From Utopia to Dystopia

Utopias, and their progenitors, have a rather poor record. Sir Thomas More, who invented the word by cobbling a double negative from Greek words meaning “not” and “no place”, for his 1516 fantasy of an ideal society, ended badly. Henry VIII punished him severely for his canonical stubbornness, but who is to say he may not also have looked askance at More’s socialist leanings?

Three hundred years later, the idea of the idealistic society was revived, against the backdrop of Britain’s dark satanic mills. In the last half of the nineteenth century, inspired by Victorian inventions, authors popularised alternative imaginary societies. J.S. Buckingham produced a plan for a model town, “Victoria”; books by R.E. Dudgeon (Colymbia), E.A. Abbott (Flatland), Walter Besant (Inner House) and Samuel Butler (Erewhon) extolled a brave new world. More practically, Scottish mill owner, philanthropist and socialist Robert Owen reformed industrial conditions at New Lanark and developed the co-operative movement.

Owen spent a good deal of his fortune buying Harmony, a failed utopian project in Indiana, renaming it New Harmony, to fail again. He had hoped a model society would prove his belief that a trinity of evils—traditional religion, conventional marriage and private property—was responsible for all the world’s misery and vice. Owen’s son William, left to liquidate the mess two years later, summed up the flaw in such schemes—their people: “A heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.”

With such unbounded faith in the beauty of human nature abroad in the mother country, it was inevitable that the colonies would follow. But nowhere was it more unlikely than on the stony ground of the Queensland outback. Unlikely indeed, given that the legislative impetus came from Sir Thomas McIlwraith, three times premier, whom his rival Sir Samuel Griffith described as “an able bully with a face like a dugong and a temper like a buffalo”.

McIlwraith had angered the politically powerful squatter community with his belief that the colony’s vacant lands were a sacred trust from the imperial government to be used to accommodate the surplus population of Britain. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Queensland echoed to what the historian Ross Johnston aptly termed “the call of the land”. Successive governments turned their backs on the industrialisation and manufacturing development in the southern states. Instead, they promoted liberal-agrarian policies with their “trinity of hope”—closer settlement, immigration and developmental railways. In 1862 the Registrar General reported:

Manufactories can hardly be said to have any existence in Queensland, nor does it seem in the least probable that the attention of its inhabitants will be turned to them for many years to come; the production of raw materials and the occupation of its vast unreclaimed territory will, for a long time, be more than sufficient to employ all their capital and energy.

These policies coincided with two other forces—the growth of the labour movement and remarkable public enthusiasm for the ideas of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the natural selection of species through his seminal insect collections in the Malay Archipelago. After his recognition alongside Darwin for his contribution to evolution theory, Wallace turned to spiritualism, socialism and land reform. He had already been heavily influenced by Robert Owen’s social theories; now he threw his weight behind John Stuart Mill on the committee of Britain’s Land Tenure Reform Association. His book Land Nationalisation, Its Necessity and Aims in 1882, a polemic on the plight of the Irish landless poor, re-awakened hopes for communal land settlement schemes.

As he was one of the leading scientists of the era, newspapers all over Australia followed Wallace’s outpourings with enthusiasm, especially as he made good copy. He did not hold back on his views on topics ranging from the thickness of the earth’s crust (eighteen miles, he said, wrongly asserting that it covered the molten core, which he forecast as a future source of heat and energy), phrenology, vaccination, working on the sabbath, and the importance of abandoning the gold standard in favour of paper currency.

In October 1883, the Charters Towers Northern Miner published a long extract from Land Nationalisation, attacking the current state of land tenure:

Our land system is a modified Feudalism, in which the Landlords have thrown their Burdens on the People whose Rights in the Land they have Absorbed … It only needs to state these facts to show that the system which permits so vast and injurious a despotism in the midst of free institutions is radically wrong and cannot be much longer upheld.

Wallace was also vice-president of the British Freeland Association, an international movement promoted by Dr Theodor Hertzka of Vienna to launch co-operative colonies based on free use of communal land, and what was termed “free nobility of labour”. The first, a settlement at Mount Kenia in East Africa in 1893, failed within a year.

