Nueva Londres: where Paraguay, Australia and Great Britain converge

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/06/nueva-londres-paraguay-australia-great-britain

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The sign outside town bears the Union flag and the Southern Cross. The streets are named after the Smiths and Kennedy families, and the blue-eyed locals could easily pass for stockmen on an Australian cattle station.

But the grizzled ranch hands wear straw sombreros, not akubra bush hats; instead of English, they speak Spanish and the South American indigenous language Guarani.

This is Nueva Londres, 9,000 miles away from Australia, in the heart of Paraguay.

Latin America has a long history of seemingly outlandish experiments in migration: Welsh miners in Patagonia, Scottish merchants in Panama, Spanish visionaries in Santa Fe. Paraguay has had its fair share of settlers from far away: Japanese, Mennonites, Ukrainians and Aryan supremacists all helped repopulate the country after its catastrophic wars (one conflict, against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, cost Paraguay 70% of its male population).

But the case of Nueva Londres (New London) is one of the strangest tales of them all.

It was founded as Nueva Australia in 1893 by a handful of families, escaping an economic depression and a crackdown on sheep shearers’ unions to carve out a teetotal, whites-only communist utopia in the jungle.

They played Paraguay’s first cricket match, winning by one run after their English opponents enjoyed a boozy lunch, and the settlement’s women tied fireflies in their hair at the village dances. But the Queensland bushmen soon discovered a weakness for sugarcane rum and the cigar-smoking Guarani women, and within nine months, the colony had split in two.

New arrivals – like the Smiths of London – injected an invigorating dose of capitalism. “My great-grandfather, Henry Alfred Smith, came here with his sons,” explains Henry Smith. “They were businessmen: they brought merchandise from Villarrica and sold it here. That was their shop across the street,” he says, indicating one of the ornate plaster buildings that dot the town.

The Smiths began a cattle empire, gave their name to one of the two main streets, and now seem to employ half its residents. The other street is named after the Kennedy family, who apparently employ the other half of the townspeople.

“I only remember a few words of English that my grandmother taught me: ‘Howareyou, nicetomeetyou’,” says Iris Kennedy, 75, who runs the stationery shop. “But that generation are all gone. There are lots of things I want to know, but there’s no one left to ask.”

Her grandfather was James Kennedy, an Ayrshire farmer who ran away with his maid, Sarah, and named his ranch after her. Big cats stole their chickens, and they were prey to insects like the pique, which burrows into the soles of the foot to lay its eggs. “I sometimes wonder how my grandfather put up with this climate,” Iris adds, as a passing cow peers into the shop.

Those who endured started families with Paraguayan-born neighbours. A few fought in the first world war; others died for Paraguay in the 1932-5 Chaco war: a cenotaph among the plaza’s orange trees lists Santiago Drakeford, Douglas Kennedy, and Enrique Jones amid the Aguilars and Escobars.

“When was the other war? 1945? Well, they didn’t even ask for us. They didn’t want a bunch of lost kangaroos,” says Iris. When Juan Kennedy, her uncle, wrote to Australia to rename the town Nueva Canberra, the letter was never answered – so they went for London instead.

Malcolm McCreen is descended from one of the few Australians who weren’t swallowed up by the British interlopers. “My land isn’t huge: I’ve got 40 cows, pigs, sheep. I have horses, but it’s quicker to get around by motorbike,” he says, before asking: “What’s the work like in Australia?”

Still living in the wooden house built by her ancestors, sheep shearers from Muttaburra in Central West Queensland, Blanca Murray holds on to some antipodean customs. “They sat down to the table to eat on the dot. There was a fixed time to eat, to wash, to sleep. And giving their word meant a lot to them,” she says.

Murray, 55, produces a shoebox of dog-eared black-and-white photos: forgotten Victorians in regimental uniform, posing beside a steam train, nameless family friends in carts bringing their meagre belongings to Nueva Australia. Memories of the town’s beginnings are beginning to fade, but a new generation are showing an interest in their history.

Sonia Uldera, Henry’s wife, has been piecing the story together for 20 years from birth certificates, government documents and letters. “I’ve found a lot of surprises. It’s not like how people tell you,” says Sonia, a primary school teacher. “Everyone says their relatives were the ones that made the town. But in reality, it was a group. They worked in a team.”

The New Australians may have failed to create a paradise, but Paraguay today, despite its problems, regularly ranks as the happiest nation in the world. And as the sun sets over the grasslands, and a sleepy silence settles over the town, it doesn’t seem like such a bad place for a bunch of lost kangaroos to end up.