Start Date
3-10-1999 4:30 PM
End Date
3-10-1999 5:00 PM
Description
In July 1893 Australia's first great socialist evangelist William Lane, accompanied by a band ofloyal disciples, departed Australia to found a socialist utopia in Paraguay. The story ofN ew Australia - the name given to the communal colony that the settlers established in Paraguay - has long exercised a fascination over Australian historians. I The reason for that enduring resonance is, perhaps, at least in part, because the New Australia saga, both in its genesis and outcome, powerfully evokes the unfulfilled dream of Australian socialism. If it is the figure of Lane who personifies that lack of fulfillment in the late 1890s, then it is Jim Cairns who best does so at the end of this century. While these two socialist visionaries inhabited vastly different worlds, their final paths are in some regards depressingly similar. More than eighty years after Lane embarked for Paraguay, Cairns, too, set out to build an alternative community in the hope of providing an inspirational model for the rest of society. The social experiment conceived by Cairns was on a far less grand scale than Lane's, and the site for the alternative community was not half way across the globe but southern New South Wales. Yet, like Lane, Cairns' resort to utopianism came within the immediate context of profound political disappointment. Also like Lane, there had been pre-existing signposts to a developing millennial style utopianism in Cairns' thinking.2 Similarly, Cairns' retreat to utopianism was ultimately rooted in a highly idealised view of human potential, as well as a grandiose self-conception of his own destiny as an agent of the liberation of that potential. Inevitably, though, the most compelling parallel is that, just as with New Australia, the community initiated by Cairns was to be beset by conflict and controversy. This paper explores this previously neglected chapter in Cairns' life.
'Millennial Dreaming'
In July 1893 Australia's first great socialist evangelist William Lane, accompanied by a band ofloyal disciples, departed Australia to found a socialist utopia in Paraguay. The story ofN ew Australia - the name given to the communal colony that the settlers established in Paraguay - has long exercised a fascination over Australian historians. I The reason for that enduring resonance is, perhaps, at least in part, because the New Australia saga, both in its genesis and outcome, powerfully evokes the unfulfilled dream of Australian socialism. If it is the figure of Lane who personifies that lack of fulfillment in the late 1890s, then it is Jim Cairns who best does so at the end of this century. While these two socialist visionaries inhabited vastly different worlds, their final paths are in some regards depressingly similar. More than eighty years after Lane embarked for Paraguay, Cairns, too, set out to build an alternative community in the hope of providing an inspirational model for the rest of society. The social experiment conceived by Cairns was on a far less grand scale than Lane's, and the site for the alternative community was not half way across the globe but southern New South Wales. Yet, like Lane, Cairns' resort to utopianism came within the immediate context of profound political disappointment. Also like Lane, there had been pre-existing signposts to a developing millennial style utopianism in Cairns' thinking.2 Similarly, Cairns' retreat to utopianism was ultimately rooted in a highly idealised view of human potential, as well as a grandiose self-conception of his own destiny as an agent of the liberation of that potential. Inevitably, though, the most compelling parallel is that, just as with New Australia, the community initiated by Cairns was to be beset by conflict and controversy. This paper explores this previously neglected chapter in Cairns' life.