New Australia

New Australia was a utopian socialist settlement in Paraguay founded by the Australian New Australian Movement. The colony was officially founded on 28 September 1893 as Colonia Nueva Australia and comprised 238 adults and children.

The New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association, known in short as the New Australia Movement, was founded by William Lane in 1892. Lane was a prominent figure in the Australian labour movement and had founded Australia's first labour newspaper – the Queensland Worker in 1890. A split in the Australian labour movement between those who went on to form the Australian Labor Party spurred Lane's intent to found a socialist utopia outside Australia. Lane's ideal was to build a society based on:

His concept of 'common-hold' was that each member of a society should be able to withdraw their proportion of the society's wealth if they chose to leave.

Lane's was not the only influence urging Australians at the time towards a socialist community; utopian Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was also popular with socialists and led many urban followers of Lane to expect that they would live in luxury in a socialist commune like that of Bellamy's fiction.

Paraguay was chosen as the site of the settlement. Lane recruited many, and the first ship left Sydney in July 1893 for Paraguay, where the government was keen to get white settlers and had offered the group a large area of good land. While it is generally agreed that there were some able settlers, there seems to be some disagreement about the character of the New Australia settlers as a whole. It has been described as a Cave of Adullam to misfits, failures, and malcontents of the left wing of Australian democracy. Notable Australian individuals who joined the colony included Mary Gilmore, Rose Summerfield, Gilbert Stephen Casey and George Birks and his family. But according to Mr. M.de C.Findlay, the Second Secretary of the Legation at Buenos Aires, who was sent to the colony by the British Consul at Asunction, they were, "a fine class of men." Men were required to pay a minimum of £60 (but including all their assets) to join the colony, a sum large enough in 1893 Australia to usually require the selling of a home, so complete failures would have been necessarily excluded.

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