Adelaide's prominent Birks family members sail off to Paraguay in 1894 to settle in William Lane's 'New Australia'
Birks family members among emigrants for "New Australia" in Paraguay, about to embark on the sailing ship Royal Tar at Port Adelaide in 1894.
Image by Walter Scott-Barry, courtesy State Library of South Australia
One of South Australia’s most distinctively extraordinary historical incidents was the departure in 1894 of George Birks and his wife Helen (nee Thomas) – from two of the province’s most prominent settlement names – and other members of their family to join William Lane’s New Australia project in Paraguay.
The Birks family left Port Adelaide on the Royal Tar in January 1894 as a second contingent to the become part of a religious socialist utopian society in Paraguay. That vision soon collapsed. George Birks died there and some descendants are still in Paraguay but most of the Birks, including Helen, returned to Australia.
The New Australia Movement was founded 1892 by William Lane, a prominent figure in the Australia labour movement that, after a split, formed the Labor party. Lane chose Paraguay to build a society based on a common hold (not common wealth), a brotherhood of English-speaking whites, life marriage, preserving the white “colour line”, teetotalism and communism.
Others in the Birks family – brothers John Napier Birks and Walter Richard Birks – were among settlers at another socialist colony, at Murtho near Renmark, in the 1890s. The Murtho experiment ended by 1899, mainly due to the difficulty of irrigating crops at its cliff-top site. The Paraguary colony collapsed under disagreements and Lane’s despotic rule.
The Birks’ part in these ventures was part of a particularly South Australian empathy with the radical agrarian ideas from Britain in the late 19th Century.
The radical agrarian movement opposed land being left unused only to collect rent or to speculate on its value.
A Land Nationalization Society was formed in London in 1884 by Alfred Russel Wallace (of evolutionary theory fame). The society believed the best way to abolish the monopoly of big land holdings was to vest all property titles in the crown. All land, they argued, should eventually be owned by the state, with landholders paying yearly rent to use it.
In the 1880s, land nationalisation society branches opened in some South Australian rural or mining centres as well as Adelaide and its suburbs. Land nationalisation merged into the single-tax ideas of Henry George, who visited Australian in 1890. The single tax would be applied to land speculators.
The special South Australian embrace of agrarian land politics drew on Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s vision for a colony of small farms – a vision corrupted by selling big land holdings to vested interests. Middle-class Protestant Dissenters, as a major force in founding South Australia, were sensitive to the land privileges of the English aristocracy and the Church of England.
As a single taxer and land nationalisation society member, the devoutly Christian George Napier Birks lumped capitalism in with the evils of land speculation and sold his own commercial interests to pursue the cooperative dream in Paraguay.
Catherine Helen Spence, a single taxer, reflected the link made between social and gender equality that fed into the campaign for South Australian women’s voting rights.
John Napier Birks’ daughter Elsie left a teaching academy in North Adelaide to join the Murtho cooperative in late 1894. A cooperative life on the land, she believed, would be more equitable, “less artificial”, and altogether “better than [the] existing conditions of society”.
