A SOCIABLE PARADISE

KEVIN FOSTER CONSIDERS THE QUEST FOR AN AUTHENTIC AUSTRALIA.

BETWEEN MAY AND OCTOBER 1851, the Great Exhibition attracted more than six million visitors to London’s Hyde Park where Joseph Paxton’s vast hangar of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace, housed acres of machinery and manufactures. Though ostensibly showcasing the industry of all nations, the Great Exhibition was principally, and unashamedly, a celebration of the host nation’s progress and innovation and a bold declaration of “the new ideals that seemed to have become the national ideals of Britain”.
     Little more than a decade later, the nation had become so closely identified with its industries and the great inventors and engineers responsible for them that Samuel Smiles could ingenuously ask: what was Britain “without its tools, its machinery, its steam engines, its steamships, and its locomotives. Are not the men who have made the motive power of the country, and immensely increased its productive strength, the men above all who have … [made] the country what it is?”
     Smiles’ conviction that Britain owed not merely its prosperity but its identity to the architects of its industrialisation was not universally shared. In fact, by the time he advanced this opinion the “trajectory of admiration for material progress” was in slow but certain decline as “currents of thought and sentiment began to flow in another direction”. Growing discomfort with the embodied effects of progress, rural depopulation, industrial blight, urban poverty and a degraded working class led to a wholesale “reappraisal of the Industrial Revolution. Instead of being seen as something which had made Britain pre-eminent as the workshop of the world, it was re-evaluated as a regrettable and disastrous phenomenon, which had brought – and was still bringing – human suffering and environmental degradation”.
     As the century drew on, there was increasing anxiety that the nation’s imperial gains and industrial advances were being achieved at the cost of its essential identity. There were complaints in parliament, the press and the humble English village that the people, places, buildings, trades and traditions that embodied and expressed the nation’s unique identity were being washed away on the tide of progress – that England itself was slowly but certainly disappearing. This emerging sense of cultural imperilment was reflected in the proliferation of voluntary bodies and publishing ventures established from the mid-nineteenth century onwards with the express aim of “recovering, preserving and celebrating various aspects of Britain’s cultural and environmental heritage”.6 Britons also looked abroad, to their colonies and beyond, for surviving vestiges of the nation’s essential identity or an inviting context into which it might be transplanted and preserved.
     It was not only the British who felt that their essential identity and the values and traditions that expressed it were under threat at this time, or who looked abroad for the means to protect them. In the latter years of the nineteenth century there was a growing sense among working-class Australians that the nation’s originating ideals were also under siege. Though initially conceived as a penal colony furnishing a solution to eighteenth-century Britain’s overcrowded gaols, its name used to frighten the recalcitrant into obedience and keep the working classes “sober, industrious and humble”, within little more than half a century Australia was desperate for immigrants to help open up the country, clear the land and develop its burgeoning industries. By 1850 more than 150,000 free settlers had made the voyage there, some fleeing ‘the hungry forties’, some the overcrowding and indigence of Britain’s towns and cities, many attracted by the aggressive projection of the country as a ‘workingman’s paradise’.
     By the end of the century, however, the promise of fair wages and a fair go for all was wearing thin. The early 1890s was a period of economic crisis and industrial turmoil in Australia that not only saw an increase in the frequency of labour disputes but a significant shift in their origins:

Before 1890 the causes of strikes had been attempts by unions to raise wages, to resist any increase in working hours, or to resist the dismissal of a man for holding a position in a trades union. In 1890 a series of strikes began in the eastern colonies that raised the question of the rights of unionism, and in doing so it led to a direct clash between capital and labour.

