The alien world: searching for ‘living space’
The law of life is movement. The circumscribed dies. Exodus is as necessary anywhere there is life, as ingress. We were the only British colony of our kind in the world. There was no other similar place with which we could have reciprocity or exchange. So, when the human cry came for change of scene, the desire for new faces, from the need of food that we could not supply, or even for another kind of girl or man to marry (for not all is affinity that is adjacent), when, I say, these things happened, and natural frictions aggravated them, there was no similar colony to go to. There was only the alien world, which was still by earlier custom the familiar world. And so the drift away began. And yet the world today, even of Australia, approaches what we advocated….the world begins to do what we of New Australia proposed as human….But we were ahead of our time. On that note I end.
Mary Gilmore, letter to Julian Ashton, June 1939. In Letters of Mary Gilmore, selected and edited by W.H. Wilde and T. Inglis Moore, Melbourne University Press, 1980.
I have lost my sister…not through real death but by an irreversible separation. She has gone to South America with her husband to found a colony. There is every prospect that it will succeed, but the more it prospers, the less chance there is that she will return. But then, the opinions of my brother-in-law, by which he is prepared to live and die, are far more alien to me than Paraguay.
Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Emily Flynn, February 1886. In Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche, Ben Macintyre, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.
August 1990
The bus drops us off in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, carrying on along the roughly paved road and leaving us amongst what seems to be endless grasslands punctuated by scrubby trees. A heavily rutted dirt road stretches out ahead of us, a road that the bus driver had assured us would lead to the small town of Hugo Stroessner, named after the father of Alfredo Stroessner, the dictator who had ruled over Paraguay for 45 years and who had been deposed just the year before. Before that it was identified on maps as Nueva Londres, but the town we are looking for was originally called Nueva Australia and it isn’t easy to find.
I am 18 years old and it is the first time I have been out of New Zealand. I am half way through a year of a student exchange program in Paraguay, staying in the unprepossessing industrial town of Coronel Oviedo, located at a crossroads in the middle of the country. A couple of Australian friends from the same program had told me about this place called New Australia, a utopian socialist settlement formed at the end of the 19th century. Apparently it was located right near Coronel Oviedo. “Let’s check it out,” I enthused. So we caught the bus.
August 1896
A school teacher sits in a rudimentary hut writing a letter to a friend back in Australia. Her name is Mary Cameron and she is writing to Henry Lawson, who had just published his short story collection While the Billy Boils and is starting to make a name for himself as Australia’s finest writer. She is flushed with excitement to finally find herself in Paraguay, following in the footsteps of William Lane, the founder of the New Australia colony that she had worked so hard to promote. She wasn’t able to sail out on the Royal Tar with the other founders in 1893, and in the meantime the colony has broken up in discord, with Lane and his loyal supporters creating a second colony not far away known as La Colonia Cosme.
But now here she is, 31 years old, in exotic South America, teaching the children and writing the colony’s daily paper. “And the country — it is a constant wonder to me, so beautiful, so rich in bird (life) and plants. And the history! — and the stories of the war. If only you were here, Henry.” Her letter ends with this teasing postscript: “I didn’t get married.”
March 1888
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche sits under a beautifully shady tree in the grounds of her new mansion, Försterhof, in the colony of Nueva Germania, located in the harsh Chaco region to the north of Paraguay’s capital, Asuncion. The wives of other colonists are gathered with her, drinking coffee, and don’t seem in the least bit resentful that so much effort has been expended over the last year in building this residence while the rest of them continue to live in hovels. Herr Enzweiler is giving a laudatory speech that hails her as the ‘Mother of the Colony’ before everyone sings ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ as they go into the house.
Elisabeth is 42 years old and her husband, Bernhard Förster, the founder of the colony, is a notorious anti-Semite who will probably be arrested if he tries to return to Germany after accusing a government minister of having Jewish ancestry. Her brother, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, abhors her husband and his views and despairs over her fate in the colony. Elisabeth claims that it is wonderful in Paraguay, however: ‘After supper we sit in the garden and look into the distance….there are fields, gilded with red from the evening sun on both sides of the river, interspersed with fields of lowing cattle. What a peaceful, happy picture this affords, nothing is alien. No, everything is homely…’
The desire for living space
The concept of Lebensraum (which can be translated as ‘living space’) first emerged in the 19th century but is most closely associated with the Third Reich and Hitler’s expansionist moves through Europe which were explicitly tied to the supposed racial superiority of Aryan Germans. Overpopulated Germany supposedly needed more living space and that would come at the expense of their neighbours deemed to be of inferior stock. The Fascist regime in Italy came up with the similar concept of spazio vitale to justify their own colonial expansion.
Aside from nationwide movements, smaller groups have also yearned for living space, not necessarily for racist reasons, but because they feel they can’t live the way they wish to within the country they inhabit. The 19th century was the heyday for utopian movements: people seeking to create an ideal society amongst the manifestly imperfect world they inhabited. Often these settlements would form within their own country, but when this was deemed impossible they would set their sights overseas as they searched for the living space that could accomodate them.
