1. William Lane was an English-born journalist, author, advocate of Australian labour politics and a utopian socialist ideologue.
17 Facts About William Lane
1. 2.
William Lane authored works covering topics such as labour rights and white nationalism.
3.
William Lane was born in Bristol, England on 6 September 1861, as the eldest son of James William Lane, an Irish Protestant landscape gardener, and his English wife Caroline, nee Hall.
4.
William Lane was born with a debilitating clubfoot, a condition that would be partially corrected in Montreal later in life, leaving him with a limp.
5.
William Lane's father James was a drunkard who when William Lane was born was earning a miserable wage, but later he improved his circumstances and became an employer.
6.
William Lane's mother died when he was 14 years of age, and at age 16 he migrated to Canada where he worked odd jobs such as a linotype operator.
7.
William Lane himself began to attend meetings supporting all manner of popular causes, speaking against repressive laws and practices and Chinese immigrants, all while utilising a charismatic American intonation he had attained during his time in the States.
8.
William Lane became a powerful supporter of Emma Miller and women's suffrage.
9.
Mary Gilmore, later a celebrated Australian writer, said in one of her letters that "the whole book is true and of historical value as William Lane transcribed our conversations as well as those of others".
10.
William Lane wrote that in the near future, British capitalists would manipulate the legal system and successfully arrange the mass immigration of Chinese workers to Australia, regardless of its socioeconomic consequences to Australian common folk and their society.
11.
William Lane's work was intended to act as an apolitical call to racial unity among white Australians.
12.
Contriving a division among Australian labour activists between the permanently disaffected and those who later formed the Australian Labor Party, William Lane refused the Queensland Government's offer of a grant of land on which to create a utopian settlement, and began an Australia-wide campaign for the creation of a new society elsewhere on the globe, peopled by rugged and sober Australian bushmen and their proud wives.
13.
William Lane became disillusioned with the whole process, willingly abandoned Colonia Cosme, and returned to Australia in 1899.
14.
William Lane left Cosme with his family on 1 August 1899, and returned to Australia where he worked briefly as editor of the Sydney Worker before sailing to New Zealand.
15.
William Lane had retained the strong racial antipathy toward East Asians he expressed in his literature, and during World War I he developed extreme anti-German sentiments.
16.
William Lane died on 26 August 1917 in Auckland, New Zealand, aged 56, having been editor of the Herald from 1913 to 1917, and becoming a much admired personality in the country.
17.
William Lane is depicted in the Douglas Stewart poem Terra Australis.