Paraguay Aussies

Broadcast: 26/09/2006

Reporter: Eric Campbell

Transcript

CAMPBELL: It's a slice of Australia on the far side of the world. In a charter boat on the Paraguay River, Australia's oldest diaspora celebrates a country most have never seen.

RODDY WOOD: We want to commemorate our ancestors leaving our motherland more than a hundred years ago.

CAMPBELL: They're descendants of Australian pioneers who crossed half the world in pursuit of a dream, a society where everyone was a mate and every mate was equal. They have names like Wood, McLeod, Murray, Burke and Cadogan - red hair and blue eyes mixed with dark Latin complexions.

Roddy Wood is a real estate agent in the capital of Asuncion and a proud Australian Paraguayan.

RODDY WOOD: Let's say part Paraguayan and part Australian. We still call Australia home.

CAMPBELL: Today, some two thousand Paraguayans trace their ancestry to the bushmen, shearers and unionists who sailed up this river in the 1890's looking for utopia. It's an extraordinary and even bizarre chapter of Australian history that was once all but forgotten here. But now, these Australian Paraguayans are rediscovering their roots, even going back to the land of their ancestors. Roddy Wood's cousins have already migrated to Australia and his daughter wants to move there.

RODDY WOOD: Paraguay opened its arms to receive all of them and I believe now, the thing is, the other way around. Difficult times are here now.

CAMPBELL: The settlers left in 1893 in the midst of a crippling economic depression. Australia was not yet a nation, but the emerging Australian ideals of mateship and equality were under attack as never before. Two years earlier, Queensland's colonial government had used troops to brutally crush a shearers' strike. Led by a radical socialist, William Lane, embittered unionists decided to find a new country to start again.

Mary Gilmore who would later become one of Australia's greatest poets, was among the settlers, and lived long enough to record their story in a rare television interview.

MARY GILMOUR: (archives footage) You must call it more than a cooperative, it was purely communistic. I wouldn't say it was a success but I certainly don't say it was a failure. I never have.

CAMPBELL: The place they chose for their experiment was a little known South American country in dire need of new blood. Paraguay had just lost ninety per cent of its male population in a suicidal war with its neighbours. It offered the settlers a generous land grant in the hope they would replenish the population. But there was a problem.

William Lane was a racist as well as a tea-totalling socialist. He ordered his men to have nothing to do with native women and forbade them drowning their sorrows in alcohol.

ROBIN WOOD: [descendant] That leaves you something like two hundred and eighty young men in a very awkward situation. What were they suppose to do? Now you dump a bunch of Scots, Irishmen, Australian in the land of the sugar cane. Christ, I bet that they didn't take off their shoes and they were already making moonshine. So it was, and there started all the clashes.

CAMPBELL: By the time the second boatload arrived, the settlers had split into two camps. The drinkers and womanisers stayed in New Australia, later renamed New London. But Lane and his wowser followers headed out to a second land grant in the district of Cosme. Neither became the utopia that the shearers and their mates had hoped for. The land was too poor and the ideals unworkable. Eventually, most of the settlers returned disillusioned to Australia.

MARY GILMOUR: (archives footage) They want to say it was a failure because it was communistic. It never was. We lived because it communistic. The reason it had to break up or disappear was because William Lane would only have British people in it.

CAMPBELL: Those who stayed eventually abandoned communal living and divided the land up between them. Some of their descendants are still on the same farms today.

Basil Murray is one of the last living links with the original settlers and the last man in the world to speak English with a 19th century Australian accent.

BASIL MURRAY: The man that taught me most things in life was my old grandfather. I was, say twelve years old when he died. Until the last minute he called me to his bedside and of course I didn't know, I didn't know he'd kicked the bucket.

CAMPBELL: His grandfather Edward, was one of the twelve unionists gaoled over the shearers strike, but by the time Basil was born, they had long given up talking about socialism or trying to live it. They were just battling to survive in a harsh, poor land.

BASIL MURRAY: Well they knew nothing about Communists in them days, nothing. And they were straight old birds - hard cases and hard workers. And they used to lend one another things but when you finished with it bring it back.

CAMPBELL: He lives in a slab hut he built himself with his blind Paraguayan wife and a few dozen head of cattle. It's been a hard life but as Basil sees it, a healthy one.

BASIL MURRAY: But look here. I never played cards. I never went to horseraces. I never been to football yet and I don't intend to. I have a swig. I have a smoke. I hunt and I fish but none of the, none of the cards business.

CAMPBELL: No carrying on?

BASIL MURRAY: No, no, no, no, no.

CAMPBELL: All the settlers eventually integrated into Paraguayan society, married Spaniards or Guarani Indians and adopted the local culture and customs. In some families, the sense of being Australian disappeared.

