LANE, WILLIAM (1861-1917) was born in Bristol. His father was a native of county Cork, Ireland, who became a Protestant after their removal to Dublin. For some years he had a prosperous business as a nurseryman and gardener, employing as many as 20 hands. He was a popular speaker, a member of the poor law guardians and chairman of the Conservative workingman's club, but dissipated his prospects in public interests and insobriety. His wife, who came of a West-country yeoman family, experienced great difficulty in bringing up the family and paying for their education. William was small in build and slightly lame from birth. He attended the Bristol Grammar School, where he studied classics and passed the Oxford local examination before he was 14.

As a boy Lane was led to attend political meetings and became a member of an Orange clique, disturbing hostile gatherings, but he early became his mother's confidant, noted the unfavourable tendency of his father's affairs, and determined to shift for himself. His first post was as office boy in an art shop, followed by a small clerkship in a glue factory. He made his first essay in journalism thus early, writing in the Bristol Times and Mirror a defence of Lady Butler's paintings. His mother died in 1875. Two years later William sailed for America and maintained himself for several years at various occupations in the United States and Canada. At the age of 20 he was promoted reporter for a Canadian paper, and shortly afterwards he married Annie Mary Macquire, a member of the staff (granddaughter of a Scots professor). Meanwhile Lane's brother John, who had won a scholarship at Colston's hospital, and had studied in London the business of a nurseryman, had decided to emigrate with his family to Australia. William's experience in America had completed the education of a radical and, thoroughly convinced of the hopeless future in England for people of his class, he agreed to go with John.

The two families sailed in the Quetta. Soon after reaching Brisbane Lane got a start in journalism by reporting a dance for the Figaro. His breezy and sympathetic accounts of the temperance lectures of R. T. Booth commended him to the Courier, and before long he had a lucrative connection with these papers, the Leader and other Australian journals. As labour writer for the Evening Observer he spread his doctrines of communism and socialism to such effect that before long he was in the inner councils of the labour movement. He preached a vigorous nationalism for Australia, believing that living conditions could only be improved by confining their attention to Australian affairs. In 1885, mainly through his influence, the Brisbane trades and labour council was established, which soon embraced seven unions and 6,000 members, and in the following year the Maritime League was founded incorporating all branches of sea labour in the five colonies of Australia and New Zealand. At this stage Lane was rabidly anti-British and republican, but he resisted the inclusion of protection in the platform of the labour movement, until events converted him on this point.

In 1887, with Alfred Walker, a compositor, he founded the Boomerang, which openly defended the association of labour and liberalism, advocated Australian nationalism, and gradually worked out Lane's theories of universal co-operation and land nationalisation. He turned from Fabianism to the cult of Henry George, firmly believing that liberty was dependent on the right to earn a livelihood from the soil. He wished Australia to be left alone, as an independent republic free of British imperialism. This gradually brought him round to protection as a measure of nationalism. He was also passionately opposed to the admission of Chinese to Australia and in 1889 published a serial story descriptive of a civil war in 1908 between the Australians and Chinese. A libel action brought successfully against the Boomerang in 1888 by a political candidate disclosed the great influence Lane now had in Queensland politics. His emotional prose was typical of the labour movement of the day. He still believed in the trades union movement as the means of gaining labour ends, and insisted that labour leaders must be sober men, abstainers for preference. His 9,000 subscribers were largely members of the shearers' union. In 1888 a trades unionist (T. Glassey) was elected to Parliament although the Boomerang was the only paper which supported him. The trades and labour council developed in 1889 into the Australian Labour Federation.

In 1889 Lane disposed of the Boomerang to Gresley Lukin (q.v.), in order to accept the editorship of a new paper, the Worker, founded by the unions with a commencing circulation of 13,000. This involved a personal sacrifice for Lane, who gave up a connection worth £600 a year for a salary of £3 a week. In the new monthly, signing himself 'John Miller,' he worked frantically for his vision of the co-operative state, and moved perceptibly towards the political sphere for labour aims. The Workers' Political Organisation Conference in 1891 claimed 15,000 adherents, and Lane succeeded in bringing women into the movement. At this time he considered compulsory arbitration merely a device of the capitalists to make wage-slavery permanent; he advocated voluntary agreements with the employers. During the series of strikes inaugurated by that of the shearers in 1889 Lane was sent to South Australia as a delegate of the general executive of the Australian Labour Federation to compose the differences of the five great pastoral unions. Throughout these strikes he directed operations, organised relief and published his great propaganda novel The Workingman's Paradise (1892). It was in these days that he overcame his aversion to public speaking, and appeared on the soapbox so effectively that when the strikes failed the Daily Telegraph (Brisbane) demanded his arrest. His conviction of the inevitability of socialism-the workers owning and operating the means of production-was adopted by the A.L.F. in a manifesto which demanded the nationalisation (at a fair valuation) of all sources of wealth and means of producing and exchanging wealth; pensions for children, aged and invalid persons, and the eight-hour day.

Lane had a part also in the formulation of the People's Parliamentary Platform adopted by the Labour Federation. Throughout these years he urged the passing of village settlement bills. He continued to insist on the sobriety of labour leaders and was able to point to the outstanding success of the Queensland labour movement, which was directed by total abstainers.