German migrants in Victoria had tried the same thing much earlier. Herrnhut Commune, the first in Australia’s history, had been established near Hamilton in 1853 by Johann Krummnow and twelve defenders of the apostolic doctrine. It prospered under his authoritarian control but petered out after thirty-four years; its land and remaining buildings were sold in 1889.

The Land Acts in Victoria and New South Wales had broken the power of the squatters, but Queensland governments struggled to legislate their encouragement for agricultural settlement without upsetting its pastoralists. In 1866 the introduction of the freeholding lease for agriculture gave birth to the grazing farm, but paradoxically enabled pastoralists to convert the best land on their runs to freehold.

The Crown Lands Alienation Act of 1868 authorised the resumption of land within pastoral leases for agricultural settlement, but failed to reduce the political power of the pastoral fraternity. The Act split large pastoral holdings in two, one half to be subdivided into selections of forty to 160 acres, theoretically making it possible for men with little capital to procure land at prices from 2/6 an acre to 3/9 an acre payable over five years. As the note in the Queensland Archives records, pastoralists were able to regain much of the land through subterfuges; the only permanent result was the addition of the words selector and selection to the Australian vocabulary.

Into the ferment of political and industrial turbulence of the 1880s, the radical ideas of the American social reformer and economic theorist Henry George were publicised by articles in the Bulletin. They were immediately persuasive among Queensland politicians, including Colonial Secretary Samuel Griffith and Lands Minister Charles Dutton. George advocated a single tax based on unimproved land values. In his books Our Land and Land Policy and Progress and Poverty, he argued that the abolition of all other taxes would combat monopoly capital, alleviate poverty and promote the cause of closer settlement. The 1884 Land Act of Griffith’s liberal ministry reflected these ideas. Selections could be leased for up to fifty years and converted to freehold after ten. Again, its aims were frustrated. Between 1884 and 1894, 30,000 fewer acres of new land went under cultivation than in the previous decade.

Henry George’s theories also excited Sydney, where the Land Nationalisation League was formed in 1887, reflecting both his and Wallace’s beliefs. Two years later it was reformed as the Single Tax League, which raised enough money to invite George to visit Australia. Arriving in 1890, George found support evaporating in Sydney; newspapers opposed his socialism, trade unions objected to his belief in private property, and his free-trade views were unacceptable as protectionism gained ground. But his visit to Brisbane in May that year energised the radical land movement in the town. He returned home to write a perceptive and not completely unkind observation of Australia for Cosmopolitan magazine.

By the end of the 1880s, Queensland was moving fast towards the depression that engulfed it from 1891 to 1893. British investment dried up, affecting construction and railway building; wool prices plummeted; the “Griffilwraith” government (an unlikely coalition of liberal Griffith and conservative McIlwraith) cut work programs and retrenched staff in an effort to balance the budget, then £1.3 million in deficit; building societies collapsed; the Labour Bureau enrolled 2000 unemployed in Brisbane; three floods in the river brought devastation to struggling families; then eight out of the eleven Queensland banks crashed.

Workers were beginning to organise; in 1890, the Australian Labour Federation was formed, the following year the shearers’ strike led to the formation in Barcaldine of the Labour (sic) Party, and by 1893 the government’s harsh treatment of the strikers, together with a change to preferential voting, helped win the Party fifteen seats in the Legislative Assembly.

William Lane, who founded and edited the Boomerang, a radical socialist magazine, and then edited the Worker newspaper of the Trades and Labour Council in Brisbane, had urged on the shearers with this exhortation: “You can take all social injustices and industrial inequalities and vested interests and strangle them one by one with your million muscled hands.” But he turned his back on the union movement. Dispirited by the collapse of the strike and pessimistic about parliamentary action to achieve “socialism in our time”, he founded the New Australia Movement in 1892, and began to plan the utopian settlement on the Tebicuary River in Paraguay.

