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5 unusual facts about William Lane


1917 in Australia

26 August – William Lane (born 1861), journalist and labour movement pioneer

Mary Gilmore

She followed William Lane and other socialist idealists to Paraguay in 1896, where they had established a communal settlement called New Australia two years earlier.

Michael Geare

That same year he became the captain of the Little John, one of five-ship flotilla under William Lane and financed by Sir Frances Drake among others.

William Lane

He died on 26 August 1917 in Auckland, New Zealand, having been editor of the Herald from 1913 to 1917, much admired, having lost one son Charles at a cricket match in Cosme in Paraguay, and another Donald on the first day of the ANZAC landings (25 April 1915) on the beaches of Gallipoli.

Gavin Souter's account of Lane and New Australia in his A Peculiar People


Freedom on the Wallaby

"Freedom on the Wallaby", Henry Lawson's well known poem, was written as a comment on the 1891 Australian shearers' strike and published by William Lane in the Worker in Brisbane, 16 May 1891.

Nyah

The communities were established in imitation of the New Australia settlement of William Lane in Paraguay.


see also

Nueva Londres

In 1893 two thousand men and women led by William Lane left Australia for Paraguay where they established a utopian socialist colony called "New Australia".