Labour had considerable success at the elections, but Lane was soon disappointed with their political conduct. In his disappointment he talked of the establishment of a collectivist colony which should be a demonstration of his social views. In May 1890 application was made for suitable land at Wilcannia. Copeland, the Minister for Lands in New South Wales, was disposed to make provision for a co-operative colony, but he was over-ruled on a technical point. Meanwhile inquiries made by Alfred Walker in South America commenced to yield hopeful replies. The plan was looked upon favourably by Australian unionists before the strike of 1891, and later in the year it was developed in a pamphlet. Lane, who regarded socialism as practical Christianity, lost confidence in the political machine. He believed that in 'New Australia' they could achieve socialism at once and afford an object lesson to Australian reformers. A committee was set up with him as chairman, and an invitation was extended to thrifty and sober men and women, bushmen for preference, to realise their assets and join the movement. In a very short time £30,000 was paid in and a picked band of pioneers, including John Lane and his wife, and James Murdoch (of the Brisbane Grammar School, afterwards a professor in Japan) were ready to sail.

Lane was unrestrained in his devotion to the cause of communism and his energy in organising the colony. Alfred Walker cabled in Jan 1892 that he had been offered a grant of 40 leagues of land in Paraguay, 130 miles from Asuncion; immunity from customs taxation for 40 years; and free rail transport, on condition that 800 families were settled within four years. The New Australia Settlement Association Company was registered at Lane's house in Brisbane (removing later to Wagga, and eventually to Sydney). The articles of association provided for communal and co-operative ownership and operation of all the means of production and exchange; community sanitation and education; community maintenance of children (under the guardianship of their parents); the division of the surplus production amongst the settlers without regard to age, sex or physical or mental capacity; complete sex equality and individual and religious freedom. The sole executive authority was vested in a director elected by a two-thirds vote in a general ballot; with an advisory board of superintendents similarly elected. Lane resigned the editorship of the Worker to carry on the organisation, and by May 1893, despite obstruction by governments and some selfish dilatoriness on the part of the workers, the first batch of pioneers was ready for embarkation. The barque Royal Tar, 598 tons, which had been in the South American trade, was purchased for £1,200, and she eventually sailed (Jul 1893) with more than 200 emigrants, the pick of Australian workers. Lane had been elected director. On 13 Sep the Royal Tar arrived at Monte Video and 220 passengers and 460 tons of their belongings were transferred to the river steamer for their destination 1,200 miles distant.

In Dec Lane registered the Association's title to 225,000 acres of land, and received from the government of Paraguay the powers of a magistrate and governor of a separate district, so that the colonists should be free from interference by local administrators. The settlers started erecting their homes and clearing the land for cultivation, and the various organisations of government, which had been discussed on the voyage, were put into operation. The debates on the voyage had unfortunately created a partisanship which became accentuated in the colony. Complaint was made that Lane was too puritanical in his judgment of human frailties. In Dec 1893 three members were expelled by Lane for misconduct, and a few weeks later 85 seceded in a body.

Meanwhile the Royal Tar made a second voyage with 200 settlers, under Gilbert Casey. Casey soon became leader of the opposition to the policy adopted by Lane, and eventually returned to Australia to take over the assets of the Association there.

In May 1894, less than a year after leaving Australia, Lane himself, feeling that individualism was becoming too aggressive, seceded with 60 followers to found an independent communistic settlement. His own opinions were becoming strongly Christian and he took a more religious view of the Labour movement, and represented Communism as the law of God. The seceders purchased 15,000 acres of land 11 miles from the small town of Caazapa, where they established their new settlement of Cosme in Jul 1894. Though they suffered great privations at first, the settlers lived in unruffled amity and made a marked success of their settlement. Within a few years they had established such essential industries as dairying, tanning, sawmilling and brickmaking. In 1896 the government recognised their success by enlarging the boundaries and reimbursing the payments made for the land. In 1897 the population had increased to 131.

Lane had a severe illness in 1895, and in the following year paid a visit to England to recruit new settlers, preferably skilled mechanics. He now began to fear that even the colonists of Cosme were not sufficiently religious in their outlook and tended to run the colony on purely material lines. Early in 1899 his wife was seriously ill. He had a growing conviction that he was not taking sufficient thought for the future of his family, and eventually he decided to withdraw from Cosme and leave Paraguay for good, to continue his work through the press and to earn money to repay liabilities he had incurred on behalf of the settlement.

Accordingly he took his departure (on 2 Aug 1899) for England on his way to New Zealand. He had accepted employment on the New Zealand Herald when he received an invitation from the Australian Workers' Union to be the first full-time editor of the Worker (Sydney). His acceptance of this post was announced on 20 Jan 1900. It was a short-lived engagement. Disillusioned by what he had gone through, and impatient of the results of labour's political activities, he soon found himself out of tune with current philosophies. His intense nationalism, which formerly had expressed itself in an anti-British direction, now made him a fervent supporter of British policy in South Africa. This caused hostility to his management of the Worker, and in May 1900 he retired, came to Auckland, and joined the staff of the conservative New Zealand Herald as leader-writer. His 'Tohunga' articles, which began on 9 Jun 1900, were characterised by an old-fashioned conservatism, with a strong tinge of humanity and burning loyalty to the British connection. That he should have been the head and front of the National Defence League, which was formed in 1906 to promote universal military training in New Zealand, was no departure from his earlier nationalism, which exulted in the belief that the military training of her citizens made Australia at last free from any fear of invasion.

Lane became editor of the Herald in 1913 and held that post until his death on 26 Aug 1917.

Australian Rev. of Reviews, iii, p. 276; Fairfax, A Century of Journalism, p. 338; W. Lloyd Ross, William Lane and the Australian Labour Movement; T. A. Coghlan, Labour and Industry in Australia; A. St Ledger, Australian Socialism; Stewart Graham, Where Socialism Failed; W. K. Hancock, Australia; May Gilmore, Old Days and Old Ways and More Recollections; Otago Daily Times, 15 Sep 1916; N.Z. Herald, 26 Aug, 1 Sep 1917, et pass.

Reference: Volume 1, page 258

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