The key dispute in this struggle was the shearers’ strike of early 1891 which had its origins in the pastoralists’ desire to institute freedom of contract and the union’s determination to maintain the closed shop. In March, with more than ten thousand shearers and station hands gathered in union camps and towns across western Queensland, the government, fearing civil unrest, determined to break the dispute. The strike leaders were arrested and, after a brief trial in Rockhampton, found guilty of conspiracy and sentenced to three years imprisonment with hard labour. Despite calls to use the verdicts as a rallying point for a final push against the forces of capital, the trial marked the end of the dispute. A week after the sentences were handed down, the carriers returned to work. The shearers’ union caved in soon afterwards, directing its members to accept the very terms that had triggered the strike in the first place. Over the next two years a prolonged drought, a dramatic fall in the wool price and a crisis in the finance sector combined to produce “an economic depression of unparalleled severity”.
     As workers in a host of sectors saw their pay and conditions deteriorate and their dreams of a brighter future shimmer and fade, the workingman’s paradise began to look uncomfortably like the old country. Indeed, many workers and their supporters in the press believed that the dispute had laid bare the true nature of the government’s class and economic allegiances.
     Disillusioned with the political process, large numbers of men and women sought to opt out altogether by establishing communities founded on alternative principles of governance, economy and social organisation. Between 1894 and 1900 more than 22,000 people inhabited a patchwork of cooperative settlements in Tasmania, South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Others, convinced that the nation’s essential values could no longer be revived but had to be rescued, looked further afield for a definitive break with the old order. The most prominent of these voluntary exiles was William Lane, a British migrant and the editor of Australia’s first trade union-owned newspaper, the Worker, who according to Gavin Souter “enjoyed a greater following than any other polemical journalist in Australian history”. From the time he arrived in Brisbane in June 1885, Lane made no secret of his desire to establish a communistic colony enshrining the principles of fellowship and equality, where “the first duty of each” was “the wellbeing of all and the sole duty of all … the wellbeing of each”. Though he took “a leading part in the promotion … of a state-aided village settlement scheme” in Queensland, Lane’s plans for a utopian community of his own were focused as far away from Australia as he or any of his contemporaries could imagine at the time – in Paraguay. He was convinced that the success of such a community depended on its severing all ties with the old country and starting afresh. Its isolation and remoteness would not only dissuade the hesitant from making the trip, but would bind the pioneers together once there and foster a true spirit of comradeship, “We must go where we shall be cast inwards, where we shall be able to form new habits, uninfluenced by old social surroundings, where none but good men will go with us”.
     The central purpose of the settlement, the preservation and propagation of the nation’s essential identity, was enshrined in its proposed name, New Australia. However, the principal goal of the colony was fundamentally at odds with its espoused ideals of separateness and innovation. It was Lane’s aim in Paraguay not to establish a new Australia but to resurrect the old one – to realise the aims and ideals that had underlain its original free settlement and had been so bitterly betrayed by recent political events. Indeed, the de facto constitution of the settlement, the Basis for Communal Organisation, reveals that making a clean break from “old social surroundings” was not as easy as may have been envisioned. While it proposed certain radical social and economic arrangements – “communal ownership of all the means of production and distribution, communal conduct of production and distribution, communal maintenance of children under the guardianship of their parents, and communal saving of capital” – in other regards it advocated the values of monogamist, chauvinist, closed-shop, White Australia, with a heavy dash of wowserism thrown in.
     The community’s most cherished principles can be discerned from the list of those groups denied membership. Barred from New Australia was any person “not knowing English so as to understand and be understood; any person of colour, including any married to persons of colour; any living together otherwise than in lawful marriage; any of questionable reputation; any objectionable by reason of past disloyalty to the Labour movement or of such other actions as are clearly opposed to the common good”. Further, one of the community’s Articles of Association required that “members shall pledge themselves to teetotalism until the initial difficulties of settlement have passed and the constitution has been established”.
