William Lane (utopian)

William Lane

William Lane (born September 6, 1861 in Bristol , Great Britain , † August 26, 1917 in Auckland , New Zealand ) was a trade unionist and social utopian , author and journalist .

Private life

William Lane was the son of James Lane, an Irish Protestant and his wife Carolin, née Hall. Since his father was an alcoholic , he developed into a rigid anti-alcoholic. He went to Bristol Grammar School and to Canada at the age of 16 , where he worked as a printer and became a reporter in Detroit at the age of 24 . Lane married Anne Mary Macquire, 19 years old, on July 22, 1883, who was born in England. They had a son and five daughters. In 1885 William Lane and his wife returned to Great Britain with their first son, only to emigrate to Australia shortly afterwards with his younger brother John.

Social engagement

In Australia, William Lane campaigned for the Aborigines in Brisbane in Queensland , where he wrote under the pseudonyms John Miller , The Sketcher and Bystander . He supported the development of the Queensland trade unions . His first book White or Yellow? A Story of the Race-War of AD 1908 he published in a newspaper series. He was instrumental in establishing the Australian Labor Federation in 1889 and became the first journalist for Worker magazine , which published the Australian Labor Federation and other labor organizations.

Lane first printed the song Freedom on the Wallaby on May 16, 1891 , a popular song in Australia that Henry Lawson wrote for the Queensland sheep-shearers strike of 1891.

Lane covered the trial of the union leaders that followed the sheep shearers' strike in 1891 , which led to their conviction for high treason. The proceeds of his book The Working Man's Paradise , published in Brisbane in 1892 under the pseudonym John Miller , went to the families of those arrested. After the defeats of the trade union movement in the so-called phase of the Great Strikes , the maritime strike (1890), the sheep shearers strike (1891), the broken hill strike (1892) and the sheep shearers strike (1894) in Australia, the union movement turned into a political one Labor movement from which u. a. the Australian Labor Party (1891) was born.

Utopian commitment

Map of Paraguay by John Lane, William's brother

Lane became a socialist utopian through the strike experiences of 1890 and 1891 , which was already indicated in his book The Working Man's Paradise and had his own ideas about his political future. In 1889, Lane and Topolobampo in Mexico had contacts connected with Icaria, a utopian North American community founded by Robert Owen . Owen was an early socialist and a founder of the cooperative system . Lane intended to go to South America to set up a social utopian settlement on 187,000 hectares in Paraguay and found a total of 600 interested parties. Lane left Australia on July 16, 1983 from Sydney to New Australia , which is 176 km southeast of Asunción and was founded on September 28, 1893 by 238 adults with their children. Lane ruled there autocratically , tolerated no contradiction and practiced living together according to simple communal rules. There were conflicts among the settlers over the strict alcohol ban, with the people of the area and especially with the leadership of Lane. According to Lane's early socialist conception, everyone should work in the collective production of goods, all land and buildings, all tools and machines and all cattle should belong to everyone collectively.

After the second group of colonists had arrived, Lane separated on July 7, 1894 with 63 of his followers in a new colony called Cosme , 76 km south of New Australia . He was then in England from 1894 to 1896. Among these colonists was the writer Mary Gilmore (1865–1962), who published the monthly magazine Cosme Montly there.

This project also failed because the living conditions were low, did not develop and the colony could not sustain itself. The scandal came when settlers slaughtered a pig and distributed it among friends, who were then all excluded from the community. Most of the settlers left the colonies because of the financial problems that arose around 1900, and the Paraguayan government subsequently transferred the colonies to private companies, and some of Lane's content has remained there to this day.

Conservative engagement

Lane fell ill and was disaffected, resigned in June 1899, left Cosme on August 1 and emigrated to New Zealand . There he worked as chief journalist in the conservative newspaper New Zealand Herald and was its publisher from 1913. In New Zealand he developed into an arch-conservative and wrote under the pseudonym of the Maori Tohunga (German: Prophet). In his newspaper he criticized lawless industries and the economy, advocated the militarization of society and used nationalist rhetoric.

Review

The Worker's regional magazine in Brisbane saw his mistake with Paraguay and said his involvement in the Australian labor movement will always be remembered; the Australian worker found him guilty of selfishness and arrogance and declared: “Billy Lane is dead - dear old Billy Lane. And he died in the camp of the enemy! "(German:" Billy Land is dead - good old Billy Lane. And he died in the enemy's camp! ").

Lane appears as a character in two plays, in Vance Palmer's play Hail Tomorrow! (1947) and in the musical drama The Ballad of Billy Lane (1982) directed by George Hutchinson . The Australian folk punk band The Currency sings the colony of New Australia in their song Paraguay . Gavin Geoffrey Souter, a historian and journalist, wrote the 1968 book A Peculiar People , an account of the New Australia colony .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} adbonline.anu.edu.au : Lane, William (1861–1917) (English), accessed March 31, 2011
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} nationaltreasures.nla.gov.au : Cosme and New Australia colonies (English), accessed on March 31, 2011
3. ^ Nat Williams, Margaret Dent: National treasures from Australia's great libraries. National Library of Australia, Canberra 2005, ISBN 0-642-27620-X . Online on Google Books