Why Paraguay?
Okay: utopia, living space. Fine. Of course it needs to be found somewhere, but why did Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s German fascist utopia and Mary Gilmore’s Australian socialist utopia both end up locating themselves in Paraguay and within a few years of each other? The answer is connected with another fascinating woman, an Irishwoman called Eliza Lynch.
Eliza Lynch has inspired at least two excellent novels: The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright and The News From Paraguay by Lily Tuck. She was an ambitious young woman who caught the eye of the young Francisco Solano López, the grandiose would-be Napoleon of South America, when he was visiting Paris in 1854. When he returned to Paraguay he brought Eliza with him and she would not only bear him six children but be a potent influence in his life. Upon gaining the presidency in 1862 after the death of his father, Solano López sought to counter the influence of Paraguay’s much larger neighbours, Brazil and Argentina, but this disastrously backfired when the two giants teamed up with Uruguay to start the War of the Triple Alliance in 1864. Despite massive mobilisation and brave fighting from the Paraguayan menfolk, they were poorly equipped and ultimately outmatched. The Alliance captured Asuncion in 1869 and Solano López and Eliza Lynch went on the run until the president was finally killed in the Battle of Cerro Corá in February 1870. Estimates vary widely, but as much as 60–70% of the entire population of Paraguay and perhaps as many as 80-90% of the men were killed during the war.
Eliza Lynch survived and returned to Paris, where she died in 1886, the same year that Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her husband set out for the now devastated and depopulated land that Lynch had left behind. It was that devastation that led to the Paraguayan government offering very attractive terms to anyone who wanted to settle there and farm the land. They had plenty of living space but nobody to live there. And a decade later the situation hadn’t changed when Mary Gilmore found herself in Paraguay as well.
As for me? I wasn’t searching for living space in Paraguay, more searching for myself, as is typical of someone in late adolescence. And in amongst visits to Nueva Australia and other places around the country I think I did find something, including an interest in literature and philosophy, which shaped my life subsequently back in New Zealand and then in Australia. I now teach those subjects in high school and the space I occupy is definitely one the right one for me.
August 1990 and after
When the three of us made it down the dirt road to the settlement there wasn’t an awful lot to see: a scattering of houses, a collection of goats and chickens, some stands of Ilex paraguariensis, which is harvested to produce mate (usually consumed cold in Paraguay, from a vessel through a metal straw which is passed from person to person as they sit around and chat about nothing in particular), and a small church. At the church we found an Irish priest who was happy to chat to us about the area and he directed us towards the house of an old man who, as far as he knew, was the few surviving descendants of the original Australian settlers who still lived in the town.
The old man (I don’t remember his name all these years on, and I wasn’t diligent enough to be taking notes on these things at the time) spoke no English, just Spanish and Guarani, like most Paraguayans. By that stage my Spanish was good enough to get the gist of what he was saying: that his great grandfather was one of the Australians who sailed out on the Royal Tar; that most of the colonists had either returned to Australia or just assimilated into Paraguay, married locals and become as Paraguayan as anyone else, as he was now. The ideals of the colonists hadn’t lasted, nor could they have had the colony survived into the repressive regime of the man who renamed their settlement after his father and enriched himself at the expense of his country.
We gave our thanks and made our way back to the intersection to wait for the next bus so we could return to our respective communities and host families. I didn’t really give Nueva Australia any more thought that year as I struggled through the heat, through sickness and loneliness, through adventures that although life-changing in many respects were mundane and not worth recounting. I didn’t even know about the fascist colony of Nueva Germania, the dark shadow of Nueva Australia, back then. I only found out about that when I stumbled upon Ben Macintyre’s wonderful 1992 book Forgotten Fatherland many years later. By that stage I had relocated to Melbourne and had become a teacher. I found that I was thinking about Paraguay a lot.
October 1899 and after
Mary Cameron did get married after all, and within a year of her letter to Henry Lawson. She hitched herself to a shearer from Victoria, William Gilmore, and in 1898 she gave birth to their son Billy. Her initial enthusiasm for Paraguay didn’t last and she and her family resigned from the colony in August 1899. They needed money to get a passage back to Australia so William went shearing in Argentina to try to raise funds, leaving Mary and Billy behind in Cosme. She wrote to him in October 1899:
I often dread your feeling sorry you left the Colony. Don’t for my sake, darling. We can’t be much poorer than we were here, you surely won’t have to work harder. I think it would be heart breaking if you had to work harder. It was always so heavy for you, always the big lifting and the wet Monte [forest]. Surely it will never be as bad as that again. We can hardly go to a more trying climate than this, and hardly worse moral surroundings, bad children for the boy to grow up with, a constant straining to individualism, the native girl outside, and the cana [rum] almost for the asking.