     Whatever its political or economic radicalism, the new settlement was marked by the determination of its founders to preserve a vision of Australia as white, wholesome, sober and straight, where the great enemy was not masterdom but miscegenation. If, in his assurance of the racial superiority of his fellow Anglo-Saxon Australian males, Lane was less a monster than a man of his time, what set him apart from his contemporaries was his conviction that in the face of the steady dilution of the nation’s racial stock, the emerging national type – ‘the Coming Man’ – was unlikely to sustain the moral or mental vigour of his forebears if he stayed in Australia. In addition to its radical political attainments, Lane asserted, New Australia would be the one place where the future race might flourish and the Coming Man come into his own.
     In the longer term, however, it seemed that Lane’s efforts had been fruitless. In the mid-1960s when Sydney journalist Gavin Souter travelled to Paraguay to track down the surviving colonists, he was struck by how they had blended in with, and become indistinguishable from, the locals. If old Australia had changed beyond recognition, New Australia had been swallowed whole by Paraguay.
     Yet thirty years later, when broadcaster and journalist Anne Whitehead returned to the settlements, she argued that the manners, attitudes and social forms of late nineteenth-century Australia lived on among the descendants of the colonists: “I had a curious sense, on meeting these men and women, that I’d slipped into a time warp, that I was talking with Australian bush people of the 1890s, confronting the values and traditions, preserved almost intact, from my grandparents’ generation. I was granted a rare picture of my own people’s past, a living one.”
     Whatever the objective accuracy of this dubious claim, the narrative purpose of Paradise Mislaid, Whitehead’s account of her journeys, required that vestiges of Australia’s essential identity be found in Latin America. This was because they afforded a means of direct contact with the late nineteenth-century locus of the country’s collective self-imagining and its most significant mythic narratives. Like the founders of New Australia whose experiences she detailed, it was Whitehead’s aim to resurrect and reconnect with a vision of authentic Australia.
     Where Lane and his fellow travellers had set out to sequester and preserve the nation’s essential identity, it was Whitehead’s aim to determine how it had evolved over the century. She travelled to Paraguay in pursuit of an image of Australia as it was, against which she might more clearly define and appraise what it had become and how it had done so. Accordingly, her account is less an endeavour to make contact with a lost remnant of the national past than it is an effort to take the health of the contemporary nation. Her portrait of the Paraguayan settlements, and the South American nations as a whole, furnishes not merely a basis for comparisons between then and now, here and there, but a means of allegorising and appraising the successes and failings of modern Australia.
     Whitehead does this by posing a series of questions. To what extent, she asks, has the modern nation faithfully upheld the values of New Australia? What have been the effects of its most conspicuous continuities with and departures from the Paraguayan model? What might modern Australia have looked like had it remained faithful to the originating ideals of the South American settlements? Her responses to these questions pay particular attention to matters of gender and race.
     In their endeavours to right the political and economic wrongs of the old world, the colonists preserved and in some cases extended a range of discriminatory practices that they had brought with them. In keeping with the social norms of nineteenth-century Australia there was a clear, gendered division of labour. While the men cleared and fenced the land, constructed the buildings, tended the cattle and busied themselves with the political infighting that split the colony into ‘loyalist’ and ‘rebel’ communities soon after its establishment, the women’s lot was largely confined to domestic chores. Though the small number of single women enjoyed the right to vote for members of the community’s executive body, their married sisters were denied the privilege – this being reserved for the male head of household.
     While in 1893 this was an unremarkable reflection of the chauvinism of the day, by 1902, when women in three of Australia’s six states had attained suffrage, “the married women of Cosme”, New Australia’s ‘loyalist’ splinter community, “still had no vote in the colony’s affairs”, a policy from which some of the colony’s women took great heart. Writing in the Cosme Monthly, one unnamed female contributor described women’s suffrage as one of the “political and social evils of the times” and “the voting woman” as “another form of the highly diseased state of city life”. She rejoiced in the colony’s rejection of these dangerous innovations: “The Cosme woman knows that her position and welfare are too well assured to trouble her head about voting”.
