatened to throw him overboard. The dispute was then amicably settled’: some methods in Labour political circles never change, it seems. The problem, unsurprisingly, was over sex, and in particular David Russell Stevenson, known to the colonists as ‘Dave’, who now took on the role of Serpent in this proto-Paradise, apple of knowledge ready to hand.

  As well as being a communist and a visionary intellectual William Lane was also a married man and father, a Puritan, and au fond a deeply respectable Victorian paterfamilias. He also had a club foot which had been operated on, but not mended. He had a pronounced limp, wore spectacles, was not physically robust, and was beginning to go bald: with hindsight one might suspect that he was sexually insecure – particularly about his own wife. Far from an advocate of free love or progressive feminism he believed strongly in ‘the life marriage’ and in women confining themselves to a purely domestic, supportive role. When he saw David Russell Stevenson canoodling in a lifeboat after dark with the only young single female on board without her parents – an ‘advanced’ Australian girl who was a qualified nurse – Lane was deeply shocked and forbade her on deck when the bachelors were taking the evening air. Clara Jones, a spirited 26-year-old, defied Lane publicly, tore his notice down from the mast in front of him, and danced on it before his eyes, an act of defiance to the patriarchy that would have warmed the cockles of the future Germaine Greer’s heart. Lane was dumbfounded, and retreated to his cabin to sulk for several days. In his documentary novel The Paraguayan Experiment about New Australia, Michael Wilding suggests that Lane may himself have been subconsciously in love with ‘Dave’ Stevenson, and was jealous: there is a telling description of Ned Hawkins’s lips being ‘strangely girlish’ in Lane’s novel The Workingman’s Paradise, and the physical portrait of his hero Hawkins-Stevenson is decidedly homoerotic to a modern, post-Freudian reader.

  Two factions now formed on board: the ‘Royalists’ loyal to ‘King’ Billy Lane, and the ‘Rebels’, later to be dubbed the ‘liberty-and-caña mob’ by the Lane-ites. These settlers were, after all, career agitators, revolutionaries and extreme radical communists who had spent their whole lives in revolt against the bosses, capitalism and the government. Opposition, sedition, revolt and protest, not to mention physical violence with fists, knives and even guns were their meat and drink, and had been all their lives. Many had been to gaol for their beliefs. Argument, disputation, ideological wrangling, faction-fighting, strike action and violent picketing were their daily bread. These were the sort of ultras whom Robespierre guillotined, Hitler had executed in the Night of the Long Knives, and Stalin shot or exiled to the gulag archipelago – the founding revolutionary fathers, the tough nuts and hard cases who are always devoured by their own creation when the revolution requires order and discipline in place of agitation and revolt. Government, order, discipline were not in the colonists’ blood; revolt, rebellion and dissension were. The bosses of Australia were now far away: here, William Lane was the boss, the government, and the property-owning class all rolled into one. He had all the Association’s money and all the power, which he would neither share nor delegate. As with all successful revolutions, the revolutionaries found they had far less power after their leader had taken control than they had under the ancien régime. The Tsar was a far easier master than Lenin, Louis XVI than Robespierre, Weimar than Hitler. In the Second World War, the Japanese had no problems with their Allied prisoners. They allowed them to form into natural groups with natural leaders, then separated all the leaders and confined them in secure isolation camps. The leaders spent the whole war arguing among themselves, and the leaderless remainder rarely attempted any breakouts. Among Lane’s followers were dynamiters who had blown up ships bringing in blackleg labour, men who would not hesitate to shoot at police or troopers if required: by removing these men from Australia Lane unwittingly paved the way for a non-violent transition from the revolutionary politics of class war to the parliamentary-based Labor Party which, using peaceful, Fabian tactics, succeeded in gaining a permanent place in Australia’s democractic structures.

  The settlers who volunteered for New Australia were self-selected – Lane had not chosen them or been able to weed out those he didn’t like. Now, on board on the high seas, he found many of them to be petit-bourgeois city dwellers, artisans and shopkeepers, ‘growlers’ and dissidents, dissenters and malcontents: people, in fact, who disagreed with him and who would not accept his authority. He began to plot how he could get rid of them. Off the coast of South America he decided that the molasses they had brought with them might contain a small alcohol content, so over the side went the whole ship’s supply, to curses and imprecations from the women and the Rebels. It was as if by his every high-handed action Lane was deliberately provoking a rebellion: and that, in fact, was his aim and his strategy – to provoke a final revolt and split so he could start anew with his own supporters.

  Lane had the authority and the money; in theory no one should have kept back any private cash, but of course many of the women and even some of the men had. At Montevideo, after being at sea without a break for almost two months, Lane went ashore, but forbade anyone else to leave the ship. For the Rebels this was tyranny and they disobeyed, coming back late after their spree in a drunken condition. Knife and fist fights were now a regular occurrence between the two factions on board, and the drunken returnees were hailed with cries of ‘Scab!’ and ‘Blackleg!’ by those who had obeyed King Billy. In theory, Lane had authority; in practice he could do nothing about all this except sulk and plot expulsions and revenge when they got on to dry land in New Australia itself.