In Barcaldine, seventy-two shearers, the defiant rump of the great strike, who refused to return to the sheds, had set up camp on the Alice River. They laid out Freedom, Liberty and Union Streets around a square with communal dining room, kitchen and library. Premier Samuel Griffith had visited the camp in 1892, and was impressed. A Parliamentary Select Committee on Assisted Land Settlement was appointed and sat for several months. One witness asserted that utopian communes would “morally create a new earth”. Others extolled the alleged success of communistic societies in the United States. The committee recommended that rural communes be established in Queensland and Griffith ordered the drafting of legislation. At that critical stage, he was induced to resign to accept appointment as Chief Justice of Queensland by a salary increase of £1000 to £3500 (Griffith went on to become the first Chief Justice of the High Court after Federation); Sir Thomas McIlwraith, returning for his third term as premier in March 1893, found himself the father of Griffith’s draft.

The 1893 Co-operative Communities Land Settlement Act had two separate components—the principal one to encourage registered groups of not fewer than thirty native-born or naturalised males to form “self-governing communities”, each entitled to lease 160 acres within a communal area, and acquire it as freehold after a suitable qualifying period. Families could be settled, but the womenfolk could not be members. A grant of £20 for rations, tools and stock was to be made to each member. The Act provided for internal dispute resolution, and a member could be expelled by a two-thirds vote. The Alice River Co-operative Settlement was retrospectively authorised under this section, but dwindled to seven diehards by 1902 and was abandoned in 1907. The Crown resumed the land in 1914. The second component permitted the creation of “labour colonies” on Crown land close to urban centres, allowing a limited degree of self-sufficiency for the unemployed.

The influential weekly the Queenslander was cautiously optimistic:

Never in the history of Queensland has the necessity for encouraging settlement on the land … been more painfully apparent than during the last two or three years. And the Co-operative Bill places it in the power of a number of persons to combine under more favourable conditions than have previously existed for utilising the Crown lands of the colony … It is gratifying to know the proposed legislation … is what a new country wants.

Within twelve days of proclamation of the Communities Act, the first application was lodged. This was for 5600 acres near Gayndah in the Burnett Valley, to be named Resolute. The following year, 165 men women and children followed Harry Head, a carpenter, radical socialist and protégé of William Lane, onto the block and began construction of pit-sawn houses. Twelve months later the commune had six cottages, with another eight and a provisional school for twenty-nine children under construction. In another six months it had collapsed, only six men remaining to take up land blocks.

The burst of enthusiasm that saw Resolute launched spurred the establishment of other communities in a crescent of country from the Darling Downs to the Burnett:

Barlowtown, near Roma, thirty-eight members, offered land but disbanded.

Excel Pioneer, near Roma, forty-five members (211 individuals), 7200 acres, £740 grants.

Nil Desperandum, near Roma, thirty-five members (138 individuals), 5600 acres, £620 grants.

Obertown Model, near Roma, forty-five members (205 individuals), 7200 acres, £840 grants.

Industrial, near Chinchilla, thirty-eight members (157 individuals), 6500 acres, £456 grants.

Mizpah, near Chinchilla, thirty-five members (172 individuals), 4000 acres, £620 grants.

Monmouth, near Chinchilla, thirty-five members (111 individuals), 3700 acres, £620 grants.

Woolloongabba Exemplary, near Noosa, fifty-nine members (237 individuals), 9700 acres, £708 grants.

Protestant Unity, near Pomona, fifty-six members (149 individuals), 5800 acres, £700 grants.

Bon Accord, near Gayndah, sixty members (191 individuals), 5800 acres, £716 grants.

Byrnestown, near Gayndah, thirty-four members (172 individuals), 4700 acres, £608 grants.

Germania, near Gayndah, thirty-one members, offered land but disbanded.

Resolute, near Gayndah, forty members (165 individuals), 5600 acres, £480 grants.

Reliance, near Rolleston, forty-one members (170 individuals), 4100 acres, £817 grants.

Total: 2078 people on 70,000 acres funded by £7525 grants.

The first thing noticeable, apart from the high-sounding names, is that women and children made up 75 per cent of the population of the settlements. Only 593 men, at best, were available for the hard development work of pioneer settlers. The second obvious fact is the location of the communities—all well beyond the nearest railway, and most of them remote from possible markets for their produce. The poor selection of sites for these farms was later proved, in many cases, to have been due to lack of agricultural experience, or a simple excess of enthusiasm over practicality.

