These days Nueva Londres and Nueva Australia form a small country town and a satellite village. They have between them a popualtion of about 4,000 and are located approximatly 140km east of Asuncion.
Little remains of their original features when Nueva Australia was founded at the end of the 19th century.
That was a time of social experimentation and Nueva Australia was to be set up to be a Solcialist Utopia deep in the Paraguayan countryside. Things though did not entirely run according to the plans of it’s founder.
The founder of the colony was an Englishman. William Lane, who had been born in Bristol in 1861.
He received a poor upbringing at the hands of a drunken father. He was a keen reader and by his youth had developed socialist ideals from studying the works of Marx and Engels.
As soon as he was able Lane left Bristol and England behind seeking a new life. First he headed to Canada and then in 1885 arrived in Australia.
In Australia Lane settled in Brisbane and found work as a journalist writting socialist articles for journals and newspapers. Before long he had set up his own newspaper, The Worker, where he could develop further his political thinking.
A turning point for came with the Shearers Strike of 1891. That was a failure and lead him to decide the only way for the workers to flourish would be for them to exist outside the state system, which was designed to oppress and control them.
At the time he had been studying the works of the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen. Owen had set up a number of socialist villages in Britain about that time.
Lane thought that was the answer, but that to be truely free and independant and settlement would need to be outside of Australia and not within it.
With that thought in mind he soon began to look overseas for possible candidates.
It was not long before he discovered that Paraguay having had it’s population devastated by the recent Triple Alliance War was a desperate need of settlers to bring wealth back into the country and get it’s economy up and running again.
After negotiations with the President Gonzalez of Paraguay 187,000 hectres of empty land in Central Paraguay was offered to the settlers. The size of the land grant showing by just how much the population of Paraguay had been reduced during the war.
As for how the colony would be structured William Lane was heavily influenced by a book written in 1887 by the socialist writter Edward Bellamy called Look Backward. In the book Bellemy discusses how a peaceful revolution would lead to a Socialist Union in which there would be no need for politicians, police or merchants. All would be equal and all would be shared.
Once Paraguay had been decided upon Lane set about recruiting settlers for his new Socialist Utopia. The main recruiting drive was aimed at the sheep shearers who had lost their jobs after the strike. However with the cost of a full fare being set at £60 (which was enough to buy a house) many of those who signed up were instead leftwing thinkers and writers rather than workers.
This resulted in numbers being reduced from the planned 600 to just 220 when the first ship set sail for Paraguay later in the year.
The ship duely arrived in Asuncion in early 1893 and was greeted upon arrival with some ceremony by President Gonzalez.
Once all the formalities and paperwork had been completed everyone then set off the 140km overland to their new lives. The site chosen for the settlement was in Central Paraguay a little way north of the town of Villarrica.
Upon arrival at their destination the foundation of Neuva Australia was declared in June 1893.
Nueva Australia was given a strick set of rules by William Lane to keep it firmly to socialist principals. Everyone was to be equal. There was to be no police, no wage earners and no unemployed.
Also there would be no divorce, no racial mixing (very much a fashionable idea at the end of the 19th century), no alcohol and no money. Coupons would be used to obtain items rather than capitalist money.
Furthermore there was to be no private property. Homes, tools and livestock would all be commuially owned.
As could have been predicted some of these rules went down better with the radial thinkers than with sheep shearers from the outback. Especially those about alcohol and mixing.
It was not long before the conditions in the colony and relations between the settlers deteriorated badly and the whole place became almost unworkable.
Lane was seen by many as a dictator and although those who disagreed were expelled conditions continued to get worse.
So much so that when a 2nd ship load of settlers arrived in May 1894 Lane took them along with those who had remained loyal to him away to form a new colony 70km distant at Cosme. That also soon failed.
Left to run Nueva Australia once Lane had left was one Fredrick Kidd. He and all who remained could see that the prospect of a Socialist Utopia in Paraguay was not a viable one and so the project was allowed to simply collapse.
By the end of 1894 property was privatly owned, settlers and locals were mixing and having discovered that the local Paraguayans had no use for their coupons a cash economy was allowed to develop.
Nueva Australia then shrank as people either returned to Australia or found family and employment within the local population.
By 1897 there were very few remaining with the land having be abandoned and returned to nature.
There things stayed with just a few isolated homesteads until the arrival of two new Englishmen, Richardo Smith and Juan Kennedy, in 1942.
They chose the site of the original settlement of Nueva Australia as the site to plant their new town. This time simply a new town without any socialist overtones.
The plan had been to call the town Nueva Canberra in memory of the old colony, but as the Australian govenment had no interest in getting involved they in the end settled upon Nueva Londres.
And Nueva Londres was the name taken by the town when it was formally recognised in 1957.
The name Nueva Australia was not entirely lost however as a small section of the town 10km south of it’s centre has retained the name and hence the link back to late 19th century socialist ideals.
To reach the site these days nothing more is required than to head east along Ruta 2 away away from Asuncion. Nueva Australia is accessed directly from Ruta 2 shortly before the town of Coronel Oviedo with Nueva Londres a short drive futher north.
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