Utopia’s Children
(Originally published in The West Australian Newspaper Weekend Extra)
As Ruta 2 winds out of the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion, its 330 km length cuts through grassy fields lined with mango and jacaranda trees. Islands of deep green, vine-and-fern jungle known as monte rise to the left and right of the highway—the lush landscape typical of Paraguay’s eastern heartland.
White zebu cows dot paddocks, pale as ghosts. Eucalyptus groves rise from the red earth. Fuller and greener than their Australian forebears, it’s disorienting to see them alongside the palms and jungle ferns, so far from native soil.
Disorienting, too, is the sound of an Australian bush ballad blaring from the tape-deck of the creaky, 80s-model white Mercedes in which I’m speeding through the Paraguayan campo.
I came to this small, green, landlocked country in the heart of South America to research one of the most bizarre and little known episodes of my nation’s history. Over a hundred years ago, a group of disgruntled Australian socialists decided to start a Utopian colony in the middle of the Paraguayan countryside, called “New Australia”. Australia at that time was barely a colony itself. But the idea took hold, and more than 800 went, some of them leading intellectuals of the time, including one of Australia’s most famous poets, Mary Gilmore, whose face adorns the ten-dollar note.
The colony was a complete disaster. Founded on principles of mateship and temperance, the settlers had their first drunken brawl before they even got off the boat from Australia. The majority were Outback farmers, shearers and stockmen who spoke no Spanish and had no idea how to farm the Paraguayan jungle they found themselves in. Within a few years most had left, to Patagonia or back to Australia, but some stayed, and their descendents remain in Paraguay to this day.
One of them is the driver of this Mercedes, Rodrigo (Rod) Wood. His grandfather William was an Australian sheep shearer who arrived in Paraguay in the 1890s. Rod could pass for a Queensland farmer, with his wide sloping shoulders, jutting belly and penchant for cold beer. I came here to meet him, and to find out what happened to the dream his ancestors had so passionately ignited.
“This’ll make you homesick,” he says, turning up the volume as the tape switches to the theme song from “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo”. His wife Carmen hands him a cow-horn gourd of cold yerba mate, the ubiquitous Paraguayan iced-tea, which he slurps through a silver bombilla. He guns the accelerator and the car lurches forward as we overtake Paraguayan families piled into the back of open pickups and heaving semi-trailers, rattling with their likely cargoes of soy, cotton and smuggled goods.
We’re on our way to Cosme, the site of one of the original Australian settlements, four hours’ drive south-east of Asuncion.
* * *
“They had the idea it was going to be Paradise,” says Florence Wood de White, pouring tea from a pot covered with her grandmother’s tea-cosey, in the dining room of her cat-filled apartment in downtown Asuncion. Her shelves are crammed with Australian memorabilia. Born in Cosme, the flame-haired, former airhostess grew up on the colony. I nod and bite into a crust-less cheese sandwich, like my mother used to make. “But when they came it wasn’t Paradise. It was more like hell on earth probably!”
On a stormy day in July 1893, amid much fanfare and cries of “Freedom!” and “Paraguay!”, the first boatload of Australian colonists—220 men, women and children—sailed out of Sydney Harbour on former timber-lugger, The Royal Tar.
Inspired by left-wing labour leader and journalist William Lane—a charismatic Englishman with a limp and a maniacal zeal—they set off on a two-month sea voyage to Paraguay. Disillusioned with Australia, Lane was convinced a socialist Utopia would never work there. According to him, it would be akin to “winning a love kiss from a woman who isn’t in love.”
He believed instead that, from the jungles of Paraguay, “a disciplined army of many thousands” would emerge, to lead a worldwide socialist revolution, founded on hard work, mateship and equality for all. His original plan was to build the colony in Patagonia, Argentina. But then the Paraguayan government, trying to rebuild after a catastrophic war with Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay wiped out half its male population, made the Australians an offer too good to refuse: free land—93,000 hectares of farming land in a fork between two branches of the Tebicuary River. This would be New Australia.
* * *
“Well the colony here went bung, you know what that means?”
Basil Murray, a towering orangutan of a man with amber eyes, sagging chest and white wisps of hair brushed back from his balding head, sits shirtless inside his wood-and-tin shack, surrounded by squawking chickens, six kilometres down a bumpy track from the site of the original New Australia. At 79, he’s never been to Australia, but he’s the last descendent within range of the original colony who speaks English—with an Australian accent. “Bung” is old-fashioned Australian slang for “kaput”. It’s the kind of word my grandfather would have used.
Basil’s grandfather, Ted, was an Australian shearer. “Sometimes Grandpa talked about Australia,” he says. “Mostly when we used to go out to the sheep. “Puts me in mind of my country,” he used to say.” Chewing his grandfather’s pipe, speaking about stockwhips and sheep runs, Basil is like a dinosaur in resin, catapulted out of last-century Australia into the middle of the Paraguayan campo.
Today the former colony is a neat, peaceful Paraguayan country town. Ironically, its name has been changed to Nueva Londres (apparently after a request to the Australian government to call it New Canberra went unheeded). Cows and pigs casually roam its gravel, tree-lined streets. It’s 800 citizens boast the longest life expectancy in the country.
But a hundred years ago, it was the site of bitter feuding, power struggles, rumouring, hardship and hunger. As the colony leader William Lane, a fervent Christian, forbade the colonists to drink alcohol or fraternise with the locals. Since most of the settlers were young men, stuck in the middle of the jungle, surrounded by an abundance of attractive Paraguayan women (themselves suffering a post-war man shortage), this turned out to be disastrous. By the end of the first year, 81 people had already walked off the colony, and Lane, disillusioned once again, formed a breakaway colony at Cosme, 70km south of New Australia.