By February 1900 she was writing to him again and lamenting that ‘Communism is a failure — is not attainable, real Communism that is, and enforced Communism is worse than none. I think that all co-operation with equal sharing is the truest and most possible — gives most good with fewest ill-results.’
The Gilmores eventually managed to get a passage to England and then back to Australia by 1902. Mary started to establish a writing life for herself in the pages of the Bulletin and elsewhere and in time would establish her own identity in Sydney as a doyenne of the Australian literary world. Her own poetry and prose were notable but more than anything else she was recognised as a supporter of young and aspiring writers. She would eventually be recognised as the face on the Australian ten dollar note, opposite Banjo Patterson (is there an irony in a formerly ardent Communist being the face of Capitalism?):
May 1889 and after
Everything had fallen apart in Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s life by 1889. Her brother had suffered a mental breakdown in Turin after witnessing the beating of a horse in the street. He would never regain his sanity. Back in Paraguay her husband was crippled by debt from the Colony and, increasingly consumed by despair, had been on a six week bender in the town of San Bernadino before poisoning himself, a suicide which Elisabeth covered up. Even as she made her plans to return to Germany she was trying to save the reputation of Nueva Germania and her husband and she published an account in 1891 that tried to paint the movement as a success in an effort to attract more colonists. Unlike Mary Gilmore she wasn’t prepared to accept the failure of something she had believed in and tried to insist that all was well, writing that, ‘The climate of Paraguay is like paradise to me, and on this visit to Germany I view the weather here with a shake of my head,’ among many other manifest untruths. She returned to the Colony in 1892 but it was steadily falling apart. One of the colonists summed up the situation:
if there is not an improvement by next year to the impossible situation here, I will have to think of moving on, though God knows where I will go. The world is large, and it would be madness to stay in this place for years when God seems to have abandoned it.
Another wrote that ‘There is not a single colonist who is content with his lot, and who can blame them, for the life is miserable here.’ In August 1893, as a group of enthusiastic Australians were breaking ground on their new utopian settlement in Paraguay, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche sailed out of Asuncion never to return.
Just like Mary Gilmore, though, this was far from the end of her story. People were finally starting to pay attention to the groundbreaking and controversial books written by her now invalid brother and she dedicated herself to their promotion, even if she couldn’t really understand what he was trying to say in them. She would edit his unpublished work and distort it to make it palatable to her anti-Semitic friends. As the 20th century rolled around and Germany lurched from crisis to crisis she managed to thrive and became a member of the Nazi party, doing everything she could to promote her brother (who had died in 1900) as the official philosopher of Nazi Germany. When she herself died in 1935 her friend Adolf Hitler attended her funeral.
The king of infinite space
I’m writing this in lockdown in Melbourne and my living space has been greatly constrained. I can leave my house for no more than a few hours each day for exercise or for buying essential goods. I can travel no further than 5km from my house in order to do those things. I must teach my classes from home. Even when we haven’t been in lockdown over the past two years (and Melbourne recently clocked up 200 days of lockdowns) I haven’t been able to follow in the footsteps of Mary Gilmore and set out for parts unknown as the border has been closed (apart from some brief windows of time when it was possible to travel to New Zealand, windows that are shut once more).
But how much living space do we really need? I taught my students Hamlet this year (thankfully mostly in the classroom). Hamlet has this famous exchange with his erstwhile school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:
HAMLET
Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
Then is the world one.
HAMLET
A goodly one; in which there are many confines,
wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ
We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET
Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ
Why then, your ambition makes it one; ’tis too
narrow for your mind.
HAMLET
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.
As always, Shakespeare is prophetic. The pandemic has indeed turned the world into a prison and here I am bounded in a nut shell. I won’t comment on the nature of my dreams, but I can still delve into the pages of the books that surround me here (including the complete works of Shakespeare) and count myself the king of infinite space. We have people protesting against the restrictions that are placed on our lives, but we’ve been so fortunate here in Australia and New Zealand to have been spared the worst of the pandemic. There’s a collective purpose that has been shown that would make Mary Gilmore proud of the Australia that she found it necessary to leave but then returned to and embraced. This is not to say that this country is free of the kind of bigotry espoused by Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche, nor the inclination towards distorting reality to suit one’s own purposes, but there are few other spaces that I would rather be occupying right now.
Paraguay, along with other countries in South America, has been having a much tougher time in the pandemic. Two members of my host family from 1990, Hugo and Patricia, are now doctors and have been at the front line. In a recent message Hugo told me, “Siiiiii realmente acá en Paraguay estamos muy complicados con el covid… Muchos amigos ya muertos y sin vacunas… Felizmente papa y mamá ya están vacunados.” [“Yes, it really has been very complicated with Covid here in Paraguay… Many friends already dead and without vaccines… Happily Mum and Dad are already vaccinated.”]. The economic impact of the pandemic has also been huge for a country that still struggles with poverty. It’s no utopia and never really was, but Paraguayans are still making the most of the space they have.