Florence White is the granddaughter of one of the original settlers, William Wood. She grew up with little interest in the family stories. It wasn't until she was a teenager that she finally asked why nobody else at school had red hair.

FLORENCE WHITE: Well you know nobody wants to be different when you're fifteen... thirteen, so I tried to find where my red hair came from and eventually I asked my father and he said I think your grandfather William had a red beard.

CAMPBELL: But one thing kept the scattered clans together - family holidays at the old colony of Cosme. All their lives they've headed out to visit relatives on the same old steam train that carried their ancestors. Florence Wood had done this trip two hundred and fifty-eight times. Now in the old days, it was more than a train ride.

FLORENCE WHITE: Well you left Asuncion at four in the morning and then after stopping at about fourteen stops, you had to take like a horse ridden cart and there if you were lucky you either took a boat, a horse, an oxen cart or walk to the colony.

CAMPBELL: It's the last wood-fired passenger train in the world, kept on as a tourist attraction for the few foreign visitors who come to Paraguay.

RODDY WOOD: All things move very slowly in Paraguay. It's not like the rest of the world. We've got cell phones and Internet but only a part of the population. The rest is like in the last century.

CAMPBELL: Some of the Wood family still live in Cosme in the last sort of house you'd expect to find here - a Queenslander.

So a genuine Queenslander in Paraguay.

RODDY WOOD: That's right. This tin roof was imported from Australia.

CAMPBELL: It was designed by a relative now living on Queensland's Sunshine Coast and it's become the focus of family reunions.

[walking around inside house] Old suitcases!

RODDY WOOD: Suitcases that came on board the Royal Tar.

CAMPBELL: 1893 suitcases.

RODDY WOOD: Real old suitcases.

CAMPBELL: Yeah, genuine article.

RODDY WOOD: Genuine.

CAMPBELL: Descendants of other clans like the McLeod's, live in houses and small farms around the village. This really is an extraordinary place. We've come half way round the world to what looks like a slice of nineteen century Australian bush, but it's not a museum piece. It's a living community that's blended perfectly with Paraguay and still retained a sense of a time and a place that in Australia, no longer exists.

Even lunch has an echo of the settlement. Amid the freshly slaughtered beef and Paraguayan delicacies is traditional Australian damper. Roddy Wood's daughter Melody is keen to join other relatives who've already migrated to Australia.

MELODY WOOD: I would love to get to know... and get to know my family down there, everything - the culture that I have learnt since I was born.

CAMPBELL: But for some people, it's not just sentimental attachment that makes them want to migrate. Far from being utopia, Paraguay remains one of the poorest countries in South America, riddled with inequality and corruption. Like their Australian ancestors, many dream of leaving to find a better world.

Robin Wood grew up in Asuncion's slums but managed to get out of Paraguay and make his fortune as an international cartoonist. Ironically, one of the few places where nobody's heard of his work is Australia where he once lived for two years.

He and the old Paraguayans are happy to end their days in Asuncion but they're angry that some younger descendants have been denied migration. He believes their ancestors earned them the right for special consideration in blood. Many volunteered to fight alongside Australia in the First World War.

ROBIN WOOD: I think they deserve a little attention, a little remembrance that young men left South America to go and fight for Australia because they didn't go to fight for the English that's for sure.

CAMPBELL: His grandfather, Alexander, was among sixteen descendants who enlisted to fight even though Paraguay was not at war.

ROBIN WOOD: My grandfather and all his brothers, they fought in Gallipoli. One of them died in France. They fought in Damascus. They entered Jerusalem. They were there.

CAMPBELL: They all chose to return to Paraguay but brought new stories from the Australians they'd fought with.

ROBIN WOOD: It's not an excessive price for all those young men who went to fight and to die. A country's got a future but should never forget that in the past they may have some debts.

CAMPBELL: With each generation, the echoes of the pioneers grow fainter. The Anglo-Celtic features are slowly disappearing but the sense of shared identity is growing. And the one day of the year when they all come together, there's no doubt in their minds that they'll always have two homes.

Australia's official representative at their latest gathering was diplomat James Bloomfield. He spent the afternoon explaining that only foreigners with Australian parents had favoured immigration rights.

JAMES BLOOMFIELD: Most of them are six generations distant from the original migrants, so none of them as I understand it, have claims for preferential treatment but I've been explaining to people a lot about the current migration programme, the opportunities that are there for skilled migrants to go to Australia and there was a lot of interest.

CAMPBELL: But the fact they're descended from Australian bush socialists of the 19th century doesn't actually count?

JAMES BLOOMFIELD: In this case I don't think it does.

CAMPBELL: Today, most of these people believe Australia is far closer than Paraguay to the utopia their ancestors were seeking. It's a history they're proud to be part of, but some can only dream of closing the final chapter by returning home.