* * *
Rod Wood swerves the Mercedes down a wide gravel road dotted with cowpats, geese and guinea fowl, and pulls up alongside a weatherboard, Queensland-style bungalow. We’ve come to the home of Rod’s cousin Francisco, known as “Frisky”, built on the remains of their grandparents’ original homestead in Cosme. There’s still the old kitchen, a guesthouse and a fireplace where their grandmother Lilian used to bake scones.
Children and chicks run between our feet. Pigs roll in the mud. A pack of dogs chase a mare and her foal in a nearby paddock. Butterflies as big as hands circle. Frisky’s 12-year-old son Jorge arrives carrying a watermelon on his shoulder. He dons an Akubra—an Australian cowboy hat—plucks a parrot from a tree with a pole, and cuts wood for the stove with a chainsaw. “He can drive a tractor too,” Rod says.
Many of the Australian descendants still live here, little remains of the dream that brought them here. Today, Cosme is a poor, Paraguayan village, like any other. There are no phone lines. Electricity and running water only arrived a few years ago. Of the 300 inhabitants, only ten percent have regular work. Many of them have names like Wood, McCleod and Titilah, blonde hair and freckled faces. Most survive on subsistence farming of eggs, oranges, corn and mandioca, a mealy root vegetable served in place of bread. Utopia this is not.
We eat a lunch of mandioca and sopa paraguaya—a baked cornmeal and cheese dish that’s nothing like a soup—and walk down to the old cemetery. Under the shade of a lichen-spotted lapacho tree, surrounded by the pastel-painted crypts of the local dead, are the graves of Rod’s ancestors covered in climbing roses. The old tombstone has grown over but the family erected a new one in black marble. The original wooden cross still stands, blanched white by the scorching Paraguayan sun.
* * *
Paraguay has always attracted dreamers. Despots, dictators, smugglers and starry-eyed visionaries have flourished in here. The place is littered with Utopian colonies—from the Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, to Neitzsche’s sister’s short-lived, Anti-Semitic, Aryan colony (whose descendents are by accounts now languishing and inbred), to the Mennonite settlements in the vast Paraguayan Chaco, which prosper to this day. Today, rumour has it the Moonies are buying up haciendas.
What draws them to this small, green, landlocked country, with a reputation as the most corrupt state in the Americas? Is it because no one else wants to go there? Without the obvious natural attractions of other South American countries—no Iguazu Falls, no Patagonian glaciers, no Peruvian Andes, no Bolivian salt lakes, no Copacabana or Ipanema (no beaches at all, in fact)— tourists seldom visit. It’s a place people go through, not to. Paraguay is the white-trash cousin of the South American clan, invited to family weddings but sat in the corner and snickered at.
And yet, Paraguay can have a powerful, insidious and overwhelming effect. One minute it’s hot and sunny, then the sky splits open and pelts water like rotten fruit from a fickle crowd. The roads become rivers—there are huge, gaping, storm drains you practically need a canoe to cross. Moments later, a burning sun appears and dries everything instantly, like speeded up camera footage. The midday heat sucks you into a kind of inertia. Along the streets of Asuncion, drivers take siestas in parked cars, passenger doors hanging open, keys in the ignition, like they got in and forgot to keep going. You don’t stay because you love it. You stay because the effort to leave seems too hard. Something to be put off till later, only by then you’ve forgotten that later ever existed. I planned to spend a week in Paraguay, and ended up staying a month.
Paraguay has a way of taking things over. In the tropics, everything new quickly seems old. Things rot and deteriorate and become overgrown, or absorbed. When the Spanish came they planted orange trees, which took root and grew wild, dropping fruit along the streets of Asuncion. A similar thing happened to the Australians.
Despite efforts to hold onto their roots, clutching at markers of their Australian-ness like straws—strong cups of tea and crust-less sandwiches, bush ballads and stuffed toy koala bears on the mantle—most of the descendents I met had no idea they were even Australian, despite their pale skin, green eyes and surnames like Smith and Kelly. Maybe, in a place like Paraguay, memories are short. Nothing sticks. Everything gets washed into the great swirling gutters, or baked into the clay by the burning sun.
* * *
But identity’s a funny thing. It taps a certain desire, to know who we are, where we come from, to feel a sense of belonging to something, somewhere. In my Asuncion hotel room, on the balcony looking out at the pelting rain, thinking about the Australian colonists who arrived here, so far from home, I’m suddenly filled with a feeling of abstract longing, curling itself around me like a cat wanting to be stroked.
Before I went to Paraguay I contacted the Australian embassy in Buenos Aires. Yes, they knew about the Australian descendents there. A few of them had started asking questions about their Australian visa status (they don’t have any). Apparently, there’s been a renewed interest in their ancestry. An Australian TV crew had been out here to interview them; a local Irish priest in Neuva Londres is planning to write a book.
On Australia Day last year, in a country most Australians probably couldn’t locate on a map, 300 descendents went on a boat cruise around the red-brown waters of the Bay of Asuncion. They drank cider and made speeches. Ladies danced with baskets of oranges on their heads, a traditional Paraguayan dance. For the finale they replaced the oranges with a champagne bottle with an Australian flag flying from its top. They sang “Waltzing Matilda.”