But a more sinister interpretation can be found in the opposition of the public service. William Metcalf, who has researched and written most comprehensively on the utopian movement in Queensland, found these confidential instructions to staff from the Under Secretary of Lands:

You will understand that this form of settlement … must be kept within narrow limits.

Information about land will not be given to men trying to set up Groups. They will levy blackmail on more decent men than themselves.

Proper land is scarce; therefore they must take it or leave it quickly—give no information about land.

Remember that we are not bound to recognise any Group or any man. We are doing them a favour in letting them have land so much easier than the ordinary selector.

The author of this obstructive policy was Walter Hume, one of the most powerful bureaucrats of the period, who also held the position of Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands. Hume enjoyed a salary of £800 a year, lived in a large house built for him by a relative, with a tennis court overlooking the Brisbane River, was a member of the Queensland Club, kept a yacht on the river, and with his wife was counted among the social elite of the town. At the same time as Hume was attending Government House receptions, Harry Head and his fifty-six-year-old father were walking thirty kilometres from the railhead at Degilbo near Biggenden to take up their land.

At first all seemed to go well in the twelve settlements. As 1893 and 1894 had been years of generous rainfall, the country had never looked better and the first plantings succeeded. In February 1894 the Resolute group reported having set up a general store, butcher’s shop and killing yard, blacksmith’s forge, three miles of fencing, with 150 acres ringbarked, two culverts built and five acres of potatoes planted.

But before the end of the year social tensions had settlers on other holdings petitioning the government to curb the power of the “senior member” or secretary. At Byrnestown, corruption, fraud, conversion, drunkenness and laziness were “white-anting” progress. “It is terrible to see our children starving,” wrote an anguished mother, “while the secretary can get his horse and cart, drive away for the day and return with drink.” An amendment to the Act in late 1894 established the right to elect or remove the secretary; in a recognition of problems to come, it also provided for additional grants.

Then Queensland plunged into its seven-year drought. Crops failed. Frost, wallabies, bandicoots and prickly pear confronted communities with problems unimagined in their socialist dreams. Much of the soil on many selections proved poor. Soon settlers in many communes were starving. The government voted a further £3000 to support the communities, limited to rations, but this was not enough. In June 1895 Obertown, Byrnestown and Mizpah were being fed from a further supplementary estimates vote of £1000.

In July 1895, Walter Hume, reporting to parliament, sought to absolve the Lands Department of any blame for the impending collapse of the schemes. Placing co-operative groups of men with their families on areas set apart for the purpose was in the nature of an experiment for the department, he said. Groups were very difficult to please, their efforts in the right direction constantly thwarted by another class whose laziness, insubordination and constant quarrels nullified the intentions of the Act. There was no likelihood of their becoming self-supporting.

As stories of corruption and maltreatment in some of the settlements trickled out, Queensland newspapers turned fiercely on the scheme and its socialistic underpinnings. The Brisbane Courier described it as “The baleful operation of communism … indeed the case of the Resolute suggests an unworkable system.” When news of the failure of Lane’s New Australia experiment in Paraguay filtered back, the Queenslander railed against experimental socialism. The only value of the failed experiments was that it

closed the mouths of the politicians whose ill-concealed object it is to take from those who have and present it to those who have not. Individualism is society’s only adequate protection against the loafer, and communism, in this age at least, spells pauperism.

In December 1895 the government sent a special train to Roma to evacuate the starving survivors of Excel Pioneer, Obertown Model and Nil Desperandum. They were taken to the immigration centre at Kangaroo Point and looked after until they could find employment and fend for themselves.

In an amendment to the Act in 1895, all communal land titles were extinguished and all assets including houses returned to the Crown. Settlers were offered a free rail ticket to Brisbane, or the right to bid for blocks once the areas were re-subdivided. About £15,000 was written off. Harry Head and four other members of Resolute stayed on, but fared no better as individual farmers. Head’s building skills earned him a respected place in the Gayndah community, constructing houses, churches and halls.

The Co-operative Communities Land Settle­ment Act was subsequently used as the model for Queensland’s Soldier Settlement Scheme between 1916 and 1929, another social and agricultural failure. But that is another story.