     New Australia’s regressive gender politics are employed by Whitehead to point out how little progress has been made since the 1890s in the broader emancipation of Australian women who over the succeeding century may have been accorded equal rights but have remained culturally marginalised. In a land originally envisioned as the workingman’s paradise, whose self-anointed prophet of national maturity was ‘the Coming Man’, what role was there for the women of Australia? The great flowering of cultural nationalism in the late nineteenth century, almost exclusively fashioned by male writers, editors and painters, celebrated an image of the nation in which women could occupy no more than a subsidiary role as servants or helpmeets. Sydney’s bohemia, one of the hothouses of national self-imagining, was largely “devoid of feminine interest … There were a few girls among the boy authors, but they were tolerated there mainly because they made tea and organised refreshments”.
     The postwar ideal of ‘the Australian way of life’ – white, comfortable, consumerist – continued to deny the majority of the nation’s citizens a genuinely participatory role in its cultural identity well into the 1970s: “Men had many outlets in ‘the Australian way of life’, as workers, fathers, sportsmen, beer drinkers, home handymen. Women were part of it only as full-time housewives and mothers”. The anachronisms of New Australia’s gender politics help demonstrate what has made Australia the country it is today and the progress it still needs to make in addressing its gender inequities.
     In race relations, the colonists’ treatment of the Paraguayans – in particular, the native Guarani – was in many regards painfully reminiscent of European attitudes towards Australia’s Indigenous people. When, in anticipation of an influx of new arrivals, the colony at New Australia established a fresh settlement, its leaders had no compunction about uprooting a number of local families who had occupied homes there for many years. On her journey through Paraguay a century after these expulsions, Whitehead bears witness to the consequences of more concerted campaigns of land seizure and eviction. She is struck by how many of the Makka, Guayaki and Guarani Indians, displaced from their lands and denied their traditional livelihoods, had like Australia’s Aborigines seen their tribal, clan and family structures collapse, fallen into alcohol abuse and indigence, and been forced into forms of cultural prostitution to survive. Having dispossessed the native Paraguayans, the Australian colonists then endeavoured to culturally disappear them. In the colony school, a “many windowed, wooden building with a bungalow roof … furnished with the ordinary fittings of Australian schools”, under the tutelage of Mary Cameron (the future Mary Gilmore) the children were subjected to a rigidly Australian education cleansed of any reference to the world or the people at their doorstep. “The curriculum”, she proudly noted, “was our own, as we kept in every way non-Paraguayan”.
     While racism was an entrenched aspect of the radical nationalism that the Australians brought with them, it was the raison d’être of another utopian scheme attempted in Paraguay less than a decade before Lane’s arrival. Nueva Germania was established in central Paraguay, near the modern town of San Pedro, in 1886 by Doktor Bernhard Förster, his wife Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher, and fourteen peasant families from Saxony. Dismissed from his teaching post in Berlin for racist views that in the Times’ view made him “the most representative Jew-baiter in all Germany”, Förster saw in Paraguay the ideal laboratory “for an experiment in biological purity”, the breeding of “an Aryan master race”. Here, “uncontaminated by Jewry”, he believed he could found “a New Germany, where Germans would be able to cultivate the authentic German geist”. But his hopes of Aryan renewal were in vain. Nueva Germania was a disaster. The crops failed, living conditions were primitive and the disgruntled inhabitants turned on one another. After four years of fruitless struggle, broken by his failures, Förster took his own life, and his wife returned to Germany where she assumed control of her now deranged brother’s papers.
     Förster and Lane had each harboured high hopes for their colonies. While Lane had dreamt that the success of New Australia would “set such an example and excite such determination in other states that a worldwide revolution would speedily be brought about”, Förster was convinced that Nueva Germania “would be the nucleus for a glorious new Fatherland that would one day cover the entire continent”.
     Though neither man’s dreams of revolutionary transformation came to fruition, it was Förster’s vision of an ethnically purified and augmented Fatherland that, with catastrophic consequences for Europe and its Jews, shaped the philosophical development of National Socialism and came closest to realisation. In Germany through the 1910s and 1920s, Elisabeth Nietzsche drew on the beliefs of her late husband in her role as the custodian of her dead brother’s legacy. In doing so, she extensively amended Nietzsche’s work, transforming him from an outspoken detractor of anti-Semitism into its philosophical high priest and the prophet of resurgent German militarism. The links between the racist vision that underpinned the founding of Nueva Germania and the principles of National Socialism were cemented when, in 1934, the first branch of the Nazi Party outside Germany was established close to the Paraguayan settlement. The Nietzsche archive at Weimar became the spiritual home of National Socialism, and Elisabeth, its matriarch-cum-oracle, was treated with great deference by Hitler on his pilgrimages there. It would seem that at least one of the roads that led Hitler to the Reichstag passed through Paraguay.