  A crucial new recruit the settlers met in Montevideo was the young Englishman Arthur Tozer, who had been employed by Alf Walker to help him find land. Middle class, educated, serious and a good Spanish and Portuguese speaker, Tozer became Lane’s right-hand man immediately, and a hero-worshipping Lane disciple who may himself have fallen in love with his hero. Tozer was armed with a Smith & Wesson revolver, had been involved in revolutionary activity in Buenos Aires, and decided to throw in his lot with the New Australians. He also became the Trotsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky combined to Lane’s Lenin, the Enforcer of the colony, a one-man Red Army and OGPU-NKVD, armed and authoritarian, empowered by the Paraguayan authorities as Justice of the Peace and constantly on the lookout for backsliders. The whole enterprise now took on a resemblance to an almost caricatural degree to the early settlement of New South Wales as a convict penal colony: an English governor and his armed English aide-de-camp were in charge, with complete and arbitrary powers, even over matters of food, drink and clothing, of a group of politically malcontent working-class Celts and Anglo-Saxons, many with gaol sentences behind them, transported by ship across the ocean, in an attempt to settle and cultivate a new, strange land none of them knew anything about, the natives of which they completely ignored. The New Australians rather than the British authorities had paid for their own transportation this time round. ‘Of course Australia is bound for glory – were not her people chosen by the finest Judges in England?’ went the early 19th-century British jibe about convicts in Botany Bay. By a complex historical irony the New Australian colonists, in seeking liberty and true mateship had volunteered and paid for their own exile, and a form of absolute rule found nowhere outside Tsarist Russia or the Uganda of the Kabaka Mutesa.

  Desertions began immediately: Lane did nothing. Rather he seemed to be expecting them. ‘The good ones, the true mates will stay – the dross will go,’ he remarked. Those who left lost their stake in the colony. The central problem was Lane’s inflexible authoritarianism and the ban on liquor. In a cynical and dismissive editorial, the Sydney Bulletin buried the colony with a derisive epitaph after its short and ignominious existence. ‘The constitution of New Australia was based on the assumption that it is possible to create a
community where every person is sober, moral, religious and full of holy yearning for self-sacrifice, and the collapse came about because there is no such community under heaven. Man will drink and gamble and prowl around the back doors of the dusky daughters of the land until the end of time.’ William Lane’s dream was, in fact, more suited to the 17th century of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army than late 19th-century South America.

  When they got to it, the land they had been granted was fine, the rivers clear and full of fish, the air clean and healthy. The Paraguayan government could not have been more helpful. Cattle were bought, crops planted, huts and shacks erected. New Australia was going to grow to be a colony of 50,000 people or more, idealists attracted from all over the world to build the pure communist society, that was Lane’s vision. They would be a vanguard, a spearhead which would eventually convert the whole world to a better way of living. But in all matters there is the human element, and this was once again defective. Men shirked their labour and did not look after community property, which got broken, rusty and lost. Against all the rules caña was smuggled into the colony and the colonists made their way by night to Ajos where there were 40 women for every man. In the colony there was an overwhelming number of single men. Community tools were stolen and traded for rum. And every night the two factions, Royalists and Rebels, sat on logs opposite each other by the camp fire and argued until they were blue in the face. Lane expelled recalcitrants, and then expelled more; their friends and allies deserted the colony in disgust. In the end, Lane himself resigned as chairman and took his own core supporters, 60 or so of his favoured Queensland bushmen and shearers, and founded a rival colony called Cosme, 75 kilometres away. ‘To save needless enquiries,’ the prospectus for the second New Australia went, ‘everybody should understand that Cosme is for English speaking Whites who accept the Life Marriage, The Colour Line and Teetotalism among their principles, and who realize in their hearts that COMMUNISM IS RIGHT!’ Not surprisingly recruitment was exceedingly slow. The Cosme land was not as good: there was malaria, flooding and poorer soils. It was out of the way and impossible to get to after heavy rains. Lane grew sick and nearly died: while he was recovering he, the strident teetotaller, became addicted to alcohol as a convalescent, supping up avidly the despised rum and wine. Yet more settlers fled this grim outpost of collectivist insanity in the serpent-ridden, mosquito-haunted depths of the deepest bush. Lane went to England, his ticket paid for by the Paraguayan government, to recruit more settlers. He all but completely failed in this, though he was accused of attempting to rape a married woman while her husband was away from home. ‘The problem with the Labor movement,’ Lane wrote in his later disillusionment, ‘is the dirty tools you are forced to use.’ It is unlikely he was referring to his own equipment here, but rather the Rebels who so obstinately refused to see sense and do what they were told. He arrived at the conclusion so many communist leaders come to, that the workers have betrayed the revolution. ‘The people have failed, therefore they should be dissolved, and a new one elected’ as Brecht ironically observed. When the scheme had first been mooted the Sydney Bulletin predicted that ‘there will be a few hundred people digging and fencing in a dreary, hopeless fashion out in the great loneliness, and living on woe and unsaleable vegetables and dreams of home. And meanwhile, the founder of the settlement will be foaming at the mouth and uttering poetry beneath a tree, and wildly asking the damp ferns, “What is life?” ’ Apart from the ‘few hundred people’ which proved a wildly optimistic estimate, this skeptical prophecy proved right in both essence and detail. Lane had increasingly taken to solitary walks in the monte, or long horse rides far away from the troublesome settlers: from leader of men he had become melancholy introvert, pessimistic, taciturn and dour, the genetic inheritance of his Puritan Scots mother in the ascendant over the fiery rabble-rousing of his booze-sodden Hibernian father.