‘For this to me is what New Australia means…To the landless, the homeless, for those who long to be true…’
These are the opening lines of the film, spoken by Tom as he reads from a pamphlet his father wants him to memorise. They are the words of William Lane, a utopian journalist writing mainly in Queensland in the 1880s.
Like me, Lane was born in Bristol, England. Unlike me, and unlike most people I know who were born in Bristol, he was a teetotaller. It’s almost impossible not to be weaned on cider where I come from and it’s perhaps an indication of Lane’s formidable strength of character that he never tipped the apple jug.
Lane, like many writers and agitators of the time, was a keen pamphleteer. I was instantly drawn to the style of the pamphlets and their almost inherent ability to suggest a quick fix, often by harnessing dreams and ideals.
I found a number of these pamphlets while trawling through the archives at the Mitchell Library, and none more harrowing than the Guide to Working a Farm, published some time in the mid 1800s.
This tiny book consisted of around 80 pages and could easily fit in a trouser or shirt pocket. It was an example of what was being popularly published at the time as city families took up the offer of land selections in the country.
These had been stipulated by the colonial governments to break up the squatters’ hold on vast tracts of grazing land. The plan was to get the big landowners to apportion out sections of territory into acre parcels which would be auctioned off or sold for a shilling per acre. These were then to be taken up by the new idealists in the cities, caught up in the Lawsonian dream of the bush and what it meant to be ‘Australian’, at one with the land.
At the same time local pastors and traveling preachers were extolling the virtues of going out to work the land for god’s greater purpose – to make it productive and fruitful (something they were convinced the godless natives had never thought of doing).
Men like Nat would heed the call, inspired by the dream of working god’s country in the bush with other like minded families, united in a common purpose.
Many of these men had never done a day’s labour in their lives, and that’s what these little pamphlets were there to help with.
They were split into chapters, each about a page long, containing hints on how to make soap, grow crops such as maize and opium (a high cash crop at the time), make traps, clear land, etc.
Unsurprisingly a lot of the land given up by the landowners was largely useless. The good tracts were taken up by dummy bidders and the rest was fallow, dry and infertile. And these young families – the ’selectors’ as they came to be known – would pack up their possessions and head out to the remorselessly brutal Australian bush, clutching their little pamphlets, and make a total hash of it.
I became captivated by these Australian dreamers. It tied in with the issues I had been trying to explore in the present – the constant debate over what it means to be Australian, and to make a home in such an inhospitable place.
This is never more apparent than now as so many people lose their homes through financial crisis, fire, flood. And the great Australian dream is so fundamentally about owning land and home.
That reaffirmation of some sort of dream is still spoken about daily by politicians, business leaders and entrepreneurs, whether selling policies or products: mateship, the fair go, the battlers. And looking over the speeches and rhetoric around the time of federation exactly the same terms of reference were being used. That surprised me.
The ideal of what it means to be here had already become a very powerful motivator, but the pragmatic reality of the thing was starkly different. While Lawson and Paterson – urban men on sojourns in the bush – attempted to create a romantic ideal of what it meant to be Australian, mythologising ‘an idealised Australia untainted by greed’, federation itself was a stolid, no-nonsense affair, tabled by bureaucrats. Sir Henry Parkes’ Tenterfield address was concerned almost entirely with practical reasoning – defence against an increasing German and French naval presence, interstate tariffs, order, efficiency and uniform rail gauges.
What we ended up with was a kind of uncertain marriage between pragmatism and idealism, and that’s been going on now, continually reaffirmed and reimagined, for over a hundred years.
It’s a stubborn yet elusive myth, powerful enough that even Donald Horne’s biting critical slogan ‘the lucky country’ could be misappropriated by people who steadfastly needed to believe differently – that we’re blessed, and deservedly so.
One such dreamer, just before the advent of federation, was William Lane, who set sail for Paraguay in 1893 with 239 men, women and children and a manifesto intended to underpin a fair and just society; a ‘New Australia’. Here they all are, merry bunch, on the deck of the ship as it was about to sail:
Bloody hell. Look at that lot. The cream of the crop.
It was all terribly Aryan too – Lane picked the most intelligent, the strongest, the most handsome, and off they went to Paraguay to rebuild Australia, or the idea of Australia.
The full manifesto, the document that takes on an almost sacred quality for Tom, was published in the Wagga Wagga Hummer (and why not), and it went like this:
The fabulous Lisa Stonham, Lucky Country’s production designer, pulled a few miracles out of the hat with this material. When it came to production we had to go back and source the documents I had been looking at, of which I’d of course kept detailed and meticulous notes. And I had then lost the notebook.
That happens a lot with me. I once lost an entire salmon on a Melbourne tram.
Astonishingly Lisa managed to track down the original William Lane article in the Hummer, and also the remarkable ’sketch of the future’ that I’d seen in an edition of The Pastoral Times, somewhere between 1901 and 1902. It was a wonderful drawing predicting the future of transport, and had a group of Victorian daytrippers in a propeller balloon, and a dapper gent with a magnificent moustache who had a pair of wings strapped to his back.
The chances of finding the actual images again were next to none, but at the production office in Adelaide Lisa had collected a huge selection of images and there it was:
These images and documents are what formed the basis for the core ideas of the story, and the characters were beginning to take shape and emerge from this core.
As for William Lane’s New Australia, by 1905 it had largely collapsed. Not because of the difficulties of living there, but by internal bureaucratic bickering. It would appear that the tyranny of the administrator, Australia’s other great bugbear, was alive and well even then.
The colony separated in 1894 and another ‘New Australia’ was formed at Cosme, 72 kilometres south. The descendants are still there.
