The visionary was William Lane, a journalist and firebrand of the Australian labour movement who had founded the country's first labour newspaper, The Worker. When the great shearers' strikes of the early 1890s collapsed and the movement splintered — some of its members going on to form the Australian Labor Party — Lane decided the only way to build a just society was to leave and start one from scratch. He recruited around 220 shearers, stockmen, and union men and chartered the Royal Tar. The colony was officially founded on September 28, 1893, with 238 people. Land and property would be held in common. There would be no wages, no employers, no liquor — Lane, whose own father's drinking had impoverished his childhood, was a lifelong abstainer — and, in a clause that has aged into shame, a strict "colour line" barring relations with the local population. The utopia, in other words, came pre-loaded with its founder's fixations.

Paraguay was not a random choice. The country was reeling from the War of the Triple Alliance, which had killed a devastating portion of its men, and its government was eager for industrious settlers to repopulate and rebuild. It offered the Australians a generous tract of good land. On paper, the conditions for utopia were ideal: empty fertile country, a welcoming host, and a band of committed idealists. The trouble was never the land. The trouble, as it so often is, was the people — and the rigid rules a single man had written for them.

Conflict broke out almost immediately. Settlers chafed at Lane's autocratic control, at the ban on alcohol, and at his rules forbidding contact with Paraguayans. Within three months, members were being expelled for breaking the teetotal pledge. By May 1894, Lane himself had given up on the original settlement and led 58 loyalists 72 kilometers south to found a stricter second colony called Cosme. Both communities limped on for years and both eventually dissolved as cooperative experiments. The dream of a world without bosses foundered, fittingly, on one man's insistence on being the boss of the dream.

And yet the people did not all leave. Some 2,000 descendants of those Australian colonists still live in Paraguay today, carrying English surnames among the Spanish and Guaraní, many of them no longer speaking the language their great-grandparents sailed with. The original settlement, once Nueva Australia, was renamed Nueva Londres — New London — in 1957. There is a quiet irony in that name. In 1989 the residents asked the Australian government for permission to call their town New Canberra; no reply ever came, so they settled for London instead. The tiny place sits about ten kilometers west of Coronel Oviedo, and a second offshoot of the same exodus took root at Cosme, farther south. They are leftover scraps of a grand idea — villages where the great-grandchildren of revolutionaries farm in peace, having long outlived the revolution that brought their families across the world.