     Whitehead’s implicit comparison here presents Nueva Germania as the darker shadow-self of New Australia. Under a less compromising leadership, in different circumstances, with a more rigorous application of its racist foundations, she suggests, New Australia might have taken a similar path. But it was another biological imperative which proved that the racial purity so prized by Lane and Förster was more a malignant dogma than a realisable objective. When the Royal Tar set sail for Montevideo from Sydney on 16 July 1893, of the 220 colonists bound for New Australia, forty-four were unmarried men and forty-three unmarried women, yet only seven of these women were over the age of sixteen. As the colony’s numbers were boosted in succeeding years, the numbers of marriageable men continued to far exceed the supply of available women. At the same time, as a result of the catastrophic War of the Triple Alliance (1865–70) in which the male population of Paraguay was “virtually exterminated”, the country was teeming with single women.
     Though the Basis of Communal Organisation affirmed a determination to keep the natives at bay from the school room to the bedroom, punishing fraternisation with local women by exclusion from the community, the irresistible urgings of biology ultimately triumphed over bigotry and cant. With all those lonely Australian men surrounded by a multitude of single women, the colour bar was breached so often in New Australia that it soon faded from view. As a consequence, Whitehead asserts, the colony should be remembered not as an emblem of Aryan exclusivity but a model of healthful hybridity, a prototype for the modern nation’s multicultural vigour.
     To drive this point home, Whitehead contrasts New Australia’s failure to sustain its ideal of racial purity with the success of another immigrant community in Paraguay in retaining its cultural and ethnic separateness. Fleeing persecution in Russia, the first Mennonite settlers negotiated a charter that “guaranteed them practical self-government” and in the mid-1920s took up the offer of land in the Chaco, a thinly populated scrub country which covers most of the western part of the country from the Rio Paraguay to the foothills of the Andes. After initial hardships, their cooperative farms prospered and developed into a large and powerful collective such that by the mid-twentieth century, with 15,000 or more of their co-religionists living in the villages around their capital, Filadelfia, the Mennonites had established themselves as “the country’s most successful colonists”. Yet their ‘success’ has rested on their isolation from their neighbours and the modern world. Separated from the rest of the country by geography, defended from state intrusion by the provisions of their charter, the Mennonites sustain their identity by rejecting innovation from without and resisting evolution from within. They can preserve their culture only by quarantining it. Defying biology, denying history, enduring isolation and slow but certain degeneracy, the Mennonites’ success is at best qualified and offers a cautionary example of what New Australia might have looked like had it survived.
     In Paradise Mislaid, through her journey back to the last outpost of authentic nineteenth-century Australia, Whitehead proffers not only a record of the colony’s cultural survivals but also a parable detailing the origins and effects of the contemporary nation’s most salient successes and failings. Just as the settlers’ commitment to racial purity compromised their vision of equality and killed off their dreams of a better society, so the modern nation has had to repudiate the doctrine of White Australia in order that it might thrive and progress. The same forces that put paid to New Australia – the natural instinct to couple and the cultural promiscuity this bred – powered Australia’s social advances through the years of official multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s when Whitehead was researching and writing the book. The emblematic failure of the Paraguayan colonies thus underpins and celebrates modern Australia’s healthful diversity. Though Lane would hardly recognise it, and no doubt disapprove, this is the New Australia he helped to nurture and build.
    
Kevin Foster teaches in the School of English, Communications & Performance Studies at Monash University. He is the author of the forthcoming Lost Worlds: Latin America and the Imagining of the West (Pluto, London).

© Kevin Foster

For footnote references please see print magazine.

Overland 189 – summer 2007, pp.22–27.

Click here to order issue